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What You Should Know About Brand Asset Management

What You Should Know About Brand Asset Management

Large, distributed teams have many moving parts, making it challenging to stay organized. Add influencers, channel partners, co-op advertisers, and other external stakeholders to the mix, and staying organized is no longer an option, but a necessity. Brand asset management is designed to streamline this process. 

What Is Brand Asset Management?

Brand management software helps your brand create, store, update, and share digital assets in a place that’s easily accessible to both your team and stakeholders. 

Brand assets are collateral that contain information pertaining to your brand. They can be logos, photos, videos, graphics, style guides, usage guidelines, advertisements, color schemes, and more. 

How Does It Differ From Digital Asset Management?

Digital asset management (DAM) encompasses all of your organization’s digital resources, whereas brand asset management pertains to collateral that contains brand-specific information. While brand assets are technically part of your digital assets, keeping your branded assets in a separate, sharable platform will help you stay organized and makes collaborating much easier. 

How Can Brand Asset Management Help You?

How your brand is represented across your and your partner’s networks impacts your brand identity — keeping control of your brand assets, including who uses them, how, and where is critical to managing it. 

Maintain Brand Consistency

Brand consistency acts as a critical pillar of support to your brand identity. Think of Walmart, Nike, Netflix, and McDonald’s. Because they’ve maintained a consistent representation of their brand across all channels, at the simple mention of their name, each brand’s logo, colors, and slogan probably come to mind. 

When you collaborate with channel partners and retailers, you’re trusting them to represent your brand accurately. This is a risk to your own brand consistency — even the smallest misrepresentation of your brand, such as using a low-resolution photo or outdated logo, can confuse your customers, costing you their trust and tarnishing your brand identity. 

You will have the greatest impact in the marketplace if consumers can always recognize your brand. With the right brand asset management tool, brand consistency and brand integrity become much easier to maintain. This software ensures you’re providing your stakeholders with the correct assets and makes it easy for them to communicate your product or service in a compliant way on any channel. 

Streamline Collaboration 

What You Should Know About Brand Asset Management

External partnerships are a valuable part of many brand’s marketing strategies, however, most brands find their strategy is disconnected from their retailers. Some struggle to keep their retailers engaged in their co-op marketing programs, and others find it difficult to ensure their partners are publishing on-brand, compliant content. Retailers, on the other hand, are typically responsible for running their business, they may not have the bandwidth, expertise, or resources necessary to represent your brand as you’ve requested. 

Brand asset management bridges the gap between you and your retailers, making it easy to find mutual marketing success. 

Increase Efficiency 

With a variety of product photos, logos, and supporting files that are all made in different file sizes and types, it can be easy to become disorganized. Your sales team, channel partners, and marketers need quick access to accurate, on-brand materials. 

Brand asset management software ensures the right files are in the right place, making them much easier to find. What’s more, the right software will free up the time you’d spend on storing, managing, and distributing your assets, which you can allocate back to the many other marketing needs of your brand.

How to Select the Right Asset Management Software

What You Should Know About Brand Asset Management

With the endless options on the market today, finding the right brand management software can be challenging. As you search for the right solution, it’s important that you keep its purpose in mind: To act as the hub of your content management system. 

The software you select should make it easier to: 

  • Store and organize brand assets 
  • Find the assets you need through searching, filtering, and tagging
  • Share the right files with the right users 
  • Keep track of analytics and measurement 
  • Streamline workflows 
  • Automate your efforts
  • Convert and edit files as needed
What You Should Know About Brand Asset Management

Conduct research and compare your options. Look at case studies, reviews, and ask for customer testimonials or referrals. Once you’ve narrowed down your choices, request a demo to see how each option compares. 

Unlock the Hidden Potential of Your Brand’s Social Presence With ThumbStopper®

What You Should Know About Brand Asset Management

Take charge of your brand’s social marketing tactics with ThumbStopper’s Brand Manager™. Our software is designed to help brands find success on social media by giving you control over what, when, where, and how your content is deployed on your retailer’s networks. 

Brand asset management is just one of our many capabilities. When you partner with ThumbStopper, you also benefit from: 

  • Automated content amplification and syndication 
  • Optimized social ROI 
  • Increased social media Engagement 
  • Simplified retailer onboarding and co-op marketing programs
  • Performance and reporting capabilities

Contact us today to find out if ThumbStopper is a good fit for your brand.

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Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It's one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience - with your accessible, branded content - in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
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Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It’s one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience – with your accessible, branded content – in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
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[/et_pb_column]
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[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
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