Knowing where to start with upgrading your brand management can be tricky — attempts to improve things by forking out on expensive software can, if incompatible with your current system, add to the problems of brand inefficiency and inconsistency.
But not to worry! Here’s a handy guide exploring several helpful features of the best BMS that you can use as a blueprint to better brand management and start you on your way to a more successful brand in no time.
Suggested reading: Brand consistency can feel like an uphill struggle, staring down an endless approval list! Please take a look at our brand consistency toolkit to give you a helping hand.
Incorporate a logo finder
The problem
From Christmas colour scheme changes and language variations across global brands to simply needing differently-formatted logos for a website versus a financial report, the sheer variety of logos one brand has can quickly lead to chaos if teams don’t know where to find the logos they need:
- They make do with outdated, low-resolution logos found on Google, most likely not meant for the content they’re producing.
- Your design team becomes overwhelmed with requests for logos, meaning the working processes of your entire team suffer.
- Bottlenecks and inconsistencies soon become insidious, causing tremendous damage to your brand identity.
The solution
So, how can you prevent your brand’s logo use from becoming more inefficient than you at 8 am on a Monday morning?
That’s where a logo finder comes in! This tool, used to help organise your team’s logo use, provides them with easy access to the logos they need when they need them!
How a logo finder helps you and your brand
- Use a decision tree to find the assets you need: Use this search tool to answer questions about the specific medium, background colour and logo format your teams need, ensuring everyone uses consistently on-brand, up-to-date logos for their tasks.
- Improve brand consistency: Everyone knows which logo to use, meaning your brand image looks far more unified.
- Remove pressure from your design team: Everyone can help themselves, clearing up bottlenecks and helping your team to operate more efficiently.
Logo finders also allow users to make minor edits to the properties of the logos they’re using! See here if you’re curious to find out how…
Bring in Digital & Print Templates
The problem
Relying on your brand and design team for EVERY SINGLE minor design change can stall the efficiency and creativity of your production processes. This can lead to severe problems like:
- Bottlenecks — delays in requests being answered mean minor edits that would improve the content are either ditched or slow down the overall workflow.
- All low-level requests can become overwhelming for your design teams to deal with, causing your brand quality to suffer as they never have time to complete the big tasks like that new logo redesign!
The solution
Pre-approved to comply with your brand identity with all your latest branding updates, Digital & Print Templates allow team members with little to no design experience to drag and drop to customise and localise material in a matter of minutes.
Easy to alter, these help improve the efficiency of your design process, liberating your production teams from having to choose between creativity, consistency, or meeting deadlines.
How Digital & Print Templates help you and your brand
- Enable people with no design experience to make minor changes to assets: Anyone in your in-house team, from the tech-whizzes to the technophobes, can adapt assets to what they need for their content.
- Maintain consistency without sacrificing creativity: Even under tight deadlines, your teams can easily flex their creative muscles, producing on-brand artwork for your campaigns!
- Unclogged bottlenecks improve overall brand quality and efficiency: Without being paralysed by answering or waiting for requests, design teams can focus on creating high-level designs, meaning a faster turnaround of branding updates and campaigns.
- Save time, money and effort: In combination with DAM software, your artwork can be reused repeatedly, reducing production costs and resources.
Make your approval workflows suit your branding needs
The problem
Using a disorganised, outdated approval workflow heavily dependent on emailing is a sure-fire strategy to send your brand, and your sanity, spinning in circles:
- Questions from your team or requests for project approvals are inevitably missed, clogging up projects with teams waiting for answers.
- Email chains become so convoluted that any approval request is a pain to find, slowing down workflows as teams can’t access the information they need.
Without clear communication to ensure your content is on-brand, mistakes and inconsistencies result in your distribution channels, with brand consistency suffering as a result.
The solution
Different businesses require different workflows — a multi-brand company needs to be able to manage a wider variety of content than a single brand one — so having workflows tailored to your business can be a game changer in simplifying your approval process.
So, take the pressure off with automated approval workflows, which provide a digital helping hand!
How automated workflows help you and your brand
- Streamlined and efficient working processes: Automatic reminders of project deadlines help you and your team stay on top of what needs to get done and when.
- Better communication with online annotations: You can answer queries and make content suggestions to your teams directly, rather than comments getting lost in an endless email chain.
- Increased brand consistency: All of the content approved for release is consistent with your image and branding guidelines, meaning the quality of your entire brand skyrockets.
- Bird’s-eye view of your workflows reduces bottlenecks: Giving you complete visibility on all your project workflows and approvals that need your action, ensuring you don’t end up with a backlog of assets requiring approval.
With just a little help from automation, cherry-pick the fruits of your team’s labour so only the best content makes it to your customer’s basket!
Use a DAM that seamlessly integrates with your MarTech stack
The problem
An outdated DAM software that isn’t compatible with your existing MarTech stack will be nowhere near as productive as it should be.
If the everyday applications your team uses can’t access compatible assets within your DAM:
- You’ll have bottlenecks in your workflow, as your team will waste time finding the on-brand assets they need.
- If your DAM fails, teams may resort to using old, off-brand asset copies stored in their applications, leading to an inconsistent brand image.
In essence, an outdated DAM will keep your brand outdated too.
The solution
To ensure that your brand keeps up with the times, upgrading your DAM to a system that seamlessly integrates with your existing MarTech stack will ensure that the applications used to create content for your brand work with your DAM rather than against it!
How a quality DAM can help you and your brand
- Improved brand consistency with a single source of truth: All of your branding material, logos and artwork are centralised on one easy-to-navigate platform, so everyone uses the same on-brand assets.
- Branding updates are easily made: Only one master copy needs to be updated, ensuring a consistent brand identity across all content.
- Seamless integration with martech tools and applications: A lot of DAM software uses an API to convert files into formats compatible with the application being used. So assets and asset templates in your DAM can be uploaded, downloaded and accessed easily by your team from any application.
- Reduction in bottlenecks and improved workflows: Reduced time spent looking for on-brand assets, so when using applications like Adobe Creative Cloud, your design teams can quickly access compatible graphics they neey.
Upgrade your brand management with Brandworkz
Upgrading your brand management is not a task that you can afford to skimp out on quality with. You want to make sure it’s built to last, so hiring quality builders to manage your project best is essential to laying the foundations for your brand that you can absolutely trust.
So, to prop up your brand for years to come with Brandzwork, check out our demo here, and upgrade your brand management system with the best possible features to ensure stability, security and resilience no matter what the world throws at it!
