If someone offered you a way to shave six to seven figures off your annual marketing costs, save your team thousands of hours, improve the strength and responsiveness of your brand and increase marketing output at the same time, would you take it?
It’s a no-brainer, right? At the very least, it’s worth investigating.
And in these times of shrinking team sizes and reduced budgets for many, fragmenting media channels, remote work and rapidly shifting economic, social and technological circumstances, it could be a lifeline for stretched marketing teams.
This is not a hypothetical scenario -- these are the types of benefits and minimum cost-savings our customers realise when they implement Outfit’s brand automation technology in their organisation to automate the predictable production work that most marketing teams still do manually.
And Outfit’s brand automation platform captures data from all the work customers generate using our platform, so you’ll always know the value you’re getting.
Here are 7 key ways our customers save money by automating repetitive marketing work with Outfit:
- Marketing production at scale
If your marketing team is constantly producing and updating new versions of the same creative asset for the next campaign -- whether it be landing pages, emails, digital ads, print ads, flyers and so on -- they’re spending hours on work that can be reduced to just minutes.
Using templates in Outfit’s brand automation platform not only slashes the time it takes to produce the new version to just minutes, it also ensures the new assets are brand-compliant.
One of our customers -- a large global technology firm based in the US -- was marketing hundreds of events in more than 30 territories. Production costs were increasing, even as the brand was being diluted due to inconsistent creative execution.
The company, which uses Outfit for brand automation, now saves more than 20,000 hours a year in reduced production time, equivalent to seven figures in 2019 -- and is on track to go even higher in 2020.
- On-brand self-service design
The centralised marketing team of a prestigious university was constantly receiving requests from different faculties and schools to create approved assets and was struggling to keep up, or outsourcing them to agencies.
Outfit enabled the central marketing team to decentralise repetitive marketing work to external stakeholders, with compliance controls, turning faculty members into designers, reducing the bottleneck at the central marketing unit and reducing agency costs.
More than 500 staff are now empowered to create on-brand assets, saving the university 5000 hours in its first full year by automating brand production with Outfit, reducing production costs by six figures and freeing up its marketing team to do important strategic work.
- Automated social production
Social media marketing is where brand automation with Outfit really comes into its own. A campaign that needs to run on multiple social channels at speed can be rendered instantly in Outfit’s platform to suit the required formats. Social content can also be highly customised for granular social segments using Outfit’s Render API.
“If it’s always-on content and it’s your primary layout, for example, Outfit will nail it across your social channels,” says Outfit’s head of product, Ash Ivory.
“Social is where we really excel -- we can set themes that allow people to change colours, images and text with the click of a button.”
Marketing teams can produce more social content for always-on campaigns and increase social engagement without needing to grow their graphic design team to handle the work.
- Easy, low-cost, local area marketing production
Franchise organisations and retailers with hundreds of outlets are often torn between wanting their franchisees and store managers to conduct local area marketing and fear of the impact of the resulting activity on brand consistency.
Meanwhile, local managers complain they’re not given the approved marketing materials they need to conduct marketing across their desired channels: it’s an unhappy stalemate.
Retailer and Outfit customer Baker’s Delight has more than 500 stores in Australia, and franchisees lodging more than 1800 art and design requests a year for in-store materials.
Instead of increasing headcount in the central marketing team by 50% to keep up with the demand, the company implemented Outfit, creating a swathe of templates and approved brand assets in Outfit’s central library.
Baker’s has saved more than 20,000 production hours on local area marketing by providing local managers with the ability to produce their own on-brand materials without requiring approvals. This has saved the company a seven-figure sum, and requests to central marketing have fallen by 70%.
- Marketing updates in minutes
If the thought of updating all your in-market assets gives you a migraine, imagine if universal changes could be made once to common elements and rolled out across your suite of marketing materials.
Marketing teams can make singular changes in Outfit as required, and disseminate them quickly and responsively across templated assets, resulting in significant production savings.
Imagery can be updated, and prices or taglines changed without the angst, forensic investigation and production weeks usually required to hunt down and manually update all your marketing assets.
- Rapid crisis management
Organisations are coping with change at a pace we’ve probably never seen before, with the impact of shifting macroeconomic conditions being felt within weeks and microeconomic conditions altering sometimes overnight.
Is your brand equipped to respond quickly in a crisis? Or update messaging as required in different territories? Can your team seize opportunities as they present themselves?
Outfit’s brand automation platform, which has collaboration and approval workflows built in, not only mitigates the risk of costly brand damage caused by out-of-date materials remaining in-market, it enables messaging to be updated quickly to maximise advantage when possible.
- Automated data visualisation and reporting
Marketers always seem to be manually collating and reproducing assets based on data sources and datasets. In all industries, marketing teams compile comprehensive internal reports to show a return on marketing investment, and in particular sectors, such as finance and real estate, they’re constantly crunching data from key sources for use in external communications.
A customer in the real estate industry utilises Outfit to produce graphs and charts from key data sets right from the data source without manual intervention, saving production time and improving accuracy as well as brand compliance and consistency.
Outfit’s brand automation platform does what it promises. Once your brand assets and templates are set up in the system, automation will reduce work that once took hours or even days and weeks, to just minutes.
Outfit attributes ROI to the work that is being completed in the platform, transparently delivering six- to seven-figure cost-savings in the first full year and beyond, slashing the time your team will spend on marketing production and improving brand consistency, responsiveness and output.
Reach out to one of our team to find out how Outfit can help you and your team reduce costs and increase output with brand automation.
