Are your digital assets on-brand? More importantly, are they being used in full alignment with your organization’s brand strategy? Branding is about more than just logos and letterheads; it’s how you consistently and effectively communicate your organization’s mission and story across all your marketing, sales, and customer service channels. It’s your organization’s key to resonating with your target audience members, and it’s your ticket to entering into and maintaining long-term relationships with your customers.
As such, it’s critical that your digital assets – and their use – remain on-brand, at all times. All the more so when your organization has multiple people working on and with a vast amount of video, audio, images, and written content versions, to promote your brand and its message, day in and day out.
Here are 5 tips to help your teams stay on top of your on-brand digital assets, to strengthen your brand and support your marketing goals.
1 – Develop a brand strategy
The first thing you need to do is make sure the mission, vision, and goals of your organization are clear and on target with your business objectives. What is the purpose of your organization, really? Who are your target customers? What is their need, and how do you aim to resolve it? Answering these questions will help you develop your brand positioning and messaging strategy, so you can best reach and resonate with potential customers, through your digital assets and face-to-face/verbal communications alike.
2 – Create digital assets that reflect your brand
Every single digital asset you create will be a part of your brand’s identity; symbolizing and communicating your brand’s ethos and essence to both stakeholders and customers. From your logo and slogan, through your website and social media presence, and to your marketing documents – mailers, press releases, brochures, promotional videos, and more – all of your digital assets should be built as an extension of your brand strategy, and as integral tools within your marketing toolbox. Therefore, when creating digital assets, it helps to keep a copy of your organization’s brand strategy in plain sight, so that it can be referred to ensure maximum brand alignment, with every word and color scheme applied.
3 – Map and categorize your assets
Now that you have branded assets at the ready, it’s important to ensure that they are never lost in the shuffle. The first step in achieving this goal is to map out how many digital assets your organization has, and in which formats. You should then create categories for different content and file/media types, and assess whether certain file types or formats are lacking, and should be created, to further maintain brand consistency and presence.
4 – Store your assets in a DAM system
5 – Establish access permissions
You have branded digital assets, great! They’re stored in a DAM system, enabling them to be found with speed and ease, even better! Now, it’s time to ensure that ONLY those who need to use your digital assets can, so that (a) word of your organization and its purpose can be effectively spread, and (b) your digital assets don’t fall into the wrong hands, potentially leading to malicious changes being made, or files being destroyed, altogether. Structure your DAM system so that those who need to access particular digital assets can, according to the type of access they need or you want them to have. Doing so will enable the right people to promote the right, up-to-date, optimized, shareable, and on-brand assets, at the right time.