Every team strives to be as productive and efficient as possible. Team efficiency directly relates to not only higher ROI for your brand but also better job satisfaction for your team members — a primary factor for talent retention and long-term brand success. The efficiency of your creative team — the people developing your brand content — is also critical to the effectiveness of all your brand marketing initiatives.
With the rising demand for digital assets within steep deadlines, managing a plethora of content across formats and empowering hybrid teams with the right tech is the way forward. The problem is, however, when your team is held back by the very software supposed to be supporting them. Just spending your tech budget on software isn’t enough. You need to spend it on the RIGHT software to actually empower your team and get real returns on your investment.
Modern Brand Management Software should be capable of streamlining tedious asset production and brand management tasks. A robust software solution that makes processes simpler and reduces time and resource waste at every step will provide your team with the help they need.
The bottom line is, a stressed and overburdened digital asset development team might meet deadlines but can often fall short on creativity — the very thing that differentiates your brand from its competitors. A potent and sophisticated brand asset management platform can take away the burden of smaller tasks from your team so that they can focus on innovating and creating trailblazing new assets.
Web-to-publish templates take the pressure off the design team
Your design team loves to create, but overworking them will only lead to stress and burnout. Sending low-level changes to a design team makes them overworked and reduces the opportunities for creativity by keeping them engaged in small, mundane tasks. Not just that, if your designers are busy making small changes, it will work as a bottleneck, restricting the productivity of the rest of your team as they’re stuck waiting for those changes to be enacted.
Giving the power to implement low-level changes to those beyond the design team ensures that small design changes are implemented quickly ‘on the spot’ without having to go back and forth and wait for the designers to get it done. This not only eliminates the probability of a potential bottleneck but also frees up the design team to work on more complex tasks.
If you’re wondering how to make it happen, think of web-to-publish templates, a feature only the most modern BAM platforms are offering..
- Easy to implement small changes, even if you aren’t a design pro.
- Makes your designers’ jobs much easier by giving them a starting point while maintaining brand consistency.
On top of that, web-to-publish templates mean even your new design recruits can work efficiently without much training.
Bottlenecks are a thing of the past with digital marketing workflows
The workload you place on your teams can clog up a workflow if it isn’t actually optimised to suit your working environment. Technology is here to help, but it shouldn’t force your process into a stiff, predetermined structure to deliver results. Every business is unique, and the brand asset management platform should be tailored to fit into your process, not the other way around. A modern solution should be customisable to your needs and eliminate bottlenecks.
Digital marketing workflows are powerful BAM tools. They make managing all your processes less tedious by providing features like a ‘bird’s-eye view’, where you can track all ongoing processes and supervise the performance of your branding and marketing teams from a single window. In addition, they also offer highly intuitive attributes like online annotations and real-time alerts to ensure that your team doesn’t miss out on deadlines or important improvement suggestions.
Approvals are vital for brand consistency, but approving every asset manually can quickly eat up your brand manager’s time (and let’s be real: there are only so many versions of that one product photo a person can look at before they all blend into one). Cutting corners in the approval process, however, can put your brand at serious risk. Digital marketing workflows provide a centralised and automated approval and feedback system, which makes the task much simpler, effortless and, of course, less time-consuming.
This improves brand consistency by:
- Ensuring the proper approval process for all marketing materials.
- Improving team productivity.
- Reducing resource waste.
- Ensuring that your team feels empowered to make design decisions and get work done quickly and seamlessly.
Brand guidelines make consistency second-nature
Consistency in your marketing assets is vital in this customer-first era. Clear, concise and up-to-date brand guidelines can do a wonderful job of ensuring that all your brand assets — like images, videos and more are consistent and effective in carrying your brand message across.
Suggested reading: We demystified brand consistency so that you can focus on creating a successful business.
Brand guidelines help your team to understand what is expected of them and ensure that everyone is on the same page. Not knowing what needs to be done or how a final asset should look can really impact your team’s confidence, leading to wasted time and sub-par quality. Old-fashioned brand guidelines, however, leave a lot to be desired.
Updating guidelines manually, printing them out and distributing them — the whole process is time-consuming and inefficient and often leads to outdated guidelines and gaps in communication. Your team can feel held back by brand guidelines that are unclear, hard to access or simply out of date.
This is where the latest technology-driven brand management tools come into play. They provide brand guidelines that are accessible online, easy to edit and can integrate with your digital asset management solution seamlessly, which:
- Empowers your team to create and edit assets with confidence.
- Ensures that all your assets are consistent with your brand, making more efficient use of time and money while also making your team proud of what they create.
Multilingual functions bring global teams closer together
If you have a global business, you’ll be managing teams spread out across multiple countries and speaking various languages. Developing content in the local language is a key factor in spreading the word about your brand and tapping into global markets. When everything is centred around English, however, things are bound to get lost in translation — whether that’s guidelines, templates or feedback.
On top of that, manual translations will add a new step to the process and delay the distribution and implementation of instructions for global team members — leading to communication gaps, valuable time lost and, above all, brand inconsistency.
Advanced BAM software is the one thing that can resolve this issue and ensure seamless workflows even in multilingual teams spread across different countries. You need to partner with a BAM platform that offers intelligent translation capabilities and ensures everyone around the world can:
- Access the right assets.
- Customise them based on regional specifications.
- Meet guidelines without a hitch, helping you to lead a successful global team.
Make secure, streamlined assets the norm with digital asset management
With the quickly-multiplying number of digital assets, brands need a centralised system to store and manage them efficiently. Spending time searching or re-developing assets because your team can’t find them when they need them means wasting time and valuable resources. It also reduces your ROI on assets and multiplies the pressure on your team without actually adding any value to the brand.
A modern digital asset management (DAM) solution will provide a cloud-based, centralised platform to house all your digital assets along with easy search options so that your team never again has to waste time trawling through old assets. Besides, any member with the required permission, irrespective of their location, can easily access any asset stored in the DAM — eliminating the need for mailing assets or granting permission individually.
Pro tip: Digital asset management can enable better branding in a heartbeat. Read our blog about it today!
A centralised system also ensures consistency and seamless communication at all times, streamlining workflows and adhering to guidelines better. In a more modern DAM, assets can be uploaded, downloaded or previewed no matter the file type — giving your team freedom from converting formats. The advanced platform can be seamlessly integrated with the other software in your MarTech stack, establishing a single source of truth within the organisation while truly empowering your teams.
Empower your teams with Brandworkz software
All these features sound amazing, right? They are practically designed to ensure that your team has all the support they need to achieve their targets. To get all these and more, you need brand management software that puts people at the heart of everything and is tailored to your business.
Brandworkz, an AI-powered Business Management Software, bundles all these excellent features together and is backed by a team of experts who ensure that the platform is optimised to deliver its best for your business process. Brandworkz makes branding success look easy and works to support your teams through and through rather than hinder them. We hope to truly empower your teams to produce better brand assets without compromising on quality or missing deadlines ever again.
To know more about the Brandworkz platform and how it has been helping businesses like yours to operate more efficiently, book a test ride today!
