Let’s face it, keeping a brand growing — nay, surviving — nowadays means MORE in every way possible. More marketing channels, more employees, more brand content in general. But with these multiples of factors to consider, brand managers need a single solution to make sense of it all.
The solution of choice for many is none other than digital asset management (DAM) software. DAM serves as a way to quickly and painlessly store, access, and manage your brand assets (as in the images, videos, fonts, logos, colours, etc., that make up your branding) in one cloud-based system.
While DAM systems are very popular in brand management — and for good reason — there can be more to them than just providing effective storage. Today, we’re going to give you a short refresher on the benefits of a DAM and what you stand to gain from combining your digital asset management software with a secret ingredient: brand management software.
Suggested reading: If you’re still struggling to convince your leads as to why a DAM is a great investment, look no further than our blog How to Make the Business Case for Digital Asset Management to help you out!
How DAMs help with brand management
A proper digital asset management system goes a long way in reducing how much time gets spent on tasks that could easily be automated. We all know that time is money. By using a DAM software, brand managers can focus more on improving their customers’ experience.
Based on our research with some of our existing customers, this is just how critical a DAM is:
- It can reduce the time spent searching for assets by 724 hours each year.
- It can save £150,000 in marketers’ time per annum.
- It can boost brand consistency and, consequently, revenue by 23%.
Migrating brand content to a feature-rich DAM software offers many benefits. Some of the advantages are:
- Effortless team collaboration: A DAM system provides a single pool of approved, on-brand content to dive into and emerge from with content that’s relevant to your specific project. This centralisation ensures all team members have equal access to your crucial and valuable assets. For those craving a little power, here’s your chance because a great DAM will allow you to set expiry dates and embargos to control when users can access files. You can also control which formats they can download the files in.
- Easy access to brand content: Brand management requires organisation. Organisation requires details. A DAM system offers details, thanks to its rich file labelling and retrieval system. The driver behind this powerful system is metadata, which are the detailed descriptions of each file in your asset library. As a result of metadata and tags being attached to each digital resource, searching for specific items in the DAM database becomes incredibly easy.
- Streamlined processes and enhanced productivity: The ease of use and centralised nature of a DAM means that your everyday tasks from brand management to onboarding, are made all the more simple and productive. For example, a newly hired graphic designer would get immediately acquainted with your company’s brand elements by simply being added to the DAM system. Even more time is saved with DAM features like file previews and the ability to download in any format. No need to hop on to Google to search ‘JPEG to PNG converter.’
- Guaranteed compliance: Effective brand management involves more than ensuring your organisation’s public image lines up with its values. It also includes following policies — your own, and those of third parties that you engage with, especially within regulated industries like finance and healthcare. Using DAM features such as tagging and access control, brand managers can ensure the usage of all assets adheres to guidelines and policies.
Suggested reading: The importance of marketing compliance could not be stressed enough… which is why we’ve written a whole blog on it: How to Simplify Marketing Compliance in 2022.
👉 Ready to improve your brand management? Check out The Brand Consistency Toolkit today 👈
Using regular DAM systems? You’re missing out
Of course, some organisations are at a level where a DAM system is enough to keep them satisfied. However, we put out this blog to help those who feel like they have to juggle multiple tools when, really, they could just hold the one solution.
Brand management is a holistic activity. It requires all departments within an organisation to be aligned in order to ensure the overall output is reflective of the company’s identity: in other words, its brand. Some DAMs lack certain features that are needed to make this happen. Features like…
Inadequate asset creation management
Every day in almost all organisations, new content needs to be created, whether it is internal documents, client work, or marketing collateral. The creation of this content is a convoluted process that can only be made simpler by using tools that allow feedback to be shared and acted upon quickly.
Brand management software (BMS) brings those tools to your doorstep. Unlike some standard DAMs, BMS come with features that make the management of asset/content creation a breeze:
- Ability to create workflows in the software that match how your company operates.
- Annotation and review of tasks within the system. No need to write hundreds of emails saying “…please look into this…”
- Real time updates of actions that your team members take. Someone edited the edit you edited? You’ll know immediately!
- Single point of access to all projects gives you a bird’s eye view of all ongoing asset creation activities.
- An audit trail that you can revisit any time you need to see creation, management, and edit histories, including who in your team has done what, and when they did it.
You can’t edit brand assets
54% of US office professionals surveyed agreed that they spend more time searching for the documents and files they need than responding to emails and messages. And if they need to edit the file once they’ve found it, there goes even more time wasted.
Brand assets need to be amendable in a way that retains consistency across the board and most BMS systems provide this dual capability. These typically take the form of offers like editable templates and brand guidelines. Editable templates allow users to quickly make edits to a pre-approved document, then share it or download it, all with the security that content will remain on-brand. They cut out the need to ask and wait for approval, especially when the change is minor.
Approvals aren’t streamlined
In fact, keeping approval workflows as smooth as possible is so key to great brand management that it gets its own subsection! Though most DAMs do technically enable less complicated processes of approvals thanks to having assets be centralised and accessible, this is more of an added benefit they bring rather than a direct result. Even the DAMs out there that allow you to track status, request reviews or edits, provide annotations, and schedule reminders are often few and far between. On the other hand, most BMS and DAM combined solutions actively make thing easier by allowing you to have the asset management capabilities of a DAM along with advanced approvals capabilities within the one system.
Complicated management of multiple brands
Managing multiple brands is not only highly demanding but also very expensive if not done right. The use of a BMS alleviates this by allowing you to host multiple brands on the same system, keeping brand attributes, resources, and reports separate in a branded area that is immersive. Certain systems like Brandworkz also enable capabilities like permission-based access to direct which of your teams can work on which brands, and reports that are either brand-specific or assess all of them across the board.
Can’t showcase what good looks like
As great as your brand assets and processes are bound to be, it helps to be reminded of you and your team’s greatest hits. A DAM is helpful in having people access and view the assets you have on hand, but truly supercharging your brand management involves also giving them giving examples of what good looks like.
Suggested reading: Looking to take your brand global? Get a headstart with our blog 6 Challenges of Global Brand Management Solved.
Can a DAM be optimised for brand management?
For a DAM to be optimised for brand management, it has to do more than just hosting a company’s brand elements. A fully-rounded DAM needs to provide features that allow for seamless editing of existing resources and easy creation of new ones.
Ever heard of the phrase “That meeting could have been an email”? Well, in this case, that email could have been a note on an approval stage in the brand management software. A DAM that’s optimised with a happy marriage to a BMS system will prove its worth in the long run when you find yourself managing 20 asset creation projects without pulling your hair out.
Brandworkz: Here to seal the leak in your DAM
Corny? Yes. Accurate? Yes again.
We were bored with the traditional green eggs and DAM (last one, I promise), so we added some of our special seasoning, and came up with Brandworkz. Our asset management solution is aimed at reducing the time you spend managing your brand, so that you can focus on actually BEING the brand.
We have an expert team that will work with you to create fully custom workflows based on your company structure. Hate reading software documentation? So do we, that’s why we designed a user interface so simple, a cat can manage a rebranding campaign. No need for platform migrations either, our BMS smoothly integrates with the other tools in your marketing stack, including WordPress, Adobe Suite, etc.
Are you ready to join 100,000 marketers already increasing revenue by 33% with a consistent brand? Sign up for a demo today. No business card required.
