Last Updated on January 14, 2024 by James Castro
Introduction:
Keeping your brand consistent across all locations is essential for building trust and standing out. WordPress Multisite offers a powerful way to manage multiple sites from one place, making maintaining a unified brand identity easier. Here’s how you can leverage it effectively.
Why Brand Consistency Matters:
When every location of your franchise uses the same logos, colors, and messages, customers know exactly who you are. This consistency strengthens your brand and ensures a reliable customer experience, no matter where your customers are.
The Challenges:
Managing multiple franchise websites can be tricky for your marketing director, who is likely already struggling to keep your team “on-brand.” If each site is managed independently, branding can become inconsistent, leading to a disjointed user experience. But what about all those other assets and communications outside of your website? Ensuring everyone has the latest brand guide at their fingertips isn’t as easy as you might think.
Unify Your Brand Guide Online:
- Online Brand Guide: Have you ever had to share your brand assets and brand guide with someone who was in another location? Or did you have to correct someone who created their new flyer based on the 1999 version of your brand guide pdf template? Knowing which version to send of the logo, special event collateral, colors, voice, mission, etc., can be a royal P.I.T.A.
- The Solution: A simple way to resolve this is to keep your brand guide online and accessible 24/7/365. Adding your brand guide to your multisite is as simple as spinning up another site within the network and adding the details from your brand guide to that site, and giving your franchisees access.
- Subdomain/Subdirectory: Now, you can have brand.yourcompany.com or yourcompany.com/brand as the URL subdomain or subdirectory (depending on how you set up your multisite) and share that URL with the people who need to know. Maybe that’s someone in the media, or perhaps it’s exclusive to internal franchisees. With User Permissions, you can control exactly who has access.
- That’s it: Your brand guide is easy to update, media and assets are at your fingertips, and it’s all self-hosted, so you’re in complete control without ongoing SaaS fees. We offer this service, so if you need help turning your brand guide into a powerful digital asset, just let us know! We can quickly and affordably build your brand guide into a WP child site.
Conclusion:
WordPress Multisite is a powerful tool for maintaining brand consistency across multiple locations. While it offers centralized control, it’s important to approach it with the right tools and strategy to keep your brand unified and strong. Whether managing one site or many, setting up your online brand guide within your multisite will pay off in a cohesive and reliable brand experience for your customers. And, for single-location, non-franchise, non-multisite readers who also need an online brand guide (why are you still here?), this can be a separately hosted site, and with a few clicks in the DNS, yes…we can help you too. 😉
Want to learn more about how we can help with your Franchises Brand Guide? Let’s talk!