Your brand isn’t just your logo, your slogan or your product.
(Even though they’re a big part of it).
Your brand is the face you show the world and the way you are able to tell your customers a story.
Maintaining a consistent brand is key in order for customers to remember your business and position you as a business. They expect you to be equally consistent across all the channels you appear on.
It’s also key in order to see your business grow, as it has shown to increase revenue by 10 to 20%.
-
In fact:
-
It takes 5 to 7 impressions for a customer to remember your brand and
-
Brand consistency has been demonstrated to increase revenue by 33%
-
But what stands in the way of increasing brand consistency, and ensuring that your customers remember you?
Content chaos and disorganized brand assets.
Let’s face it, when different teams and departments use your brand assets differently, it can lead to a diluted brand identity and inconsistent messaging – not to mention, it can take a toll on your revenue.
But how can enterprises begin to control the brand assets that they have, in order to remain consistent and create new streams of revenue?
In this article, we share how to improve the way you manage your brand assets and how a digital asset management platform can help you get the job done.
What are brand assets?
Your brand assets are what your marketing team should hold near and dear to their heart (and their campaign).
Brand assets are what make up your company identity – namely the recognizable elements that belong to your brand.
Brand assets don’t necessarily have to be your slogan or your logo, but they can be multiple elements that together create a brand identity, like:
> Product packaging
> Typography
> Design elements
> Photography assets
> Templates
These assets should be so specific to your brand that when customers come across them, they should recognize your company instantly.
In fact, having your very own specific brand assets can improve the buyer experience by creating an emotional connection between your customer and your brand (as customers bring 52% more value to a brand the more emotionally connected they are to it)
Take your logo for example.
Logos might be the most important brand asset you have, as it’s proven that people are much more able to process and remember information if it’s presented visually.
And when it comes to color – 90% of the first impression is solely based on color.
What this means is that enterprises today should focus on ensuring that only the right brand assets are used, approved and distributed – as they have an incredible impact on customer impressions.
Poor brand management and brand consistency can lead to a damaged credibility, confusion in the market, increased costs and slower sales cycles.
The question then arises – how can enterprises avoid this?
5 WAYS DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT HELPS CONTROL BRAND ASSETS
Enterprise companies leverage technology when managing thousands of images and assets.
We’ve outlined below the four ways in which a DAM can help enterprises manage their brand assets in the most efficient way in order to ensure brand consistency:
DAM is a “central source of truth”
Organizations waste several weeks a year looking for assets like files, pictures and videos.
It’s incredibly time consuming (and draining) to have to continually track down and sift through all the files found on different employee computers and shared drives.
Luckily, there is a solution.
What DAM provides is a “single source of truth” – one place where all company assets are located, in just one digital library. All users of a DAM have the same access to all assets – to edit, manage and distribute assets in whichever way they see fit.
Within this centralized library comes an intuitive and fast search – thanks to efficient tagging of metadata that makes it easier to access the content you need, quickly:
-
How Digizuite DAM enables fast search
-
Based on governance rules and specific criteria you set, search functionality and AI enables you to quickly find the brand assets you need for your e-commerce site or any other channel..
-
You can start your search with text or a few basic criteria and refine them as you go along with filters.
-
Easily save your frequently used search criteria so you can use them again and again.
-
Both internal and external teams benefit from a centralized library where all brand assets are found, since DAM only contains the approved and relevant assets belonging to your organization.
And having only the approved assets circulating around can only be helpful in terms of maintaining (and improving) brand consistency – since there aren’t two different versions of a new campaign going around.
Limits the silo way of working
What often will ruin the efforts of having a strong brand identity is when different departments use your brand assets in the wrong way.
That is, your team is working in silos and doesn’t have a mutual understanding of which assets are relevant or which assets should be used in which channel.
For example, your in-store retailers should be equipped with the same branded assets as your online campaign team in order for the brand identity (and experience) to remain the same (that you aren’t using two different versions of a photo campaign for a new product, for example).
How does digital asset management help?
In practice, it sets up workflows that enable both your external and internal teams to not only work faster, but also smarter in three ways:
1. Create a process, set up workflows that correspond to the steps, and then automate for speed.
2. The Digital Asset Management software from Digizuite includes 34 workflows right out of the box. Asset approval, publishing to channels, usage approval, and end-of-life are the four that can be used right away. Use them as they are or create your own processes to fit the way your organization operates.
3. The DAM system can be configured to alert the next accountable system or person when a task is finished.
Supports regional and local hubs
Having the right access to sales enablement, logos, color themes and photos is necessary for local, regional and head office marketing hubs.
Why?
Because brand managers and CMO’s need to understand what brand elements and marketing collateral they have in order to categorize them.
This is key in order to ensure brand consistency for brands that span across multiple locations and regions.
A DAM helps organizations quickly identify which assets are supposed to be used for local teams, regional teams and which are strictly to be used by the head of department.
An easy way to start identifying assets for whichever use they have is to check content analytics to see which assets are used the most.
For enterprises operating internationally – digital asset management tools are made to ensure that the same assets are provided across borders and that the inventory of assets is constantly being updated in real-time – containing only approved content.
DAM can also for example help your in-house creative team much more easily find the most frequently used assets in order to be efficient and to be able to reuse (and potentially repurpose) your assets when needed.
Because the only way to ensure consistent local messaging is through a more streamlined asset management and reuse (an important step in the content lifecycle).
Distributed brands that deal with thousands of digital assets can highly benefit from a DAM, as it helps them scale operations alongside the large amounts of content they produce.
Streamlines brand asset distribution
A DAM gives you better control of the amount of brand assets that you have and ensures that all teams have access to the approved assets.
In addition, it also simplifies the time-intensive processes of distributing content to the local and regional hubs whilst simultaneously ensuring that the same content is distributed throughout the various sales channels.
Thanks to DAM’s automation capabilities, you can reduce time-to-market by streamlining the processes of delivering assets, products and content into the market – so, you can make sure that the same photo hits Instagram as it does TikTok, at the same time.
It also helps assure brand managers that all assets are up to date on all the relevant platforms, reducing the costs of delivering wrongful content.
Assigns appropriate user rights and permissions
With DAM, you can assign roles and permissions to different users, making it easy to ensure that only the right people have access to the right content.
For global companies, especially in retail, it’s especially important to have control over who can access your digital assets. This helps to maintain brand compliance and consistent global messaging.
When implementing your DAM system, be sure to establish roles and permissions right from the start. This way, you can make sure that the right content is being distributed through the right channels, both locally and globally.
Large manufacturers also benefit from DAM, as they often have to deal with multiple stakeholders throughout the supply chain, like end sellers, distributors, and suppliers.
A DAM system allows you to limit and enable access for different users and teams based on their permission credentials.
This not only saves time but also adds an extra layer of security, ensuring that only authorized users have access to your content and avoiding any potential copyright infringements.
Conclusion
Your brand assets are incredibly valuable to your organization.
They’re how people recognize and recollect your brand amidst hundreds and thousands of other brands. In most cases, your brand assets are your first impression to a customer. Get that first impression wrong and they’ll do business with a competitor.
Leveraging your branded assets is most efficiently done through a DAM – which provides your teams with one place with all approved assets, helping you increase brand consistency across the globe.
Want to know how your organization can benefit from managing brand assets in a DAM?
