For most companies our websites have become the heart of our brand, it can be easily monitored by everyone at a company to make sure a brand is being delivered consistently. This is relatively easy to keep it updated with the current brand style and use it as a template to base all printed material on.

However, for most businesses your website is not the main way your customers interact with your brand.
All the physical representations of a brand are the ones that are going to stay with them and these elements of your brand are harder to keep control of and keep consistent.

As companies grow it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor everything that is distributed as more things are taken care of independently by different departments of your company.  This can lead to a really fragmented brand that is less able to maintain customer loyalty and the other advantages a strong brand can offer.

One solution to this is to implement a branding software package. Branding software is an easy way to recentralize all your branding efforts.  First you have a designer create and provide templates for the various documents you are likely to need, stock images, fonts, style guides and any other branding tools. 
Then you create an online database to store all this information.

Putting all this information in an online database means that you can grant access to it to anyone in the world, meaning that every arm of your company has access to this information to easily create documents by filling in templates.

As companies grow, a large number of branding tools will amass.  Branding software is designed to make it very simple to find the information you need by the way it is filed within a searchable database.  Customizable interfaces make this even simpler by only allowing individual users to resources they are likely to need.  This means there is no risk of information over load as well as reducing the risk that confidential documents could be seen by the wrong person.

Communication is a critical part of any branding effort but can be hard to maintain as companies grow.  More sophisticated branding software includes its own communication systems.  More advanced than email, these systems usually look more like internal social networking programs. 

This makes it easy to search profiles of other members of the company making it simple to know who needs to be included in certain conversations.  These conversations can then be monitored by those driving the brands.

Any documents produced can then easily be approved centrally and sent directly to the printers through web 2 print.  Speeding up the approval process like this means there is no reason not to have things approved centrally.

Your brand is about more than just your website, so make sure you keep control of it and keep it consistent, a consistent brand is a strong brand.

Many thanks to Ewan Cambell MacDougall for this Guest Post

If you'd like to write for this blog please check out the following Guest Posting for Web Branding