How to Stay in Control of Your Brand with DAM

Brand management is not only a critical practice in safeguarding the reputation of your business, but in building your brand's personality and growing trust and loyalty among your customers. Brand management ultimately affects the success and growth of your business and is a top priority for marketers, but it is also one that is demanding and complex. Discover how a solution like an enterprise Digital Asset Management(DAM), can help you stay in full control of your brand and fuel stronger brand experiences.

The importance and challenges of and brand management

Brand management is an important aspect of marketing and is crucial to the success of any business. Building a brand takes time. It involves developing a unique brand identity and ensuring that every experience and message is consistent, compliant and memorable. But ensuring that every interaction with your brand, whether online or offline, is always on brand and legally compliant is not an easy task.

First, it involves making sure your content and communication consistently conforms to your brand identity. Brand consistency allows customers to easily identify and recognize your brand, no matter where they are, making them more likely to trust and buy from you.71% of customerssay they're more likely to buy from a brand that they recognize. You need to therefore ensure that your messaging reflects your company's core values while the presentation of your content is aligned with your visual identity, from your colors and logos to your typography and creative design.

On top of keeping your content on brand, you must also make sure that it addresses any legal or industry-related regulatory compliance frameworks. Licensed assets such as images come with expiration dates and even channel or geographic-specific usage rights. To avoid problems related to copyright infringement, you should make sure that you are using assets only during the indicated licensing period, in the right countries or markets, and on the right marketing channels.

Companies in certain industries like financial services, consumer goods or healthcare even face their own set of constantly changing industry standards which require content to go through approval processes in order to avoid corporate penalties. This means ensuring every product packaging, flyer or price sheet includes all necessary information and product disclaimers.

Having an effective brand management strategy is necessary to maintain a positive brand image, build customer loyalty and therefore drive revenue. It is a top priority for marketers and brand managers, but it is also one that comes with many barriers as your teams grow and your business expands internationally. Companies produce a huge volume of valuable marketing content, distribute this content on various communication channels, and must constantly reconcile local and international marketing needs. And to only add to this exhaustive list of considerations: today's customers expect customer experiences to be personalized.

How can brands maintain global brand consistency and compliance while also providing unique brand experiences? The former necessitates quality control, while the latter requires giving teams local autonomy. Without the right system and automated marketing processes to make teams agile, brand management almost seems like an impossible task.

Only a centralized technology like DAM can set companies up for brand management success.

How does DAM help you ensure proper brand management?

Here are some key ways an enterprise DAM solution helps global companies with their brand management efforts.

Provide a centralized access to your assets and brand resources

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution first and foremost helps companies manage an increasingly large volume and variety of marketing assets. It provides a 'Single Source of Truth'for all your validated marketing, product and brand assets, making sure your company's up-to-date and validated content is easily accessible across your organization.

A DAM also serves as a 'brand center' housing all sorts of brand assets and resources: brand guidelines, logos, primary and secondary brand colors, typography, icons and more. Companies can therefore ensure employees incorporate the right logos, colors, or images in their marketing materials, whether they are creating this content within the DAM platform itself, or in any other application that is connected to it: Microsoft Office Suite (PowerPoint, Word, Outlook), Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator) etc.

Control who has access to your assets

DAM platforms come with a very important feature for protecting your brand assets: digital rights management. This allows you to set up user roles and user permissions, meaning different employees, teams, brands or business units have a customized access to assets. This way, each user group only sees or downloads the content that is relevant to them. A DAM administrator or librarian may have access to most assets, while an agency or channel partner may have a more restricted access to location-specific or campaign-specific media for example.

Ensure the correct usage of your assets

Digital rights management also enables you to ensure the correct use of your assets on various channels and markets. Copyright information is tied to each asset specifying the photographer and location of a photo, when and for how long it can be used, as well as which channels and markets it can or cannot be published to. By having this information, you can better monitor image licenses and avoid using expired assets, helping you avoid any hefty fines that might arise from copyright infringement.

Control how assets are locally customized

If your company works with channel partners, it can sometimes be difficult to ensure local marketing content is consistent with your global brand identity. While personalizing content to the local audience and delivering it in the right language is important, this should not sacrifice or hurt your brand image. Enterprise DAM platforms come with distributed workflowsthat allow central marketing teams to give channel partners the possibility of creating their own content using validated brand templates.

Whether your local retailer or reseller wants to produce a print asset, a newsletter or a social media post, they can always be confident that the marketing content they create respects the brand's rules and guidelines: InDesign and emailing templates available in your DAM will indicate non-editable and editable zones for customizing text or visual elements (contact details, promotional offers, photos, pricing info etc.)

Make sure content goes through an approval process

The content you publish needs to comply with your brand identity but also to regulatory requirements you may face. A DAM comes with the necessary creative and validation workflowsto review and approve newly created content like images, documents and packaging materials. For any campaign, you can involve the right individuals from the team in charge of the project, to the business and legal validators responsible for approving it for publication. With a validation process, you simplify content review and approval and can record all revisions of content, ensuring traceability and that final versions contain the right and up-to-date legal mentions, disclaimers and brand elements.

Control where assets are published

Last but not least, an important aspect of protecting your brand is making sure your content and visual assets online are being used in the right context. Enterprise DAM platforms come with image reverse search capabilitiesto allow you to track your assets online. In times of rebranding, you can identify all the webpages that are using your old logo and thus update them.

You can also find out when other companies, including your competitors are using modified versions of specific images that belong to you. Some DAM platforms like Wedia's, come with Digital eXperience Management(DXM) functionalities that also allow you to find the pages where assets specifically distributed by your DAM have been published online. By helping you monitor your media, an enterprise DAM allows you to keep control of your intellectual property and take the necessary steps to avoid a negative or compromised brand image.

Digital Asset Management offers all the control milestones needed to empower global and local marketing teams, channel partners and brand managers while guaranteeing the integrity and strength of your brand at scale. Whether you want to simply download an asset, create a new marketing campaign or publish a marketing content, with a solution like DAM, you have complete control of your brand and ensure that every experience with your company creates value for your business without ever having to second guess yourself.

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