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Successful branding is like a puzzle, and consistency is the missing piece. Without a system to manage, organize, and streamline brand assets, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and trust us, nobody wants to get lost in there.
On a day-to-day basis, marketers are already juggling too much while trying to keep up with the latest trends and stay within budget constraints. But with brand asset management (BAM) in place, you can provide consistency in your branding efforts and tailor messages that resonate with different target audiences while keeping marketing tactics effective. BAM literally changes the marketing game by making your marketing team’s lives easier. It allows them to work smarter, not harder, by creating a centralized source of truth.
Let’s take a closer look at the importance of brand management.
What is brand asset management?
Brand asset management is a continuous process that involves storing, compiling, systemizing, and streamlining brand assets for seamless access, sharing, and adjustments.
Since your marketing team constantly refers to the brand to create marketing materials from brochures to PPC ads, high-quality BAM is key to tweaking the marketing process. Without easy access to brand assets, it may be complicated to maintain the high level of consistency needed to stay ahead of the competition.
As the younger brother of digital asset management, brand asset management isn't just a way to improve your branding and marketing strategies. It's an opportunity to reduce asset waste and take your brand to a higher level by producing data-driven insights.
A BAM system is a centralized source of truth for all brand assets, collateral, and any additional information needed to keep your branding efforts in top shape. This includes guidelines on how you want your brand treated, internally, externally, or both.
When it comes to brand assets, the sky is the limit. You'll be surprised how quickly marketing teams realize that large volumes of brand data and content need a high-level organizational approach. In fact, organized marketers are 674% more likely to achieve success.
That's where comprehensive BAM solutions come in.
What falls under brand assets?
When you think about brand assets, you imagine different types of content, data, and files related to your brand, including:
- Videos
- Presentations
- Brand guidelines
- Color swatches
- Brand imagery
- Templates
- However, the concept goes beyond logos, videos, images, colors, and taglines. It's all the assets you create with the brand and your target audience in mind.
Every asset you produce is a redesign of your brand assets. These assets consist of various components you can use to enhance future sales and marketing tactics.
Think of assets as the sum of their parts. Arranging them based on purpose and significance can streamline marketing workflows and empower your marketing efforts. You can track various assets, retire outdated ones, and catch duplicates before they cause clutter.
What does informal brand asset management look like?
Isn’t it frustrating when teams go rogue, creating assets inconsistent with the brand? Then you have to track that asset down, eventually falling into a rabbit hole of confusion.
Essentially, you put all of your assets in one place and then spend time searching for the right one because of the lack of search functions. Studies show that employees conduct an average of eight searches to find the information they need. That slows down sales and marketing processes tremendously.
As a result, you face outdated assets, wasted information, and missed revenue-generating opportunities, failing to understand the importance of brand management.
Informal brand asset management involves using tried-and-tested, simple asset storage solutions like Google Drive or Dropbox. These tools can store endless amounts of data and provide access to anyone with a link.
However, they can't:
- Categorize data for consistent content creation.
- Simplify marketing collateral management.
- Provide quick access to ensure educated decision-making.
- Create authorization levels to beef up security.
- Analyze user behavior to serve up the necessary assets when you need them the most.
- Set an end date for specific campaign assets to limit their usage.
- Expire assets everywhere from one place.
Effective brand asset management, on the other hand, aids in discovery just as much as it aids in storage and distribution, making finding what you need a breeze. The marketing team can remain on the same page, sticking to a uniform brand vision throughout their projects — but that’s not all.
9 ways a brand asset management system transforms marketing teams
A brand asset management system goes far beyond storing, organizing, and sharing assets. It serves the marketing team in every step, from lead generation to retention. Here is how BAM does it.
1. Removing siloed tools
Implementing a BAM system eliminates the need for siloed brand asset storage and access tools. All brand assets are in one centralized location, making it easy for all team members to access them.
This translates to improved collaboration for your marketing team and fewer manual data entry activities — they currently spend over 30% of their time on repetitive tasks. With real-time access to brand assets, your team can unify content across teams regardless of internal silos.
2. Organizing by distribution channels
A BAM system can systemize brand assets according to the users or teams that need access to them. This allows your marketing team to gain quick access to the assets they require here and now instead of sifting through unnecessary data. They can also use the BAM system to arrange asset access for clients, partners and advertising service providers.
3. Locating and sharing files
BAM allows your marketing staff to find the necessary brand-related files and share them with each other, other departments, customers and clients. Besides having an easy search and share feature, a comprehensive AI-powered BAM system can aid the searching and sharing process according to your team's needs and previous behavior.
