As a business owner, keeping track of your creative assets is the last thing on your mind. You simply know what you need, when you need it, and then move on to the next big initiative.
This go-getter attitude is perfect for keeping your business thriving. However, it can be detrimental for the employees you have trying to consistently market your business.
The Common Problem
Your brand and/or creative manager on your marketing team needs to have a universal storage place for creative assets. This allows them to easily assemble and access your recurring brand materials.
Think about how many press releases, for example, that your company produces every month. The process of distributing that press release would go easier with a press release template on-hand.
Having to recreate a design every time your company needs it is not effective. As we like to say at SIX, you should work smarter, not harder.
Fortunately, there is a way to partially ‘automate’ the creation of design materials for your company.
The Solution: A Collateral Engine For Creative Assets
How much stress would be off your marketing team’s shoulders if they knew they didn’t need to recreate every digital asset produced? Our guess is likely a ton.
As a marketing team, ourselves, we wanted to create a solution that worked for us. We wanted to alleviate our own personal struggles dealing with monthly flyers, brochures, and — for example — annual benefits guides.
It wasn’t that the projects were out of our wheelhouse. Rather, it was how much time they were filling. We knew we wanted to work on more valuable, campaign-driven initiatives for our clients.
So, we developed something to properly manage all of our clients’ various collateral/design needs — the Six Collateral Engine (SixCE).
Collateral Engine: A software platform that brings all company assets into a central, organized view for teams access and brand control, making collateral standards and role-based accessibility across your organization a reality.
Melissa hoffman, ceo & founder of sixdegrees, inc. llc
The idea behind a collateral engine is simple. We aim to provide our clients with access to the design templates they need on a consistent basis.
That way, our clients can very easily paste in their content and print or download the piece in a matter of minutes.
Should I Use SixCE For My Business?
A unique perk to using a platform by TeamSix is you get our team along with it. Unlike other template engines, like Canva or Pictochart, we only add a template that benefits your company.
We work with you to create a set list of digital creative assets you know you will need. Then, we do the legwork of importing those pieces into SixCE.
From that point forward, you have full access to print, download, edit, and piece-together any of your relevant marketing materials.
To truly know if your business is in need of a collateral engine, you should analyze where your marketing department stands.
How do they keep up with the on-going needs of your company? Survey with them just how useful a drive of template design materials would be for their work flow.
Maybe you don’t have a marketing team, and you are looking to act as your own brand or creative asset manager.
If that’s the case, then having a universal access point to your brand materials should be a no-brainer. There’s no reason to try to recreate multiple documents a month and run a business.
How Does SixCE Make Managing My Creative Assets Easier?
There are three main ways that having a collateral engine on your side can result in more effective business operations for your team.
Wide Brand Standard Control
Our platform allows you to implement a set list of standards for your brand, such as logos, fonts, and colors that will be the only logos, fonts, and colors available to you and your users.
This ensures all collateral will always be created within your brand standards and remain consistent across digital and print pieces.
Easy Access to Sales Collateral
We understand the struggle of trying to make sure your sales team is using up-to-date proposals, case studies, and RFPs when working with clients. SixCE gives your sales team a universal access point for all their digital and print needs.
Personalization and Editing On-the-Fly
Our platform gives you the ability to import past documents, create new documents, and easily edit all of your documents. If, for example, a new employee is being on-boarded, creating their business card could be as simple as visiting your business card template, updating their contact details, and pressing a button to send it to your printer.
You can also lock or unlock certain ‘editable’ elements within documents, giving your team the ability to tweak necessities and not waste time on things you know should be set-in-stone across the board.
Getting Started With SixCE
The best way to set up your account with ease and efficiency is to give TeamSix a call. We can take the time to walk you through pricing, user accounts, and figuring out what kinds of business templates you need ready-access to.
Click here to Contact TeamSix.
