How Companies Use Brand Portals to Distribute Digital Assets

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Skip to Topic:

• What is a brand portal?
• Do you need a brand portal?
• Key benefits of a brand portal
• Brand portal use cases
• How Aprimo empowers the content lifecycle 

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Brand consistency is a key priority for marketing teams. Continuity in branding is the cornerstone of increased customer awareness and brand association. 

How deep does the need for brand consistency go? According to G2, consistent brand presentation across all platforms increases revenue by up to 23%.

With this in mind, it’s clear that organizations’ creative and non-creative stakeholders must access and implement brand messaging consistently across channels. 

The challenge is to strike the correct balance between access and asset control.  

Enter the brand portal.

A brand portal used in conjunction with larger digital asset management solutions (DAMs) gives teams access to the assets they need, with a level of personalization that empowers great customer experiences and brand consistency. 

Read on to learn more about using a brand portal, including the following:

• What a brand portal is (and isn’t) 
• When it’s time to use a brand portal
• The benefits of using a brand portal
• The best use cases for internal and external teams 

What is a brand portal?

A brand portal is a private file storage area with a searchable interface. It stores approved digital assets for use by marketing teams, salespeople, retail locations, or other internal and external marketing partners. 

Using a brand portal creates safe, curated access to approve file formats and assets such as the following: 

• Graphics
• Logos
• Product photos
• Customizable templates
• Marketing materials
• Text files (blogs, etc.) 
• Social media posts

These brand assets are curated for use by user and role. The portal has permission settings to govern who can access and use the assets it stores. 

For instance, a marketing manager might have access to the full asset collection, while other users have access to their campaign-specific files. This allows non-creative stakeholders like sales teams and marketing managers to deliver experiences and messaging to customers while adhering to brand identity.

How do brand portal features work within a modern DAM platform?

If digital asset management is the warehouse for your in-flight and completed assets, a brand portal is the delivery vehicle bringing those valuable assets to marketers. Where the repository features of DAMs provide access to brand assets at all production stages, the brand portal features of a first-in-class DAM platform make it easy to provide those approved assets and templates for broader use by marketing teams. 

By selecting a DAM tool with robust brand portal functionality, you create a single source of truth for all your digital assets. A unified solution de-siloes data from several creative departments, allowing faster and safer delivery to end users such as marketing and sales teams, customer service reps, external agencies, resellers, etc. Delivery can take place in a single environment, reducing redundant software tools and streamlining your brand management and content lifecycle. 

Who uses a brand portal?

Stakeholders self-serve within a brand portal by searching for and using the items they need. Generally, users log into a website or online content catalog, conduct dynamic searches on one or more search parameters, download the files they need, and deliver them to the intended audience.

Several parties within organizations use a brand portal to distribute approved assets:

• Marketers access the materials needed to push brand messaging such as social media posts, thought leadership pieces, and advertising out to the organization’s chosen marketing channels. 
• Salespeople have searchable access to materials to share with customers. These resources help them educate customers and close deals. 
• