Does your brand asset management system need an overhaul? Do you even have one? If your teams waste hours every week searching for the perfect brand asset to catch your audience’s attention, you might want to keep reading.
As a McKinsey report points out, high-skill workers spend 19% of their time searching for and gathering information. Additionally, they spend 28% of their time emailing back and forth during collaborative and other information-gathering tasks.
Image Source: McKinsey
However, the same study showed that companies could shave a significant amount of that time down if they deployed leading-edge software to catalog their branded assets, such as:
- Logos and all their variations
- Branded infographics, graphs, images, and illustrations
- Webpage designs
- Boilerplate company descriptions for press releases, white papers, and other content
- Brand and style guidelines
- Approved taglines and other branded messaging
- Email signature and press release templates
- Your company’s official unique selling proposition (USP)
While we would certainly recommend our own DivvyHQ content platform for centralized access and seamless collaboration, you’d also do your company a big favor if you tasked your content operations and governance teams to implement (or upgrade) your own brand asset management (BAM) system.
What Can a New Brand Asset Management System Do for Me?
Suppose your creative teams are under the gun to come up with a proposal for that major prospect your sales teams hope to land. The deadline looms in a few hours, so they launch a frantic search for a branded photo of the product you’re pitching.
So, your outdated system coughs up several versions of the photo. Your teams choose the one with the most attractive background, thinking it would make the best impression on your Fortune 500 prospect’s top brass. And then, reality set in.
Unfortunately, your brand asset management system lacked AI-powered metadata management, so version control was virtually nonexistent. They sent the prospect the 2019 version — which lacked the one update that would have driven them to buy. You lost the sale.
However, that story can have a happy ending. When you use a leading-edge brand asset management system, you’ll save time and always have updated material at your fingertips.
Maintain Strict Version Control
Today’s brand asset management systems have robust metadata, including version control. When your teams search for photos of a particular product, your latest tagline, or the official explainer video, they’ll see only the latest version, ensuring that you’ll never miss a sale or run afoul of compliance due to dated material.
Avoid Double Files
Asset management is especially critical among larger content teams. When design personnel and writers, for instance, work on the same asset at the same time, your brand asset management software ensures that only one file — the latest version — emerges from the creative process.
Streamline the Process of Finding Branded Assets
And instead of storing all your brand assets all over the place, you’ll have a central location accessible to all teams who need to use them in communications. With the massive volume of content that enterprise-level companies need to put out, streamlining the process of finding digital assets is essential.
Simplify Rebranding
Rebranding involves a complete overhaul of your digital assets — especially the most brand-forward ones, such as video ads, content marketing pieces that emphasize your former USP, or designs that feature your older color scheme. Having a robust digital asset management system in place before you rebrand ensures there won’t be any embarrassing hiccups.
Manage Asset Permissions
State, federal, and local regulations change over time. Just because your legal team approved a brand asset five years ago doesn’t mean that you can still use it today. Digital asset management streamlines the approval process, allowing legal and compliance teams to review older assets without emailing or texting back and forth.
Similarly, if you paid for permission to use a digital asset — like a few bars from a popular tune — in your ads, you need to keep track of when that permission will expire. Otherwise, you risk a costly lawsuit for copyright infringement.
Digital asset management systems can note those dates in their metadata, alerting your teams that they need to find another asset or re-apply for permission to use an asset whose permission has expired.
Update Brand Guidelines in Real Time
From time to time, content governance teams need to update their company’s brand guidelines. With a central hub that hosts all your brand assets, updates occur across the system in real-time.
And, if your digital asset management system integrates with your content platform, your content teams will be able to refer to your guidelines on the same platform they use to create and publish content.
Personalize Branded Content
Building brand loyalty often starts with the first step on the buyer’s journey. Later on, audience members will build their trust in your brand through content that helps them solve the specific problems they face.
With the metadata capabilities of today’s digital asset management software, you can tag each branded asset with the target demographics, pain points, and position on the buyer’s journey so that your teams can pair written content with other brand assets that will create lasting impressions.
Reuse High-Performing Brand Assets
Some brand assets take on a star quality all their own. Ronald McDonald, Progressive’s “Flo,” and the Limu Emu and his sidekick Doug come to mind.
Even though your branded content might not amuse fans nationwide like Limu Emu, you’ll probably find that some digital assets resonate powerfully with your target audience, producing bottom-line results. And in business, that’s what counts.
If your digital asset management platform integrates with your content analytics solution, you can identify these superstar assets and tag them as such. That way, your content teams can reuse them whenever they need a visual that drives their message home.
Fulfill Last-Minute Requests from Your Sales and Support Teams
With a leading-edge brand asset management system, content collaboration becomes oh-so-easy. When they ask, “Do you happen to have something that could get this prospect over the finish line?” your teams can locate just the right white paper, infographic, or graph that could drive your sales team’s presentation home. In minutes, not hours.
Similarly, when your support teams are dealing with a customer who can’t quite understand their verbal instructions, you can provide them with a troubleshooting video or diagram that can meet a visual learner’s needs.
Align Your Messaging Across All Your Channels
When you have a brand asset solution that provides access to teams outside the marketing silo, your messaging will be more consistent enterprise-wide on every channel. And, if you pair your brand guidelines with an AI-powered content checker that suggests words that reflect your brand, every person in your organization will communicate with one voice.
Whether it’s a quick email from your CEO to your top client or a heavily researched white paper, your brand voice will echo throughout every message. But to pull it all together, you need a content marketing platform that can integrate seamlessly with hundreds of other platforms, including Canto’s digital and brand asset management platform.
DivvyHQ can do all that — and much more. But don’t take it from us.
Try it for yourself for 14 days for free — and see what a difference it can make for your brand.