Is This the Lacking Cornerstone of Your Model Administration Technique? | Zombie Tech

Your brand is the most valuable thing your company owns. But if maintaining their constant use is giving you a headache, you should look at the tools your team uses. In today’s fast-paced world of marketing, digital asset management is the cornerstone of strong brand management. This is why.

If branding is about creating memorable assets and on message, brand management is about making the most of them. But even leading companies can fail to maintain the integrity of their brands, due to inconsistencies like outdated images or incorrect colors and fonts.

This is often because many parties are responsible for producing or publishing content. Brand inconsistency may suggest that your company doesn’t know what it’s doing; can you be trusted? At worst, your prospect will question what they see and abandon their interest in your product or service.

While customers are less likely to buy brands that appear unprofessional, poor brand management also creates inefficiencies in the way you work. Without a centralized source of truth, designers have a hard time maintaining a consistent brand identity.

Brand assets come in many forms, with a lot of work to get these materials right. A logo, for example, has detailed characteristics in terms of size, orientation, and color, chosen based on extensive research. Therefore, having a strategy to ensure that the finalized versions of your latest assets are always used is just as important as creating them.

Enter digital asset management

The growing volume of content facing any marketing team is scary, let alone ensuring the right content is being used. Many teams have turned to specially designed software to help overcome this. Digital asset management (DAM) platforms make it easy to organize, manage and distribute your assets, which is essential for good brand management.

These tools ensure teams are using the right materials and adhering to the same standards, helping you get the most out of your investment in branding. And once implemented, DAM democratizes how assets are used, allowing multiple people and departments to share content seamlessly.

Let’s look at five advantages:

1. Maintain brand standards

Although organizations invest heavily in their brand standards, that doesn’t mean everyone is familiar with them. Without a clear system in place around which assets to use and when, your team is more likely to grab what they think will work for the content they’re creating.

As a result, they end up using materials that don’t adhere to brand guidelines, leading to inconsistencies and ultimately undermining their brand integrity.

By creating a single source of information, you can much more easily present and manage a consistent image to the public.

2. Centralized content can be optimized

The best starting point is to put all your guidelines and approved assets in some centralized place, which reduces the risk of someone using something that isn’t good enough to get out. You can immediately remove any ambiguity about which assets are “safe” to use.

After you centralize your assets, you need to provide guidance on how the content should be used. For example, a logo that is optimized for social media won’t work for a website header, or images for Instagram might not work for LinkedIn.

Similarly, if there is no system in place for licensed content or relevant permissions to feature people, you could find yourself in legal trouble. Fortunately, DAM platforms provide a variety of controls that allow you to effectively manage your brand across multiple touchpoints.

3. Use metadata in your brand management

When all assets are managed in one place, it’s easier for teams to find the right materials when they need them. DAM platforms can tag each asset with metadata that makes it easy to find using keywords, dates, dimensions, and other unique identifiers.

The metadata attached to assets can also provide instructions on how the assets should be used. For example, as part of a campaign or in a certain market. These search features help ensure that the correct content is published.

4. Portals deliver the right content to the right people

Just because a brand resource has been approved doesn’t mean everyone should have access to it. DAM tools allow you to customize usage rights for anything stored on your system, so you can set up a specific portal for freelancers, for example.

This means that your campaign content for a product launch in a specific region is only available to your designers and marketers there, preventing your product or campaign images from being inadvertently used elsewhere in a specific region. market where the product is not available.

Mistakes with licensed assets can quickly become costly, exposing you to legal action and damaging your brand, so placing expiration dates on individual assets or entire portals can help you stay in control. At the same time, digital rights management tools within DAM, which enable features like watermarking, can help you determine if assets were used without your permission.

5. Bring your internal and external collaborators together

Once brand assets have been created, they need to be accessible to everyone who needs to use them, which is a challenge when multiple people collaborate. Consolidating assets that would otherwise be scattered across multiple systems is a good start, but if your tools don’t facilitate sharing, that creates more delays.

DAM platforms allow you to connect employees with the assets they need, so they can work more efficiently and scale production as you grow.

Today’s creative teams are made up of both internal and external designers, so it can be difficult to manage permissions across multiple platforms, especially when files are constantly coming and going. Shared workspaces that consolidate every asset streamline everything and ensure everyone is working with the latest materials, so teams can work faster.

Email and public cloud storage are not efficient when it comes to ensuring people are working with the right files. With a DAM platform, you can avoid these headaches by using sharing links and web portals, where users can access files directly.

These links can be set to expire, while portals provide access to select assets without the need to manage individual user privileges. Both options allow collaborators to process approvals or obtain the assets they need for a specific project.

You can’t build tall without your cornerstone in place

Ultimately, with a DAM platform like Canto, you can take control of your assets and use them more efficiently. It is the easiest way to build a consistent and scalable process. Instead of spending time searching for resources scattered across multiple locations or managing access privileges across multiple platforms, you can organize your brand assets and simplify collaborative content creation.