What’s key to building (and maintaining) a powerful brand?
Hint: It’s not just about how strongly you establish your identity on multiple different platforms.
It’s about how consistent your brand is on these platforms.
Brand consistency matters immensely to your customers.
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In fact:
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50% of companies state that their customers expect consistency across channels and touchpoints
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Having a consistent brand representation can increase brand revenue by 33%
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So how do you constantly stay consistent with your brand?
Ensuring brand compliance can help – as it helps you stay the same no matter how many partners, stakeholders or channels are involved.
95% of companies create brand guidelines in order to remain compliant to their brand, but only 25% of companies actively enforce them.
In other words…
Staying true to your brand guidelines isn’t enough to ensure more consistency across all your touchpoints and interactions.
In order for all your departments, teams and local and central marketing to stay on the same page – it’s crucial to adopt tools and technology that will help keep all their branding efforts in one place.
Which is where digital asset management software comes in.
In this article we explain what brand compliance is, the importance of maintaining it and how DAM software ensures brand compliance in 3 ways.
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Table of contents
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What is brand compliance?
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Importance of maintaining brand compliance
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How DAM ensure brand compliance in 3 ways
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What is brand compliance?
Brand compliance is a way of ensuring that all your brand elements and components adhere to your brand guidelines.
In other words, making sure that your brand elements are aligned in agreement with your company’s standards, identity and values. Etc.
If you get brand compliance right, you should see that the look, feel, content and messaging that you constantly put out for your customers never strays away from your brand or corporate identity.
In its essence, the four key components of brand compliance are the following:
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Making sure that your brand looks and feels the same way across different digital channels or touchpoints
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Administering the right brand voice across platforms to preserve your brand identity
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Having consistent communication and messaging across different mediums and locations
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Using the right design brand assets: Such as graphics, color themes etc.
But brand compliance goes beyond just consistent communication – it also considers how much control you have over the entirety of your brand, like:
> The narrative of your brand
> The perception of your brand in the market
> Brand identity
But why is maintaining these components important?
And what kind of benefits do they provide for companies that get brand compliance right?
The importance of maintaining brand compliance
It should be every company’s goal to share brand assets that reflect the brand’s values, voice and identity.
However, brand compliance goes beyond just maintaining consistency – it’s also about adhering to rules and regulations.
What happens when you fail to do so?
Damage to reputation, fines or lack of customer loyalty and trust. To name a few.
So, what are the main benefits of increased brand compliance?
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We’ve summarized the top 5:
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Helps you avoid false claims: Increasing the control over your content makes sure only the right assets are shared
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Makes sure you adhere to content guidelines and copyright: Through consistent use of the same content that’s already been approved
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Helps you build and maintain business credibility: Improves your brand image through a single message
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Reduces time to market: Enforced brand guidelines makes it easy to streamline processes of getting your content (and products) out there
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Builds customer loyalty: A credible and consistent brand representation will make customers more loyal to your brand
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How DAM ensures brand compliance in 3 ways
Keeping all of the benefits listed above in mind…
You might start to ask yourself:
How can companies efficiently grasp these benefits and improve their brand image?
When it comes to enterprise companies, tools like digital asset management software come into play. We’ve outlined the 3 ways in which DAM helps companies not only control their content, but also stay in touch and comply with their brand identity.
A central vault for brand assets
Digital asset management (DAM) is a tool that gathers all digital assets belonging to a company in one place.
In other words: A single source of truth – a single vault for branded assets.
Tons of enterprises today struggle with content being dispersed across multiple computers and shared drives, which makes searching for content incredibly difficult (and time-consuming).
In fact, 54% of US office professionals report wasting time searching for much-needed files in cluttered online filing systems.
DAM allows companies to organize, centralize, distribute, analyze and access their brand assets in one place, which helps break down silos and make sure that those with access only can quickly get their hands on assets that have already been approved for use.
Take the manufacturing industry for example.
Think of all the stakeholders involved – whether it be the distributor or the end seller.
