Most modern-day brand managers will tell you their job has become infinitely more complex in the last few decades.
As organisations look to reach an increasingly global audience, navigate more marketing channels than ever, and work to stay consistent amid growing consumer expectations, controlling brand identity has become an ongoing battle.
In this battle, technology is your great equaliser. That’s why more and more brand marketing teams have enlisted the help of a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system to bring their sprawling collection of digital assets under one roof.
The right DAM solution ensures marketing teams know exactly where approved brand assets are, and can locate relevant content in seconds. Combined with the right user permissions, tagging systems and approval workflows, your DAM becomes a single source of truth for your organisation.
Sounds like the perfect solution, right? Well, not quite.
Don’t get us wrong, we know how valuable a great DAM system is – our own DAM is ranked one of the best worldwide according to Forrester. But this also means we understand its limitations and that, alone, it can’t deliver the end-to-end brand governance today’s marketers need.
DAM gives you control over your marketing collateral; a brand portal offers you control over your brand identity.
What is a brand portal?
A brand portal, also often referred to as a brand hub, is a dedicated cloud-based platform that brings together everything that defines your brand culture. A true “home” for your brand.
In its optimal form, this central hub provides a one-stop shop for anyone – from your executive marketing team to your ground-level employees – to understand your branding style and what your organisation represents. This includes:
- Clearly defined brand guidelines and style guides
- Your company vision and mission statements
- Actionable on-brand templates for all types of marketing materials
- Tutorials, handbooks and FAQs on brand application
- Resources for employees to use your branding for their teams’ purposes
Essentially, a quality brand portal ensures brand consistency, educates users and empowers your marketing teams. It showcases the blueprint of your brand in a presentable, digestible way, so you can keep your identity locked down on every channel.
3 limitations of a standalone DAM that a brand portal fixes
You may be wondering: “Can’t DAM software offer this same level of brand management?”
DAM systems are great at what they do, which is manage your digital assets. But their potential as an end-to-end brand management suite falls short in several key areas:
1. Supports user adoption
Firstly, a DAM system is only valuable if people use it. Many DAM implementations never deliver a return on investment because employees don’t universally adopt it, meaning parts of their workforce retain the same cumbersome, inefficient approach to digital asset management.
There are many potential reasons for this lack of adoption: minimal training and onboarding, failure to inform employees, a set-and-forget mentality, etc. But in our experience, one of the major roadblocks is education. Put simply, users don’t know how to access the DAM system itself, let alone the brand assets within it.
A brand portal addresses this issue. Establishing an assigned “home” for your brand that your people know about and is immediately accessible on any work device can act as the gateway for your DAM system.
This helps your team understand that your DAM solution is part of your overall brand management ecosystem, enabling them to recognise its purpose and improve its adoption rate.
2. Educate, not dictate
Next, while a standalone DAM system brings together all approved brand assets – something that can effectively illustrate how future assets should look – it is not the same as someone truly understanding your brand.
This approach leaves room for misinterpretation and inconsistency. A user may create a brand asset based on one they saw on your DAM, only for it to be ill-fitting for that particular marketing channel, target audience or application.
A DAM is not brand management in the same way a centralised brand portal can be. By ensuring this incorporates guidelines, handbooks, tutorials and more alongside exemplary brand assets, you can properly educate your users on how to apply your brand correctly on every channel towards every audience.
3. Communicates evolution
Finally, a standalone DAM system is a snapshot of the current stage of your brand’s journey. If you undergo a rebrand or a brand refresh, how can your DAM communicate this to your users instead of them gradually seeing old assets being replaced by new ones?
A brand portal can represent your brand’s evolution deliberately and transparently to your global workforce. Designing and moulding this central hub around your brand’s visual identity allows you to instantly communicate your updated identity after a rebrand or refresh.
No mixed messages. No opportunities for old assets to resurface. Immediately people know your new identity and have this reinforced with up-to-date guidelines and examples, making a brand portal a valuable ally as your company develops and scales over time.
Plus, for design agencies guiding a company through a rebrand, a brand portal is a perfect tool to visualise this change both succinctly and distinctly.
Remember – a brand portal complements a DAM
We are not advocating for a brand portal to replace a DAM system. Instead, a good brand portal acts as its perfect partner, encouraging company-wide adoption and providing much-needed context to the brand assets within your DAM.
Want to know more about making the most of your DAM solution? Check out our 7 steps to Digital Asset Management success.
4 more ways brand portals deliver true brand management
So, we’ve identified 3 examples of how a brand portal builds upon a DAM in the brand management landscape. But the benefits of a high-quality brand hub extend even further:
1. Absolute brand consistency
Fundamentally, your brand portal is the key to a consistent presence on all marketing platforms. By bringing everything that underpins your branding in one place, you can ensure a harmonious message to your potential customers, which goes a long way to building trust, raising awareness and improving user experiences.
2. Increased marketing efficiency
If your people are only a click away from the guidelines that steer your content creation, they can produce collateral faster.
Combined with intelligent custom templates, this can mean less strain on your marketing team and graphic designers to produce around the clock. In turn, local teams are empowered to create for their own campaign needs, leading to a more efficient process.
3. Security over your brand culture
Allowing the right people access to your brand guidelines, style guides and wider resources preserves your brand’s equity. This can alleviate the burden on you and your brand management team, reducing your need to review and approve every asset created, so you can concentrate on more pressing matters.
4. Company-wide collaboration
Finally, having a cloud-based portal at the heart of your brand, shared across your entire workforce, can serve as a means for stronger collaboration workflows. Especially for teams with users spread worldwide, this single point of reference can help you keep everyone on the same page at all times.
What features should I look for in a quality brand portal?
Now you understand how a quality brand portal opens the door for comprehensive brand management, what does a good brand portal look like?
Here are 6 of the key features you should prioritise in your hunt for the optimal brand portal:
- Customisable layouts: It’s crucial your brand portal feels like your own, so the layout and its components should be completely customisable using your visual elements
- Multiple languages and translations: Your brand portal should allow you to create dedicated versions for users who operate in different territories, written in their language and outlining any unique nuances to your brand in these locations
- Drag-and-drop functionality: You should be able to reposition content on your brand hub in a couple of clicks for absolute ease of use
- Simple section builders: Your brand portal should give you the flexibility to design page layouts and grids that maximise the impact of your content
- WYSIWYG software: A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) format allows you to update and refine your brand portal without any coding expertise
- Easy integration: Your brand portal should be an extension of your existing marketing technology and be simple to integrate within your existing ecosystem
As well as these key features, the ideal brand portal must also be backed by a reputable, reliable provider. With this in mind, we encourage you to research available options and ask the right questions to locate your perfect match:
Better brand management starts with your brand portal
To stay in control of an overwhelming wave of digital brand assets, a DAM system is your best bet.
From providing the consistency your brand and customers demand, to unlocking efficiencies within your marketing operations, we hope this article has helped you understand exactly why a solid brand portal is so important, and the ways a DAM system falls short on its own.
Similar to how you work alongside your marketing teams, agency partners and wider colleagues to push your brand to new heights, brand management technology is also a team effort.
Pairing up your DAM solution with a compatible brand portal allows you to control, share, and activate your brand as it is meant to be.
