Contextual advertising… viral videos… personalised content… insert other marketing buzzwords. Trying to keep up with all of them is enough to drive you crazy. It’s hard enough to stick to everyday tasks like your posting schedules and general workflows — now you have to make sure every piece of content is managed efficiently. How?
Here’s how NOT to do it. Stuff all your files into a OneDrive account, add colour palettes to Adobe Illustrator, and call it a day. Alright, of course, we know that you’re better than that. But we also know that you’re reading this article because you want to know why digital brand management tools specifically are the ideal solutions to your brand management woes.
Here are some issues you can expect to stamp out when you invest in a digital brand management tool.
Suggested reading: Brand management itself has gone through plenty of developments over time — get a refresher on how with our blog The Evolution of Brand Management | Lessons from the Past and Visions of the Future.
1. Brand inconsistency
It’s common advice for businesses to be where their customers are. In the social media era, customers expect that you provide them with customised experiences on their favourite digital platforms. But how do you do this when your customers are anywhere from 16 to 80 years old with wildly different interests and viewpoints?
The challenges to brand consistency are not only external — they can stem from within the company too. Digital marketing teams, for example, are made up of real people with unique ideas that they all want to be heard. Without a north star for your brand that team members can look to, it’s impossible to create seamless, highly effective marketing strategies.
How digital brand management tools solve things
A digital brand management tool provides a central, cloud-based home for all of your brand assets (basically the materials that make up your brand), from images to videos and even brand guidelines and policies.
A brand management system (BMS) combats brand inconsistency across different channels by allowing you to categorise brand assets and share them seamlessly between relevant parties. Using templates, BMS also allows companies to ensure different versions of an asset retain the base brand identity.
2. Oversaturation of tools
Many brand managers have their hearts right when they invest in multiple affordable brand management tools. They’re just trying to improve the process of managing their brand while keeping costs low. However, in the long term, this approach not only leaves them spent on cash but energy as well, trying to manage one tool for images, another to host video, and yet another one for text documents.
How digital brand management tools solve things
A BMS is the aggregate of all the individual tools needed to manage brand assets. Its cloud storage, document editor, and collaboration tool are all provided in one product.
With just one system to manage, a proper digital brand management tool allows you to:
- Host all types of files in their varying formats.
- Share brand resources directly from the tool. No need to download and email files.
- Create new versions of assets by editing them with digital and print templates.
- Crossover different files — e.g. import images into documents directly from within the system.
- Provide team members with only one log-in.
- Save on time and monetary costs of managing multiple tools.
There is only a need for one master file, which can be edited and downloaded in different file formats.
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3. Miscommunication
A foolproof measure for how well your brand management — and really, how well your whole company is doing — is by looking at your communication process. Even the most well-meaning and successful companies can make basic communication mistakes. Couple that with brand management issues like discordant access to brand content across your teams or a lack of content creation audits, and you have a recipe for disaster, with miscommunication being the main ingredient.
Taking every measure to avoid miscommunication is important because of what you stand to lose when it happens. It could cost you time, money, customers, or worse, your reputation.
How digital brand management tools solve things
A brand management tool facilitates both internal and external communication.
With BMS, features such as annotations, the creation of new brand assets, and managing changes to existing ones are made easy. Annotations allow users to comment on changes made by others and leave notes for others to understand the changes they have made. Additionally, a BMS automatically provides an audit trail on actions made on assets, keeping everyone in the loop on who’s done what and when.
For communication with external stakeholders, the brand management system provides fully-fledged sharing functionality. Brandworkz, for example, utilises this with its digital asset management (DAM) system, allowing for approved assets to be centralised, accessed, and shareable from one location. Users can create custom folders with special settings that dictate when and what the recipient can download. The recipient, or client, also has the option to leave comments on the files that can be read at once by all concerned parties. No more playing broken telephone with clients and other team members.
