After seven months of COVID, we’ve become pretty good at video conferencing. We fix our hair, even though we haven’t washed it in days. We put on our best shirt, pants are optional. We set up lighting to accentuate our finer features, and futz with our audio settings. VOILA! We are producing in a pandemic. Full steam ahead.
We are present at our remote meetings, but what are we presenting? Where is the brand and what is the message? Where is the content?
In the past, customers would come to our office, meet us at a trade show booth, leaf through a brochure, or maybe watch a TV commercial to learn about our products. Unfortunately for the foreseeable future, there are no office visits or conferences. The only things getting printed these days are “Stay 6 feet away from me!” floor stickers. And streaming services are limiting our exposure to TV commercials.
This puts more pressure on remote meetings, and our employees who rely on them, to communicate your company’s brand and message. Content can pick up that load where web cameras leave off.
Every good Marketer knows the importance of consistency in branding and communications. Getting a consistent message out, with the proper brand elements, and distributing those materials to the team, has always been a challenge. And that’s when we were sitting in the same office!
Here are some tips to make branding easier and meetings more productive.
Simple Kit – Create kit – a short corporate story — that includes product information, pricing, case studies, white papers, presentations, etc. You don’t need a long-winded, comprehensive corporate encyclopedia, but you do need the key collateral pieces that will support your team during their day-to-day calls, Too many files and they won’t be able to find what they’re looking for. Too few and they won’t have the material they need to support their sale. Like Goldilocks, you need just the right number of files so Sales can access what they need, on demand, during a remote call.
Cloud – Put this kit in one Cloud location where your team can access it. Use single sign on so they won’t have to remember another user name and password, or another URL address.
Search & Visualization so they can locate the exact page, slide, video they need in seconds, on the fly. No need to download and scroll, hunt and peck, and then start over again because they selected the wrong file. That’s a frustrating, time-suck. Visualization lets them preview and read the file, as part of the search results, in seconds.
Present LiveTM so they can literally show that slide, immediately after they’ve found it through search.
Reporting & Metrics provide real-time, quantitative analysis of what slides, files and videos are used, by whom and in what context. Reporting is taking on a larger role, now, that we are having fewer spontaneous conversations to that offer invaluable feedback.
As remote meetings become the preliminary form of corporate communication, they will require more and better branding materials. You can start with a Kit in the Cloud and some sharing and tracking.