It’s important that all relevant stakeholders of an organization are given the same access to the same content – so that messaging and brand identity remains the same, aka consistent.
Without it, you never know exactly what message is given to customers (and on which channel, and at what time).
With a DAM, all of your relevant marketing collateral and materials are put together, coherently and cohesively. Boosting your content operations.
What you’re left with is better management, reporting and tracking of all your assets – so that only the right content gets delivered each time – minimizing the risk of damaging your brand if the wrong content gets out.
Consistent approval and review of assets
Without a centralized place to store assets, CMOs, brand managers and marketers (to name a few stakeholders) often struggle with the following:
> Poor workflows and bottlenecks
> Designers struggling to keep up with requests and demands
> Content that isn’t aligned with guidelines
> Expired/out-of-date assets
In order to manage all the bits and pieces that make up a brand, solutions like DAM can help companies control their content chaos and make sure that only the right assets are used.
With DAM, both external and internal teams are able to access the same library, and all the approved versions include all sorts of marketing assets, whether it be photos or videos.
Users can also see the history of approvals and changes of assets, in addition to the changes made to current branding guidelines – making sure everyone remains on board with the same idea of the brand image and identity.
KeyShot also includes automated workflows.
The approval-for-use workflow efficiently streamlines the processes of reviewing and approving content, checking for dates of expiry, if content includes the right terminology and that it adheres to the right terms and conditions.
DAM makes every marketer’s life easier.
Why?
Because by using the tool you can (in addition to efficiently approving only the right assets intended for use) pre-approve campaigns and also assign certain controls that ensure that specific assets are only supposed to be used in some cases, and not all.
Efficient and consistent localization to both local and regional markets
For multinational companies, oftentimes this applies to large retail brands, it can be an increasing struggle to make sure that not only are only the approved assets used – but that they also correctly apply to the region they’re intended for.
To put it in perspective:
Many retail brands launch hundreds, if not thousands of new products (both locally and internationally) each year. For each of those products means a large number of digital assets that need to be available to retail partners, local marketers and retail designers.
Adding on: Different teams spread out across different regions might have different opinions or preconceived ideas about what assets matter and which don’t.
By having a central source of truth with the brand guidelines containing only the approved content – it’s never been easier for multinational brands to actually stay on brand.
DAM helps you secure consistency by giving you the brand control you need.
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Picture the following scenario:
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Central marketing has the main control over the brand (and which direction it takes)
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Local marketing (like franchisees, distributors or other stakeholders) need to have access to the assets to deliver them for local use
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What does this mean?
Both teams need to stay on the same page so that they use the same brand elements that adhere to the guidelines.
Thanks to DAM, local marketers have the same access to content as central marketing, and it makes it easy for them to create, manage, and adapt every single piece of marketing content to be used locally.
Without putting in jeopardy brand identity and consistency.
Summing up, DAM makes it easy for large enterprises’ marketing departments to meet localization and globalization requirements.
How?
Brands are given an easy way to keep businesses with multiple locations in one place. At the same time, it gives the appropriate access to external stakeholders to edit and adapt assets based on geographic location, audience and region.
Each location and language’s quality assurance procedures can be automated with a DAM system.
Conclusion
Your brand significantly forms your company and how people perceive it.
Remaining authentic is something that a lot of companies deem favorable – makes sense, as 88% of customers state that authenticity is crucial when it comes to deciding which brands to support and which not.
Maintaining brand consistency and being brand compliant is one way for companies to stay authentic.
It’s important so that not only do you remain credible, but you also increase customer loyalty.
Tools like digital asset management software can help large enterprises control their assets and make sure that they’re in line with brand guidelines and regulations.
In three ways in particular:
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By being a central vault for all digital assets
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By automating the workflows that approve assets for use
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By helping companies make their localization and globalization efforts more efficient
Want to learn more about how your organization can benefit from Digizuite DAM, in addition to maintaining brand compliance? Book a demo here.
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