Why Brand Management Is Important

Every marketer knows that brand management is extremely important. After all, the strength of your brand is dependent on customer perception. But influencing how you’re perceived in the market is extremely complicated, and unfortunately, there’s no magic formula or quick fixes for earning customer loyalty.

To build a brand that customers choose over competitors takes dedication and hard work. It starts with a clearly defined brand vision, organizational self-reflection, and company-wide discipline. Easy to say, harder to execute. But having a solid understanding of the components of brand management will help you get there.  

In this article, we’ll delve into the specifics of brand management and how you can begin to put it into practice to build brand loyalty. Get to know the who, what, why, and how of brand management, including how you can support your efforts with digital asset management (DAM). Let’s make brand management a competitive advantage, instead of a hard-to-define concept. 

What is brand management?

Every touchpoint — from your website pages to your product campaigns to your customer service chats — needs to communicate what your company values so that your audience thinks of you first when they need to buy what you sell. It’s a critical business practice for anyone who wants to become relevant and stay that way in today’s constantly shifting digital landscape. 

For example, if you’re in the market for social media management software, you probably already know the name Hootsuite. Their product is used by more than 18 million customers and employees at over 80% of the Fortune 1000. That’s the kind of recognition you want to develop for your brand. To see successful brand management in action, check out Hootsuite’s case study to see how they use Acquia DAM (Widen) to manage their brand.

Four reasons why brand management is important to marketers

Brand management should be top of mind for everyone at an organization but it’s usually marketers that are leading the charge. That’s because superior brand management makes their job much easier! While the benefits of brand management are vast and wide reaching, these four tend to top the list for marketers. 

1. Improved brand perception

Brand management and brand consistency go hand in hand, which is good because they’re pillars of a strong brand perception. When brands present a consistent customer experience across channels, it builds customer trust. Shoppers know that they can count on this brand to meet their needs. For marketers, brand management allows them to drive brand perception by delivering this experience time and time again. 

2. Workflow efficiencies

As omnichannel marketing becomes common practice, being able to deliver a consistent experience across channels increases in difficulty as well. Having processes in place to support brand management is not only beneficial to the customer but also to the teams behind the scenes. Developing a strong brand identity that marketers can follow eliminates bottlenecks in the process that arise alongside confusion. Understanding your brand management process also makes it easier to see opportunities for improvement, including system integrations and automation options. 

3. Content optimization and reuse opportunities

A lot of time, money, and effort goes into creating content, but many teams aren’t getting everything they could from their investments. Understanding how and where your content is being used will provide insights into how it can be optimized, repurposed, or reused. Extending the life of your content and leveraging learnings from past projects increase efficiencies and help teams deliver the content customers desire.  

4. A safe and secure brand

If you’re building a brand, you want to ensure that you have control over how and where your brand assets and elements are being used. Leveraging tools like a DAM solution, along with digital rights management (DRM) technology, keeps content safe and secure — as well as easy to access and share. As a marketer, knowing that your brand guidelines are automatically enforced via a strong permissioning structure gives you the peace of mind needed to clear the way for other more meaningful work.  

What tools do I need for brand management?

Start with a DAM system. It’s one of the core technologies companies use to manage their brands. A DAM system organizes and distributes brand assets from a central hub, serving as a single source of truth for brand visibility, monitoring, and consistency. It’s also a powerful engine for content delivery to empower your sales teams, resellers and partners, e-commerce experiences, and every channel that needs branded content.

A DAM system can help your organization:

Create a digital gateway for your brand by using a branded login page, dashboard messages, custom URLs, and more.

Share more memorable and meaningful stories with portals, shared collections, embed codes, and share links.

Segment marketing stories by business group, audience, content type, and more by using metadata, categories, and search filters.

Personalize brand experiences using landing pages in different languages, curating asset groups tailored to different audiences, and localizing the brand with custom sales collateral.

Save brand guidelines where people can easily find them, centralizing brand assets and standards in one location with on-demand access

Track how brand assets are being used online, by whom, where, and when with asset-level and site-level content analytics.

This single-source-of-truth strategy enables you to simplify both employee and customer experiences — a common quest for many modern-day marketers.

Who is responsible for brand management?

In short, everyone at your company. Branding and brand management are more than just a marketing or creative focus. Of course, your brand relies on the consistent use of your logo, brand colors, and messaging. But it also has to be understood, adopted, and put into daily practice across the whole business.

How will you ever get the whole business on board? Start by giving everyone access to up-to-date brand assets through your DAM system. This makes it easier for everyone to contribute to the customer experience in ways that build your brand consistently over time. When your brand is embraced across the organization, everyone wins:

• Marketing has an easier time communicating the value of your products and services

• Sales receives a pipeline of leads that start with a better understanding of the value you provide

• Prospective customers know what to expect from your business

• Current customers feel confident in their decision to be(come) loyal to your business

• Prospective hires will be drawn to your culture

Actions that make up the art of brand management

Now that we have a better understanding of what brand management is and who’s responsible for it, let’s look at all the actions that combine to form the art of brand management.

• Inspire a positive brand perception. Your brand isn’t just a logo, campaign, or tagline. It’s the culmination of every experience a person has with your organization. To consistently influence positive brand association, make sure to follow through on your promises; deliver genuine, customer-centric experiences; and behave with integrity across all touch points.

• Know who you are. Positive influence starts with knowing who you are and what you stand for — your brand essence. Get your teams, including leadership, on the same page so that everyone is representing your company consistently.

• Know your audience. You need to know your audience and what they truly want from you to ensure that your brand essence resonates. Document your core audience and interact with them regularly to ensure you understand what they want, not just what you think they want.

• Rally your employees around your brand. Your employees are absolutely essential to managing your brand. After all, they’re the ones who interact with your customers, buyers, and partners every day. The more you communicate about what the brand means to them and how they can move it forward, the more they’ll evangelize your brand and contribute to the success of your business. Use multiple employee engagement opportunities, like during onboarding or in quarterly meetings, to keep the brand alive and top of mind for everyone.

• Safeguard your brand. Start protecting your brand by controlling your brand assets with your DAM system. Logos, photos, product images, sales collateral, and videos have a value associated with them, which needs to be protected. Brand guidelines should be created to explain how and when to use these valuable assets, to get everyone moving in the same direction, and to make it easy for your teams to create communications that are on-brand.

• Measure brand perception. Regularly talk to employees and customers to understand if you’re managing your brand successfully. Consider message resonance, brand recognition, brand loyalty, and culture confidence. Depending on how clearly people connect to who you are or if they can recite your core values, you’ll start to identify areas where your brand is resonating and where it’s not. Then you can adjust messaging, brand training, or tactics as needed.

See brand management in action

Remember, brand management isn’t just about using the right version of a logo. It’s an overarching business practice that distinguishes your company in the marketplace, ensures the strength and consistency of your brand, and helps your organization live up to its promises. 

When you create a central source of truth for your brand assets with a DAM system, you empower your whole organization to participate in brand management. That’s crucial if you want to make sure your brand is the go-to choice in the minds of your customers. 

See how Hootsuite, Brooks Running, and the Houston Texans use Acquia DAM to manage their brand. Or, request a demo today to start putting your own brand management into action.