Why DAM is Your Brand's Best Friend: Managing Brand Guidelines
As the CMO of a successful retail company, you’re constantly overseeing new product launches and dynamic marketing campaigns.
But amidst it all, you struggle with maintaining brand consistency across all your channels both (physical and digital).
And in today's multi-channel marketing landscape, having a uniform brand image is crucial - it’s something that your customers value.
A consistent brand representation leads to 23% revenue, trust-building with customers, and coherent brand messaging.
The heart of this challenge lies in effectively managing brand guidelines—preserving your brand's messaging across digital assets like product images and other visual elements.
Because here’s the thing: Inconsistent brand guidelines dilute your brand's impact, confuse your audience, and most of all - lead to missed market opportunities.
Enter Digital Asset Management (DAM), which helps you gather, organize, and protect digital assets, all while making sure you follow your brand guidelines across all touchpoints.
In this article, we’ll discuss how a DAM system is crucial when it comes to managing your brand in terms of the guidelines you set.
Table of contents:
What are brand guidelines?
Why you need DAM for better brand management
6 ways DAM is crucial for your brand guidelines
Transforming brand management: Focus Brands' journey with Digizuite DAM
What are brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines, also known as brand style guides, are essential documents that establish rules for presenting and communicating a brand consistently.
The key is that they ensure uniformity in visual and verbal identity across all communication channels — including marketing materials, websites, social media, and packaging, you name it.
Some key elements in brand guidelines include logo usage, color palette, typography, brand messaging, brand voice, and tone.
All in all: Brand guidelines are indispensable.
Especially when it comes to maintaining a strong and recognizable brand identity, whether produced in-house or by external partners. As much as 68% of companies believe that ensuring their brand looks and feels the same across all platforms has led to a revenue increase of at least 10%.
Why you need DAM for better brand management
In today's oversaturated market with over 10,000 daily ads per person, increasing brand recognition is a challenge.
Complexities arise with diverse product lines, local marketing teams, multiple languages, and various sales channels. Which leads to off-brand content in 81% of companies.
This kind of inconsistency results in market confusion, credibility damage, longer sales cycles, and increased costs, the list goes on.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) comes along as the solution for better brand management.
It’s a tool that centralizes all brand assets, speeds up content distribution, and streamlines asset retrieval. Which as a result ensures asset relevance and fosters a unified brand image.
6 ways DAM is crucial for managing your brand
From ensuring consistency across channels to much better version control, here are 6 ways DAM is crucial for managing your brand today.
Centralized storage
One of DAM’s biggest features is its centralized storage, a cornerstone of effective brand guidelines.
Within DAM's secure repository, AKA “single source of truth”, you can safeguard visual identity standards, including logos, color codes, and typography guidelines.
It also stores written brand guidelines, such as tone of voice recommendations and messaging principles - which are crucial in order to communicate your brand the exact same way, every single time.
This centralized archive houses all digital assets, from product images to videos, preventing version control issues and simplifying retrieving content when you need it the most.
Take the following example: When preparing to launch a new athletic wear collection, DAM allows quick access to up-to-date product assets like high-resolution images and detailed product descriptions.
Consistency across retail channels
DAM collaborates seamlessly with Content Management Systems (CMS) to maintain brand consistency across both physical and online retail channels.
In physical stores, DAM ensures that marketing teams have easy access to approved visual assets for in-store displays, signage, and merchandising, aligning these with the brand's aesthetics.
Online, DAM's integration with a CMS like Optimizely allows for the implementation of web design templates and guidelines.
In its essence, it simplifies the development of web elements, including header layouts, product page structures, and checkout processes.
Designers and creative teams can then access DAM's assets and templates through the CMS, ensuring that the online shopping experience adheres to the brand's visual identity.
Improved version control
DAM's version control features are key when it comes to eliminating content inefficiencies.
How?
By reducing the likelihood of duplicate assets and offering a comprehensive history of your digital content, DAM significantly boosts your overall workflow efficiency.
With DAM, you can quickly search and pinpoint the most up-to-date version of a document or video file, ensuring the precise asset is distributed every time.
Plus, these capabilities enable you to efficiently archive outdated variations, reducing clutter and maintaining content relevance.
PERMISSION to access branded content
DAM, at its core, ensures the organization and security of digital content.
While your organization can have a huge amount of different digital assets, not every employee or stakeholder needs (or should) have access to all of them. Some content may carry specific copyright restrictions or cater to specific clients, which demands a lot of protection.
This is where DAM permissions come into play.
User permissions allow you to govern which assets specific users within a DAM system can access and how they can use them. This helps your DAM system operate seamlessly, granting users easy access to the digital assets they need while at the same time safeguarding sensitive materials.
In a marketing context, a global fashion brand relies on DAM to control access to promotional materials.
This ensures that only authorized marketing teams can adjust and access the most important product brochures, digital advertisements, banners, social media graphics, promotional videos etc.
Metadata and tagging for the correct brand asset retrieval
Managing visual marketing materials at scale relies on three essential metadata forms: Descriptive, administrative, and technical.
Descriptive metadata helps find images, administrative metadata manages asset lifecycles, and technical metadata organizes different content versions.
Tools like DAM allow you to establish structured metadata systems, just like how your company organizes information.
Within DAM, digital assets are linked to specific metadata fields, simplifying searches and filters to pinpoint assets with specific details.
For instance, a fashion retailer uses DAM to tag logo usage guidelines with labels like "Merchandising," "Advertising," and "Corporate Communications," making sure you can easily locate what you need for various situations.
Metadata also streamlines access to color palettes tailored to specific product lines or campaigns.
Easier collaboration ALL AROUND
Lastly, DAM ensures that teams worldwide can access and utilize them as it’s a centralized hub for all company assets. Which leads to better collaboration both internally and externally.
Internally, designers in the DAM can collaborate on visual mockups for brand guideline updates, refining design elements plus making sure that they align with brand standards.
In addition, content review workflows enable teams to easily review and approve written content updates - guaranteeing consistency in both the messaging and the tone.
Externally, DAM facilitates collaboration with partners, agencies, and distributors by providing both controlled and safe access to brand assets.
The result?
Making sure that external stakeholders always adhere to brand guidelines when creating and promoting content across borders.
Focus Brands' journey with Digizuite DAM
Focus Brands initially grappled with the challenge of harmonizing seven distinct global food service brands, each with its own processes and scattered assets.
This meant the need to gather all their assets in one place, streamline operations, and eliminate bottlenecks was crucial.
The solution was Digizuite DAM: Clear business goals were established, ensuring that the software actually addressed specific needs within the company.
Digizuite DAM made their day-to-day content operations much more efficient, plus reduced redundant administrative work.
The tool also provided automated image recognition and keyword validation. A content audit and pilot testing ensured both up-to-date assets and an improved user experience.
Focus Brands' journey didn't stop at implementation.
They continue to invest in machine learning and automation, making DAM a crucial tool across the organization.
Conclusion
DAM enhances brand management through these six essential ways:
Centralized storage
Consistency across retail channels
Improved version control
Permission to access branded content
Metadata and tagging for the correct brand asset retrieval
Easier collaboration all-around
Curious to discover how Digizuite DAM can improve your brand management and streamline adherence to brand guidelines?
Schedule a demo with our team today.
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