Brand Management Archives

By Jake Athey

“Results are what you expect, and consequences are what you get.” This adage certainly rings true for brand strategy. Without data-driven goals, brands are destined to drift — with their organizations left to deal with the consequences.

This five-part series examined how organizations can enhance the value and perception of their brand through better use of their digital assets. Our previous installments looked at four of the five interconnected elements of brand management: strategy, people, process and technology. In each, a maturity model is used to assess and chart appropriate steps for improvement.

Our final discussion in this series looks at impact: the ability to measure how digital assets can influence brand success, and use data to track towards milestones and goals for brand efficacy.

Establishing KPIs

A digital asset management (DAM) platform helps teams organize, store, and distribute their content. It can also play a key role in brand management. Organizations that are in the early stages of brand maturity have little or no idea how their DAM system impacts their business. If they believe it is beneficial, they don’t know for sure because they aren’t accessing its effectiveness.

It’s critically important to measure and report on DAM impact. Mature organizations use this data to inform strategic brand decisions and support DAM system optimization.

At the highest levels of maturity, organizations fully understand the value of their DAM platform. Return on investment (ROI) models and key performance indicators (KPIs) can help quantify this value across three areas:

System usage: This includes the number of assets being uploaded, downloaded, and shared via collections and portals; user log in rates; and fewer email requests.
Content usage: How is DAM extending the content lifecycle? This can be measured through content reuse and repurposing, embedded asset activity, and system integrations.
Business metrics: Workflow efficiencies can result in numerous measurable outcomes. By eliminating manual tasks, content rework, and even risks related to rights infringement, teams can produce higher-quality content (and more of it!) that supports an expanded market reach and increased sales.

Establishing KPIs and benchmarks for ROI can be challenging, especially because DAM involves process and behavior changes. But setting and measuring success factors over time will clarify the impact that DAM has across the other four dimensions of brand maturity: strategy, people, process, and technology.

Steps to Improve Brand Maturity

It’s possible to make great strides in brand maturity, even within the first 12 months. Here’s how: First, develop a governance document to outline your purpose and guidelines. You’ll find a governance template here.

Second, plan on devoting eight hours a week on DAM maintenance and user engagement, via a dedicated administrator or a team to share tasks. Third, document your process for uploading and tagging new assets as part of your creative workflows. Fourth, map out your marketing technology (martech) stack to identify the role that DAM plays across the content lifecycle in data management, creative workflow, and content operations — all in support of your customer experience.

Fifth and finally, identify two to three KPIs related to content use and another two to three related to platform use. A good DAM system will have analytics tools that makes it easy to generate monthly, quarterly and annual reports.

Maximizing Value

A brand represents everything a company stands for. It’s the culmination of every customer interaction: from its products, to its online user experience, to the people who answer the phone.

As professionals in the business of brand management know, it’s not possible to completely control brand perception. But you can influence it, and a DAM platform plays a vital role in this regard. When used to its full capability, a DAM system fosters both control and consistency. It establishes guidelines and workflows that form the nucleus of a successful brand strategy. Use it wisely, and you’ll move your brand from an exercise in unintended consequences, to the most powerful tool your enterprise owns.

To access a PDF worksheet and discovery questions for maturing your brand management, go to go.widen.com/maturity-model.

Feature Image Credit: Pavel Sanchez

By Jake Athey

Jake Athey is VP of marketing and customer experience at Widen, where he helps organizations realize their maximum marketing potential by communicating the value of Digital Asset Management (DAM) as part of core brand and marketing channel strategies. An integral member of the content strategy team, he oversees and manages all of the moving parts of content strategy, brand consistency, sales and more.

Sourced from CMS WiRE

Know your USP

Each brand has a unique selling point. This USP sets your brand apart from your competitors. For instance, Idea’ “India ho Gaya hai 3G me busy” ensured that they came up as the leading telephonic brand for the 3G technology. Similarly, the affordable rates offered by JIO for 4G technology set the approach as a brand differentiation key. In order to create it, the product’s position needs to be fit properly in the market. Here, the demographics of the consumer base will play a huge role in understanding what kind of branding will intrigue them.

Relate your marketing communication to brand awareness

Very few people understand the difference between marketing messaging and effective marketing communication. All the communication that goes out through your brand should include your USP and be associated with the brand awareness that you are trying to create. Do not target just traction from your branding approach, instead, include targeted consumer traction for your brand. This will ensure that your brand does not fall prey to false growth but instead sees the qualitative approach.

Keep developing your brand internally

The main idea behind conquering the right market is that you would need to keep evolving with times. Everybody involved in brand development should learn to collaboratively ideate and keep introducing changes from the very inside. One way to do is to get buy-ins from the other departments which co-create the core of your brand. You can also get a buy-in from the external stakeholders. Learn to incorporate different views into your brand which you may have ignored initially. Also, always include the R&D department. Your research and development team can tell you what is being appreciated in the market and how changes can be incorporated to align your brand with the same.

Create a winning influential marketing strategy

Word of mouth is a strategy that never loses. With our entire world revolving around following the right influencers and following targeted propagators- approaching a strategy that includes influential marketers would be very helpful. There is such a thing called a third-person effect. Just ensure it does not look like an obvious product plugin. Have a subtle influential marketing strategy where the influencers you choose do not look sold and your brand management is done subtly.

Do not underestimate a brand management software

One important pointer to remember is that even though a brand may evolve, the core of it never changes. Simple elements like colour, messaging, the shape of the logo stay in the minds of the consumers. So, they start to resonate with them. With brand management software, you can adopt evolution while keeping the core principals the same.

Summing up

While brand management has a lot of facets, the simplest of principles can give you the much-needed head start. This simple approach would surely help you in making an effective and influential brand management strategy. While most of these are already adopted, but there are a lot of simple mistakes pertaining to these principles that we make on a regular basis.

Sourced from iamwire