What Is Brand Asset Management?
Do you think your brand appears consistently across all the platforms? Is it presented in the same way to organizations and local channel partners, or does the imagery and messaging vary? Are your brand assets always accurate and up to date? Can your employees and partners access the updated files easily?
Too many questions! Right? But these are a few of the most important questions to ask yourself when it comes to branding. If all your answers are positive, it’s a plus for you. If not, then you need a proper system to organize your brand assets. This system or process of organizing your brand assets is known as brand asset management or BAM. Now, you might be wondering, what is brand asset management? So, as you read further, you will learn all there is to know about BAM. Let’s dive in.
What is Brand Asset Management?
Brand asset management is a system that helps you organize your brand’s marketing files and documents to give you a seamless and consistent brand experience. Through brand asset management, you can make your branding materials accessible across the entire organization. If your employees, channel partners, or any of your collaborators want to use corporate brand assets for marketing, they can easily use the BAM system to obtain the necessary files. The BAM system ensures that the brand assets are up to date, consistent and legally approved. This process streamlines marketing across your entire organization and maintains consistency across all of the brand’s locations.
What are Brand Assets?
Brand assets are basically the individual creative files and documents that make up your brand. They convey important messages to your audience. It is very important for these digital brand assets to be consistent, up-to-date, and easily recognizable across the board. Think of brand assets as the face of your company, they’re a part of your identity and tell your story. Here is a list of brand assets:
- Logos
- Brand colors
- Typography and fonts
- Graphic elements and icons
- Imagery
- Slogan and taglines
- Templates (i.e. sales decks, letterheads, signage)
- Standard messaging templates
- Video
At times you will need different versions of a few brand assets like the logo. Different materials call for different design requirements so it is better to have various versions of that particular brand asset. Make sure you store all the important files of each version in one place and in an organized manner.
What Are The Benefits of Brand Asset Management?
Your brand identity is essential, especially in today’s highly competitive marketplace. Brand managers at large companies with a huge library of branded materials usually share branded assets with other departments or with distributors, vendors, partners, dealers, etc. So, it is important to keep your brand assets up to date and easily accessible. Adopting a BAM strategy will make your brand assets easy to find and access. Moreover, it can drastically impact the productivity of multiple units of your business.
Here are a few benefits of incorporating a BAM strategy into your business:
- It will help you organize your brand assets in far better and clear ways.
- BAM improves the efficiency and organization of your brand assets.
- It ensures the fully up-to-date versions of each brand asset are easily available across the team.
- BAM improves communication and collaboration within the team on marketing projects.
- Incorporating BAM helps to maintain your brand consistency and representation.
- It enables you to easily develop, manage, adapt, and improve your brand overall.
- A Brand Asset Management strategy enforces clear, strict brand guidelines that keep your brand image consistent.
- Moreover, it ensures that your brand retains its authenticity and uniqueness. This will help to make it stand out in the market. Also, it will appeal to consumers, and ultimately increase the level of brand awareness.
How to Organize Your Brand Assets?
To organize your brand assets, you should follow these steps:
1. Create separate folders for different brand assets.
Create individual folders for logos, brand guidelines, poster templates, message templates, social creatives, and video files. This will make locating brand assets easier.
2. Use a structured nomenclature system to save each brand asset.
Develop a process to name different brand asset files. It may sound tedious at the moment, but this simple step will ensure that the users can easily find the file they’re looking for with minimal effort.
3. Make it clear which files are recently updated.
Include the date in the file name while saving it to make it clear which files are the most recent. Create a separate folder for archived files that you don’t want anybody to use in the marketing materials anymore.
Conclusion
If you want to ensure the growth of your company continues, it’s critical for you to develop an effective BAM strategy that lasts. This strategy will improve your business practices across the board. Furthermore, it will ensure that your consumers’ experience with your brand’s product and services is consistent and as positive as it possibly can be.
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