It’s well known that a strong brand helps to differentiate a company from its competitors and creates orientation and trust. It’s also well known what this requires: consistent messages and a clear corporate design at all touchpoints.
What’s often underestimated in this context, however, are business documents.
Brand managers know the problem: documents and presentations are often at odds with brand guidelines because employees have the freedom to design, but typically little skill and appreciation for adhering to the guidelines. Applications such as Microsoft 365 don’t support the implementation of corporate design guidelines, and users are rarely design experts. As a result, many unbranded documents are released to the outside world unchecked.
Prospects and customers often experience a company through multiple touchpoints. That gives them a comprehensive view of the company.
The more consistently a company communicates, the stronger the impact of the message. Repeating the same message increases its persuasive power. The quality of corporate communications often serves as a measure of service quality.
A conspicuous inconsistency between media can lead to a weakening of the recipient’s previously positive impression of the company.
External (and internal) communications include business documents created with Microsoft 365 applications. Think contracts, proposal presentations, monthly reports, emails, and the like. Tons of these documents are created and sent every day, and each one represents your brand. But they’re often neglected when it comes to design.
Nearly 50% of the content created with Microsoft 365 isn’t brand consistent. That’s not surprising, since maximum design freedom is usually combined with minimum design expertise. There’s a lack of effective controls for designing brand-compliant documents and a lack of appreciation for adhering to brand guidelines. Nowhere else is the potential and influence of employees on the brand image as great as in the creation of business documents.
Ideally, consistent and branded documents convey professionalism and trust, and integrate seamlessly with your communications and branding.
But how do you ensure brand-compliant document creation in Microsoft 365? After all, Microsoft 365 is productivity software, not branding software.
Even so, some tips can be implemented using standard Microsoft tools. Additional software solutions, such as the empower® Suite, support the creation and distribution of brand-compliant Office content.
Make sure that your current Office templates are automatically displayed when you open Microsoft Office applications. For example, the current master template should be available when you launch PowerPoint. That way, your employees start with the right foundation without having to search for it.
Ideally, images, icons, slide templates, and table and chart templates should be available directly in Microsoft 365.
For the most basic Microsoft on-board resources, SharePoint can be a good-enough option. You can create a SharePoint library containing all relevant images, presentations, icons, and other resources. However, SharePoint is challenging to set up and maintain, especially if you have any more than simple Office document requirements. And SharePoint can’t integrate brand-compliance within the Office applications to make it easy for employees to start and stay compliant throughout the document lifecycle.
empower® provides a much more flexible, user friendly, integrated, and easy to manage solution. The empower® central library delivers content and formatting directly into a presentation or document with the click of a button—without having to leave the application.
Many employees are unaware that internal branding guidelines exist, while others ignore them, usually due to lack of time, convenience, or excessive demands. To prevent this from happening, you should use the standard features of Microsoft Office and the support of your IT department to store corporate colors and fonts in Office applications.
It’s easy with empower®, where brand guidelines are built right into Microsoft 365 and can be managed by line-of-business administrators.
From time to time, rebranding is necessary to refresh and update your brand image. This includes updating templates, email signatures, and PowerPoint masters. But creating and distributing a new master isn’t enough. Typically, many existing presentations need to be adapted to the new design. A technically well-designed slide master can’t completely replace manual transfer, but it makes it much easier.
With empower®, you can convert old presentations to a new design at the click of a mouse and save a lot of time.
It’s especially important to check Word or PowerPoint documents for corporate design compliance before sharing them with external parties. Given the enormous volume of Office documents created every day, that can hardly be done manually.
Software solutions such as empower® enable all users to check documents themselves before sending them—with just a click of the mouse. Deviations are highlighted and can be automatically corrected.