You can also see who is sharing files, when they were shared and monitor other share link activities, including their frequency.
4. Managing metadata
A sophisticated BAM system analyzes assets you add to extract metadata, provides tags and puts all incoming files in the right places. It can also learn from the metadata you provide to streamline brand assets while enhancing search and navigation.
This allows your marketing team to access the assets they need quickly without spending time on manual arrangements.
5. Using updated assets
By providing your team with updated assets instead of accessing outdated stored information, BAM safeguards your branding and marketing efforts. Using outdated brand assets presents a significant risk of inconsistency, and it could negatively impact your marketing materials. A BAM system helps you identify and remove outdated information, avoiding inconsistencies and potential errors.
For example, you want to create a promotional brochure for an upcoming event and publish it on the company's blog. However, you don't want users to see this blog post after the sale.
You can publish the brochure using BAM tools and set an expiration date. When the sale ends, the information will disappear from the blog.
6. Avoiding duplicate work
A BAM system keeps you from doing duplicate work by providing the available assets during the research stage.
By preventing your marketing team from repetitive work, the BAM system can save time and money for your company while giving marketers more time to focus on branding tasks.
For example, a comprehensive BAM helps you spend less time searching and more time doing when you’re able to find the final assets you need at the right time. Instead of always creating new content because you can’t seem to find that campaign asset from over a year ago, your teams can find those assets and repurpose them with ease. A BAM is a major organizer because it scans new uploads and checks whether similar items already exist. It doesn't allow you to add duplicates to your asset library, so your team members never run into multiple versions of the same asset. Which helps with….
7. Versioning control
The BAM system makes sure you are using the latest version of brand materials to prevent inconsistencies. By serving up the latest versions of brand assets, it allows you to avoid customer and client confusion and prevents you from creating useless digital assets.
8. Creating easy-to-deploy templates
Using locked-in branding elements in your asset creation templates maintains brand consistency and control. Your marketing team won't need to worry about maintaining them — they are automatically updated with the latest brand elements thanks to Content Automation.
Additionally, drag-and-drop templates are easy to use for even non-designers without requiring any special knowledge, saving time and effort for the team and ensuring consistent branding and appearance. Plus, with the option to make changes themselves, even less tech-savvy members can easily adjust the templates.
9. Centralized repository
Brand asset management involves creating a centralized repository for all your brand assets. Essentially, it's a centralized source of truth you can always turn to without worrying about updates or duplicates.
Your marketing experts won't need to go back and forth between different software and systems with a risk of losing data along the way. If you need brand assets, you always know where to find them.
Overall, a comprehensive band management system has a few impressive tricks up its sleeve. Once your marketing team begins using its features, it's likely to discover additional benefits.
You can notice how easily it changes workflow efficiency, inspires insights, and streamlines your entire marketing approach. Sort of like magic backed by science.
Is brand asset management tied to brand success?
Without a doubt, branding is a vital aspect of a company's success. And yes, brand asset management is instrumental in helping you achieve it.
Implementing a BAM system provides a clear picture of your brand's potential, allowing you to establish and enforce consistent brand guidelines across all your assets.
Take brands like Nike or Kellogg Cereal, for example. Regardless of how resellers offer and market their products, these brands maintain a consistent brand identity and operate seamlessly and error-free. Brandfolder's comprehensive asset management system allows you to follow this example, ensuring the successful organization and distribution of your brand assets.
Build brand consistency and make your team's lives easier with a brand asset management system
By focusing on the importance of brand management, you are supporting a successful branding process. Besides providing brand consistency and reducing asset waste, BAM transforms how your marketing team works and contributes to the campaign's ROI.
Brandfolder is the best-in-class brand management solution because it makes a consistent investment in the success of your branding and marketing by:
- Providing excellent branding features that save time and money for your team.
- Offering high-quality support for each BAM system element.
- Ensuring a user-friendly experience and intuitive operation of all the features in the BAM system.
- Empowering brand consistency, control, and convenience every step of the way.
Instead of focusing on basic BAM needs, Brandfolder's system adjusts to your requirements, enhances your team's capabilities, and improves your marketing strategy. That's what makes us the highest-rated BAM instrument based on user reviews.
One user perfectly captures the essence of Brandfolder, describing it as a platform with "impeccable organization, simplicity, and the ability to effortlessly share an abundance or limited amount of resources based on the desired need. There is no platform quite like this one."
To experience firsthand how Brandfolder's enterprise DAM solutions can drive your company's success, contact us for a personalized demo today. Together, let's unlock the full potential of your brand.