5 marketing efficiencies for companies with a house of brands
A house of brands brings numerous advantages to companies in terms of marketing, cost efficiencies, and growth! At the same time, the prospect of having to set up different marketing strategies, objectives, and schedules for each may sound exhausting. The good news is that you can take advantage of built-in marketing and cost efficiencies and leverage your house of brands to drive improved ROI across the board. Of course, you’ll have to be clear about responsibilities, budgets, and teams before sharing resources and spearheading collaborations, but with a clear plan in place and alignment among teams, you’ll be poised to take advantage of marketing efficiencies right away.
Share resources, agencies, and team expertise across brands
The great thing about having multiple brands is that you most likely have a diverse team of talented professionals whose expertise spans different channels, technologies, and methodologies. And, while expecting one expert to do all the area-specific work for your house of brands is a bit ludicrous, that doesn’t mean you can’t leverage their expertise for different initiatives in other brands. To streamline the sharing of resources, expertise, and tools, encourage teams to adhere to thorough documentation of campaigns and practices and regular all-brand meetings to review progress. That could look like comprehensive project management platforms where teams can attach documents and indicate the entire project timeline and process. Alternatively, collaborative briefs and campaign documents that give everyone access to relevant information will also work to encourage cross-brand communication. Overall, sharing marketing resources allows for cost and talent efficiencies, a win-win for any brand when it comes to marketing.
Try cross-promotion and cross-selling
It used to be far more common to keep a strict divide between brands of the same parent company. However, these days, the cross-promotion and cross-selling of brands within the same house can be beneficial for all brands. Depending on your products and services, you can choose the most relevant audience and bucket together the best brands to promote on the right platforms. By leveraging the customer base of each brand to cross-promote related services from other brands within the portfolio, you’ll expand your market and get in front of loyal customers more likely to make a purchase from a related brand.
When cross-promoting, make sure that you’re tracking campaigns to capture touchpoints, engagements, and conversions. This will help you map out which brands work best with each audience and channel. Additionally, if there are ways to personalize campaigns, even better! What better way to introduce a customer to a brand than with personalized outreach solving for a need of theirs? Ideally, with cross-selling and cross-promoting you’re leveraging your current customer base and building a new customer base at the same time.
Incorporate unifying branding elements
As an agency, we often work with multi-location organizations that don’t have any unifying brand elements and it can result in a disparate environment among the brands. While it can be vital to maintain some differentiators between brands and, in the case of an acquisition or merger, protect some of the original branding, unifying brand elements are becoming far more common. When you have similar branding elements or unifying pieces across your house of brands it helps to spur visual brand awareness and can lend credibility when cross-promoting or cross-selling.
The idea is to build strong brand equity and strengthen your portfolio by uniting your brands under similar visual identities that link them together, encouraging brand ambassadors and enthusiasts to engage with all brands. If you need a better understanding of how you can achieve a distinct, yet united feel for your house of brands, give us a call!
Support efficient data sharing and analysis
Just like you are sharing resources across your house of brands, you should also be sharing data and analytics! Consumer and trend data is particularly valuable when you have new brands entering the market or you need to make a pivot with one of the brands within the umbrella. There are numerous tools and dashboards available to help you streamline data collection, storage, and analysis across brands. In fact, MDG recently built out a custom dashboard for a multi-location client so they could not only manage and observe each brand’s digital presence, but also compare and contrast data across brand campaigns.
The use of technology in data sharing is crucial as it allows for predictive modeling for more than just one brand and seamless integrations with other systems. When you go to make data-driven marketing and sales decisions, it’s best to have insights into similar brands that are performing well or that have tried different initiatives. Your house of brands can provide exactly that crucial information. And, since you have already fostered a sense of openness and collaboration across the brand’s marketing teams, sharing data and analytics should be a seamless experience.
Engage in strategic partnerships and collaborations
Marketing and advertising can be competitive, but at the end of the day, it is all about getting the right product or service into the hands of someone who needs it. When you build strategic partnerships and collaborations, it allows for fast, streamlined opportunities for content curation that is unique to each brand. While you want the brands to be connected and build off of one another, it’s important to remember that they are different and should have unique approaches to content and messaging to reach the right audience. Strategic partnerships can be shared across brands, but should have distinctive objectives and approaches, making them invaluable marketing efficiencies for a house of brands.
If you have a house of brands and you’re interested in leveraging different marketing approaches to capitalize on marketing efficiencies, start the conversation with MDG today!