Protect Your Brand with Digital Asset Management

When you don’t use a centralized system to store and manage digital assets, you put your brand at risk. That risk comes from crashed hard drives, missing metadata, and the slow creep (or disastrously fast explosion) of inconsistent brand experiences. If you want to avoid unintended damage to your company’s lifeblood, it’s time to learn how to protect your brand with a digital asset management (DAM) system.

Customer experience (CX) happens across more teams, devices, and channels than ever before. You’ve got social media managers who use their smartphones and Instagram as a window into your company culture. Videographers who produce dynamic stories for your website. Creative teams who produce new branded materials published across the web and printed for in-person communications.

Where do you put all that content? What system do you use to publish it? How does everyone across your global organization find the right logo file to use? Without the tools and processes to centralize, review, manage, and publish these digital assets, you leave your brand exposed to unnecessary risk. Thankfully, protecting your brand starts with a simple concept: storing and managing your brand assets in a centralized location.

What options are available to protect your brand?

When it comes to storage, many people make multiple back-ups of their computer systems and storage devices. But if you’re not careful, this can turn into loads of duplicate data. While your teams are working hard to keep up with the velocity and volume of marketing content, they’ll be increasingly slowed by the confusing mess of their brand assets.

Accessibility, governance, and transparency are key to preventing inconsistent branding. Not knowing which file is the final version, where it can be used, and for how long can lead to confusion and even legal trouble. But your organization can avoid those risks.

“Your brand is everything. It’s your image. It’s exactly who you are and how you want to be seen by your market,” explains Trey Bailey, Digital Asset Manager at Brooks Running.

That’s why brands use a DAM system to improve how assets are organized and accessed. Today, businesses are extending their DAM system upstream in the creative process to support more effective review and approval workflows. Downstream, brands use DAM systems to facilitate more dynamic asset sharing and distribution.

What are the benefits of using DAM for brand protection?

DAM tools help organizations improve efficiency, increase effectiveness, and gain greater control over the vast amounts of digital media and brand assets at every stage of the content lifecycle.

A DAM system helps protect your brand by:

• Creating a central source of truth for all digital media
   
• Providing safe and redundant storage across geographically separate data centers via a cloud-based system
   
• Allowing visibility into the global representation of your brand across media, product lines, and geographic regions
   
• Enforcing governance through roles and permissions to securely control access to assets
   
• Setting expiration dates to prevent teams from using outdated and irrelevant assets
   
• Integrating with digital right management (DRM) tools to put digital barriers in place to protect content that’s been published online
   
• Enabling a distributed workforce to securely access files from anywhere via the internet
   
• Using asset-level and system-level analytics to monitor the use of your brand assets
   
• Making assets easy to find and manage with metadata
   
• Versioning assets to make sure your teams are always using the most up-to-date files
   
• Digitizing your brand guidelines and providing links to key assets like logos and imagery
   
• Integrating your content management tools to create a seamless workflow and harmonious digital ecosystem

Brand protection in action

Brand management starts and ends with people. It’s important that the teams who activate your brand know how to do so safely, efficiently, and accurately. Let’s look at two brands that use DAM to do just that. 

Hootsuite

More than 18 million customers and employees at over 80% of the Fortune 1000 use Hootsuite’s social media software. With global headquarters in Vancouver and offices across the world, company workflows span numerous teams, continents, and time zones. Before implementing a DAM solution, the creative team noticed a lot of people were creating their own private collections of assets, resulting in the use of outdated and low-quality images. Brand consistency was suffering.

With a DAM system, Hootsuite teams and partners now have easy access to curated content, administrative control to protect assets, and the ability to integrate the assets from the DAM site across their entire digital ecosystem. Read the full story from Hootsuite.

McCormick

A Fortune 500 business that sells seasoning mixes and condiments worldwide, McCormick needed to align its marketing, creative, and e-commerce teams to respond to the rise in online commerce. The company lacked a central repository for its brand, marketing, and product content, however, and its teams used siloed tools that made it difficult to collaborate and find the most up-to-date version of assets.

Those challenges subsided once McCormick began using a DAM platform. The system gave the company a 360° view of product content in a single location and cleared collaboration hurdles. McCormick could also rest assured that its customer experiences were unified across its many subbrands. Best yet, the company has saved more than $241,000 in annual costs. Read the full McCormick story here.

Protect your brand with Acquia DAM

Don’t leave your brand exposed to damage caused by crashed hard drives, lost memory cards, ineffective workflows, and inconsistent branding. Your brand is key to your business success; the right solution will protect and grow it.

Learn more about using Acquia DAM (Widen) for brand asset management and, when you’re ready, get in touch to request a demo or watch one on demand today.