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As a brand owner, effectively managing your brand assets goes beyond merely picking a pleasing color palette across your online platforms. Instead, you’ll need to adopt a holistic strategy for your company’s complete branding while leveraging best practices to ensure proper asset management while building a strong, compelling brand.
But here’s the million-dollar question — how do you effectively control your brand’s assets?
In this article, we’ll walk you through the best practices for controlling your brand assets and developing a digital asset management strategy specifically tailored to ensure your company’s success.
What is Brand Asset Management?
Brand asset management is an organizational strategy that leverages specialized technologies to make it simple for your team to access and edit the entire corpus of your brand assets.
In other words, it employs specialized software to manage your digital assets (such as logos, photos, font, typefaces, etc.).
When it comes to creating a digital presence for your brand, consistency is vital. To do this effectively, there must be guidelines for the appearance and positioning of your brand logos, a list of acceptable business descriptions, and other requirements.
Brand asset management is, therefore, critical to ensuring your brand is presented correctly and doesn’t cause confusion among consumers.
Thankfully, the right digital asset management system can help you successfully and efficiently produce, edit, and distribute your marketing assets while providing you with better control.
How to Manage Your Brand Asset Effectively
The following paragraphs share essential tips on proper brand asset management and control:
1. Keep all of your assets in one location
Managing your digital assets can be challenging, especially when you have to work with many files because they are likely saved on desktops or personal drives.
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As a result, it becomes difficult for others to access them when necessary, particularly when an employee leaves, is out from work due to illness, or is just not at their desk.
On the other hand, if you kept them all in one central location, you would have immediate access to the files. Of course, this means you can enjoy higher productivity and work efficiency as everyone can quickly locate the necessary files or documents.
2. Approve assets as they are uploaded
Checking and approving all assets can be time-consuming, especially when working with hundreds or even thousands of assets in different formats.
An asset management system allows you to upload pre-approved templates with adjustable elements, ensuring that all marketing materials created are consistent with your brand.
This way, marketers and brand managers can spend more time organizing and concentrating on the business activities that will generate revenue by spending less time approving assets or waiting for assets to be designed.
3. Use an online file storage system
Today, remote work is getting increasingly popular as more businesses are adopting a fully remote or hybrid work system. As a result, it has become vital to move your storage system so your team can access it from anywhere, especially your brand assets.
In addition to improving access and remote work convenience, an online storage system also protects you from data loss associated with theft or damage to physical systems. However, be sure to employ up-to-date security measures to protect your brand assets online.
4. Back-up marketing materials
Lost or mistakenly deleted assets and data can result in steep financial consequences and non-monetary chain reactions. Thankfully, backing up your marketing materials and brand assets can effectively prevent such situations.
Remember, reproducing assets not only means more costs but can also be very time-consuming. So, consider saving your files and documents on multiple cloud storage or creating a physical drive.
5. Ensure that only the most recent assets are accessible
Understandably, you’ll likely create several drafts and make several corrections or variations when creating assets. However, you’ll need to make sure these work-in-progress versions do not end up on your marketing platforms.
If carelessly handled, the incorrect version of an asset may go into marketing communications if the different versions end up on a shared drive.
This is unprofessional, and it could harm your brand. If you have worked hard to develop your brand, you want to safeguard it. So, ensure your team has only the most recent files, so nobody can use drafts or outdated marketing materials.
What’s the Difference between Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Brand Asset Management (BAM)?
Fun fact? Brand Asset Management is different from Digital Asset Management.
On the one hand, BAM provides your team with all the resources they need to designate a location for storing your brand assets.
On the other hand, digital asset management focuses on your digital presence and platforms (e.g., your website). It focuses on how your team accesses, stores, and organizes your team’s digital business resources (such as files like photographs and videos).
You can easily keep track of these resources by safeguarding them from damage, theft, or unauthorized use.
Wrapping It Up
Brand asset management is essential for effective brand growth. They help you retain your company’s distinctive branding while maintaining a streamlined workflow, excellent communication, and productive work.
Remember, the goal is to keep all your brand assets safe and secure while ensuring they remain easily accessible for team members who need to use them. This way, you can ensure higher efficiency and productivity throughout your marketing department.
