You undoubtedly pour your day-to-night efforts into your business. You undertake the best branding practices to create loyalty, trust, and credibility for your brand, and if your efforts persist, no doubt you’ll one day become an industry giant.
But what happens after that? Growth continues, of course. Yet, there’s one crucial factor you can’t overlook. Even as your brand gains global recognition and widespread support, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to small missteps. At this point, the tiniest errors hold the power to jeopardize your entire operation.
To prevent that from happening, we use a range of effective tools because, as the saying goes, you need the right tools to get the job done.
Branding the art of marketing your business as a unique identity with a dynamic personality can be quite enjoyable if you know the right techniques. But, like every aspect of business, branding has its vulnerabilities. Inconsistent branding across different platforms can harm the reputation you’ve worked so hard to establish.
The solution? Brand asset management (BAM) platforms. In this guide, we’ll introduce what brand asset management is and see how automation in BAM tools can provide you with a range of valuable benefits.
What is Meant by BAM, and What are BAM tools in easy words?
Brand Asset Management (BAM) refers to the practice of organizing all the materials that represent your brand, like your logo, images, videos, fonts, and other brand-related content. As your business grows, so does your library of branding assets. BAM helps keep everything organized so that you can easily find and use the right versions of your brand assets across different platforms and media, whether it’s for a social media post, a website, or print materials.
For example, you may need different versions of your logo to fit various backgrounds and sizes, and BAM ensures you have the correct versions at hand.
As such, Brand Asset Management (BAM) tools refer to the software or platforms that help you store, organize, and share your brand assets in one place. These tools, like Ethos, Frotify, and Bynder, allow you to create categories, add tags, and control access so that everyone on your team can quickly access the materials they need without searching through endless files.
Moreover, these tools are a big help in maintaining consistency across various channels. You can also create branding guidelines to ensure that your branding assets are used just the way they are intended. For instance, they allow you to specify logo colors, background colors, variations of the logo and where each version should be used, logo placement, and other details for efficient and consistent branding.
What is Meant by Automation in Brand Asset Management (BAM)?
The concept of automation is straightforward in every industry. In BAM, it refers to using technology to simplify and speed up processes like asset creation, storage, organization, and sharing. You may be able to store and organize your assets as a startup, but as soon as your brand starts to get some reach, overlooking everything regarding branding manually can be a pretty cumbersome experience.
Moreover, humans are prone to making mistakes. For example, you updated your brand guidelines but forgot to send the updated version to your team. The results will be an inconsistent brand voice across platforms, negatively affecting your business. BAM automation can help in this regard by minimizing the need for repetitive work, reducing errors, and helping maintain consistency across channels.
Common Drawbacks of BAM Tools and How Automation Solves Them
Even though BAM tools can bring immense benefits, they have certain drawbacks as well. Of course, if you use the platform to its full potential and manually input all the data, it’ll clear most of those drawbacks. But then again, your employees or team members may not read the detailed instructions, or they may not understand your vision correctly.
Here are some common BAM challenges with automation as an effective solution.
Difficulty in Locating Assets
As we’ve revised multiple times in this article now, once your branding asset library grows, it becomes increasingly challenging to organize and locate the assets you’re looking for. Traditional BAM tools allow creators to tag assets into various categories as it helps to find the assets. But if you’re in the industry for much longer, the tags you initially created may no longer be relevant. Moreover, manually tagging, categorizing, and sorting the plethora of files will lead to a cluttered, disorganized system.
How Automation Solves It:
Automated tagging and metadata management simplify asset categorization and improve search functionality. With AI-powered tools, assets are automatically tagged based on content, colors, themes, or file type. This allows for faster, better search results. With this automation in place, team members can quickly locate the assets they need.
Inconsistent Asset Updates and Distribution
This is, by far, the biggest drawback of traditional BAM platforms. These tools rely heavily on manual data input. You spend hours updating branding assets or guidelines, enduring a long, tiring session in front of the monitor, clicking, and typing away. Eventually, you’ll need a break but you might miss the most crucial step: notifying your team. After all, what good use were your efforts and the updated branding assets if they’re not utilized in the first place?
How Automation Solves It:
The automation feature in BAM platforms enables centralized updates. This accounts for the fact that every asset update is immediately reflected and accessible to all users.
Time-Consuming Approval Processes
We’ve all heard the saying, “Time is money.” Nothing is more frustrating than going back and forth with the same document just because it doesn’t match the supervisor’s vision. The approval process for new assets or updated materials can be slow, particularly if feedback has to pass through multiple departments. This not only creates a frustrating experience for your employees but also delays important updates.
How Automation Solves It:
Another advantageous use of automated workflows is that they streamline approvals by setting up a defined approval process. This approval process notifies stakeholders at each step of the creation process. As a result, the outcome always matches the stakeholder’s vision, and without any delays, you can move to distribution.
Manual Asset Management is Prone to Errors
Humans may be the best creation on this planet, but even we make mistakes. Usually, these mistakes are minimized through approval processes, yet more hands in the workflow often mean increased labor and higher costs. But even after all those checks, errors like missing files, duplicate assets, or mislabeling are still likely to occur. These mistakes create confusion, waste time, and can lead to significant inconsistencies in branding.
How Automation Solves It:
Although technology doesn’t have the creativity of the human mind yet, it can do processes faster and without any mistakes. With automation, you can eliminate many of the repetitive, error-prone tasks associated with BAM, such as file organization, categorization, and version control.
Limited Scalability as Brands Grow
A successful entrepreneur always plans for tomorrow. Today is a gift, but tomorrow is a dream. Your goals should include globalization and making a meaningful impact. For that purpose, you must always adopt tools and platforms that offer scalability along with our business growth. Unfortunately, traditional BAM tools offer little to no scalability. As your brand expands, managing an increasing number of assets manually becomes cumbersome. The increased manual effort leads to slower workflows and more complex asset management.
How Automation Solves It:
Automation brings scalability to the table. It allows BAM tools to handle larger volumes of assets without a decline in performance. With automated processes in place, brands can grow their asset library seamlessly, keeping workflows efficient and assets accessible without additional manual workload.
To Top it Up:
After reading this whole guide about automation, you might think that a BAM tool that offers automation is the solution to all our branding needs. But actually, it isn’t. Nobody can replace the creativity of a human mind. People see authenticity in brands. They love storytelling. Your words captivate them into making purchases.
And none of these things can be achieved with a tool. Remember, as the brain behind the puppet, you have to pull the strings. Use automation, as much as you can, to aid you in your creativity. But if you rely on it too much to even create generic branding assets, it can backfire. So, be creative. Be authentic. And be different!
Ethos: A BAM Platform with Integrated AI Capabilities
Ethos is a fresh and innovative entry into the BAM industry. As a powerful Brand Asset Management Solution, the platform offers custom brand showrooms that you can use to organize, store, and display your branding assets. You have complete control over permissions for edit or view-only. And if you ever feel like you’re experiencing writer’s block, you can use the integrated AI feature to come up with compelling, solid taglines that not only mirror your brand but also act as subtle calls to action to drive leads.
There’s never been a better time to innovate. Try Ethos completely free for 30 days—no credit card required!
