3 essential brand management tools that will make your life easier
Successful long-term branding is essential for every company. And the key component for good branding is being consistent. Your company needs to deliver a predictable experience to your stakeholders in order to build trust and loyalty. Given the importance of branding consistency, and the countless points of contact between your brand and the public, it’s essential to have your brand consistency locked down. One way to do this is to have a VP of Brand who oversees everything, but this is time-consuming, expensive, and just not feasible once a company grows beyond a few employees. Thankfully, tech can help out.
There’s a ton of software that can streamline your brand work, giving you confidence in how your brand is being presented to the world without needing to get your hands into everything. Here are some of our favorite tools for enforcing brand excellence:
Digital Asset Management System: Would you like to find a photo of a product taken at a specific side angle? Or would you like to use a campaign picture from two years ago and want to be sure that you are allowed to use it? Are you looking for an image that has the exact same shade of red as your company logo? Or would you like to use a picture with the brand logo on it, which is still up to date?
Digital Asset Management systems (DAM) are robust platforms that let you store, organize, manage and distribute all of your digital content, from images to videos and beyond. It goes above file-sharing platforms like Google Drive or Dropbox, and eliminates the need to waste time searching through folders or emailing back and forth to get the right asset. It improves your brand consistency by offering the user content that is never outdated.
Style Guide Creation Tools: Brand guidelines are not just documents that collect information about your brand. They are a key to brand alignment. Storing brand guidelines on a PDF document and sharing updated versions over and over again will lead to misalignment because so many versions exist. It becomes a hassle for your colleagues to find out which file is the correct one and who’s hard drive it’s on.
If all your stakeholders know how to find your brand guidelines, know what they are and how they apply to their specific role, you have achieved brand alignment, a critical measure when it comes to customer attraction and satisfaction.
Locked Content Templates: One of the biggest marketing and branding trends in the recent years is (and will continue to be) content scalability. There are two key reasons for this:
- People need more content to be convinced.
- They want personalized messages that speak to them directly.
Companies are looking for ways to create more with less resources so they can be visible, relevant, and interesting to their target audience. On-brand content templates allow you and your colleagues to create and publish branded content directly from your asset storage solution without any design skills. No need to upload and download different versions to edit or create material, why not just do everything from one system!
Make sure that you opt for a solution that allows you to work with professional design software. Working with the locked templates needs to be easy for the end-user but the quality should still be at a professional level. Lytho, for example, partners with Adobe through advanced integrations so that all materials created are top quality.
Lytho’s Brand Management Solution
There is no sense in buying three different solutions to maximize your brand’s consistency and connect all stakeholders to it. Especially since all these tools need to work closely together in order to reach your branding goals. Implementing several different pieces of software risks inconsistencies (exactly what you are trying to reduce) and it can be a complex structure to manage and, as we all know, users hate logging in and working from a bunch of different systems to get their work done. That’s why we developed Lytho, the central location and most user-friendly solution for all your brand management activities.
We can help you scale content and make your brand guidelines reach and resonate with all your employees and partners so you can focus on building a great brand. With Lytho, you can:
- Securely store, share, and create all of your digital assets in a central location — no more duplicates, no more missing files.
- Manage interactive brand guidelines so that content is always consistent.
- Save time from coordination and build your brand awareness by creating new content.
- Enable your external stakeholders to stay brand consistent with locked content templates.
- Break through the designer bottleneck and enable everyone to create their own on-brand materials with a software that is so easy to use it requires no training.
- Reduce agency costs.
- Integrate with all your favorite software, including Adobe InDesign.
Originally published at https://insights.lytho.com.
