In this article, we outline eight top tips that will help you manage brand assets. You’ll get practical tips to help you create a BAM strategy that perfectly suits your business.
Brand Asset Management (BAM) is the process of storing, organising, and retrieving your digital assets. A major benefit of BAM is ensuring their effective usage across your business.
Managing your brand assets properly ensures consistency which is essential for increasing brand awareness among your customers.
Before we start, let’s quickly look at:
What Are Brand Assets?
We’ve got a whole article dedicated to explaining what brand assets are.
But in a nutshell, a brand asset is any digital media file that you own, that has value to your company, that can be uniquely identified via metadata.
Common brand assets include:
- Logos
- Colours
- Characters
- Photos
- Videos
- Audio
- Illustrations
- PDFs
- Marketing content and collateral
Now, onto the list!
1. Develop Clear Guidance For Managing Brand Assets and Make Sure Everyone Uses the Same Brand Asset Management Process
Your first step in better brand asset management is making sure everyone is on the same page.
To do this you need to define your brand management processes. Which need to be simple and straightforward.
Then write clear (and simple) guidance that anyone can follow.
When someone new joins your company they need to be able to read your guidelines and be able to follow your brand management processes without issue.
2. Assign a Digital Asset Manager
Perhaps obviously, it’s essential that your brand asset management strategy is simple to follow. It’s also important to have a person or team overseeing the delivery of your strategy.
The reason being is they can ensure people understand it, implement it properly and look for pain points and opportunities.
This becomes even more important as your business grows and your brand management needs scale.
3. Use Software to Manage Brand Assets
Yes, you can use internal servers and email, or software like Dropbox.
However, specialist brand asset management software comes with so many benefits over these approaches.
This is because internal servers and email are much less secure. They are difficult to scale. They make remote collaboration difficult.
Dropbox is an excellent file storage platform. However, it’s not specially designed for digital asset management. So the way it’s structured isn’t optimal for BAM. Pricing is per user, meaning scaling it as your business grows will be costly.
Digital brand asset management software, like Brandspace, is specifically designed for you to upload, organise and share your digital assets.
It will scale better with more suitable pricing options. It’s cloud-based making it more secure and easier to collaborate remotely.
In conclusion, you will save time, money and reduce stress using specialist BAM software.
4. Take Time to Get the Structure and Taxonomy of Your BAM System Right
Okay, so you’ve invested in a new BAM system. The first step in successfully managing your brand assets is structuring your system properly.
Take time to think about how you will use categories, tags and metadata to catalogue and manage your brand assets.
You want a strong foundation that will be robust as you scale.
5. Use Your Brand Positioning to Define a Creative Style
Once you have your systems and processes sorted, it’s time to look at the actual brand assets.
Your brand positioning should be the starting point for all your creative work.
If you’re not sure what brand positioning is, take a look at our guide to brand management.
Whatever theme you set should run through all your creative assets.
For example, if you look at how Apple execute all their work from product design through to promotion, there’s a clear theme that runs across all their work.
- Simplicity
- Creativity
- Humanity
6. Set Creative Standards That All Your Brand Assets Need to Meet
The next step after defining your creative style is to set the creative standards. All brand assets you create should meet these standards.
The best way to do this is with a simple checklist or scorecard. Outline what you will and won’t compromise on. And stick to it.
The results will compound over the long term as you consistently stick to your creative style and standards.
7. Look For Any Gaps in Your Current Brand Assets
The great thing about using BAM software is that you can quickly get an overview of all your creative assets in one place.
You can monitor style, quality and also types of assets.
For example, if people are frequently running searches that return no results you know you have a content need and can look to create new work.
8. Edit Ruthlessly – Don’t Use Your BAM Software as a Dumping Ground
By now you know it’s super important that all your brand assets are in one place. However, it’s equally important that you focus on quality over quantity.
The reason being, too many unused assets in your system will slow things down. And finding the right files will be a nightmare! Plus, it increases the likelihood of people using incorrect or outdated assets in their campaigns.
We recommend your digital asset manager frequently audits your system and removes outdated brand assets.
Manage Brand Assets Summary
So there they are. Our eight top tips to help you manage brand assets.
- Develop clear guidance for managing brand assets
- Asset a digital asset manager
- Use software to manage band assets
- Get the structure and taxonomy of your BAM system right
- Use your brand positioning to define a creative style
- Set creative standards that all your brand assets need to meet
- Look for gaps in your current brand assets
- Edit ruthlessly