4. Inaccessibility or too much accessibility
According to a digital workplace report by Igloo, 51% of employees have avoided sharing a document with a colleague because they couldn’t find it or thought it would be too difficult to find. Not surprising. When faced with the prospect of rummaging through hundreds, even thousands of digital files to find a poorly named Word document, anyone would back out.
You may wonder how “too much accessibility” could be an issue. Basically, as valuable as all your team members are bound to be, they’re likely in the specific departments and roles that they are for a reason. Having all your brand assets be available willy-nilly without using security functions like permissions can cause confusion and potential mishaps.
Brand assets are like the ingredients in your kitchen: they should all be in one place. Albeit with different access levels, if someone has the brilliant idea to make a chai latte with garam masala.
How digital brand management tools solve things
The usefulness of a DAM rears its head once more! As a centralised asset storage system with proper access control, DAM systems prevent team members from becoming frustrated with endless searches and long waits for access approval. Standardised access to brand assets across team members also ensures all created content is on-brand and consistent. You won’t find one team using the latest logo and another using the logo from a year ago.
Another benefit of the accessibility that a BMS provides is that it allows you to maximise the ROI of your brand resources.
Let’s take this scenario, for example, The content team at DolphinPics LLC needs a stock photo of a dolphin for a blog post, and the finance team needs a similar photo for the company report. A stock photo of a dolphin was purchased weeks ago and already exists in the brand management system. However, only the content team has access to it. Because they don’t know about it, the finance team buys a new photo of a different dolphin, so not only does the company not get to maximise ROI of the images they bought and lose consistency, but they also have to incur an extra cost.
To prevent too much accessibility, a brand management system is fitted with a permissions system. Users are only able to access what they need to perform their tasks. Nothing more, nothing less. The permissions system offers two benefits: the security of assets is enhanced, and users avoid being confused by too many options.
Let’s not forget about your remote workers. That same Igloo report found that 60% of remote workers struggle with missing out on important information because it was communicated in person.
But don’t worry, the problem isn’t you — it’s the lack of a digital brand management tool. It’s time to let your internal memos know that you found a better way to communicate.
5. Avoiding fads and imitation
They say there is nothing new under the sun. Well, the business world must not have a sun because it seems to always have something new.
Now, we’re not saying you should live in a shell and never learn from others’ successes. However, if you don’t have a good handle on your brand values and goals, it’s easy to get sucked into the trend machine that has caused the disappearance of many brands.
How digital brand management tools solve things
Brand management tools allow for hosting brand guidelines and policies and editing them on the fly whenever company views change and/or evolve. Central hosting of brand assets allows anyone with access to the system to have an overall look at what the brand is about, its identity, and its style. This way, everyone is aligned to a similar focus.
6. Unclear paths for growth
We reckon a homemade quote would go well here. How about this — you can’t grow what you don’t know, and you can’t know what’s not shown.
So, clearly, we’re not a bunch of Nobel Prize winners, but basic as the quote might be, it’s true! You need to study your brand constantly to improve its performance.
Suggested reading: For more in-depth guidance on maintaining brand experience for your customers, check out our Brand Consistency Toolkit.
How digital brand management tools solve things
Growing your brand requires you to have a system of knowing which brand assets are performing the best. Such information can be useful in informing future investments into creating new brand assets — you’ll know which ones are ROI-positive and which are a waste of space and money.
A good brand management tool is the nucleus of a successful brand growth plan. Other tools, such as conversion rate optimisation software and user analytics software, are connected to it. By combining data points from these different sources and analysing them, you can find out which 20% of brand management efforts bring you 80% of the results. You can realise brand growth much faster by doubling down on the 20% activities.
At Brandworkz, we carefully studied brand management best practices and combined them in a single system. Our software capabilities, like digital and print templates, approval workflows, and our very own DAM, go beyond solving your brand management problems — they take it forward altogether.
So whether you’re dealing with some of the problems listed above, problems that aren’t listed, or just want to better your brand management, get started with a free demo of Brandworkz to see the benefits of BMS for yourself.
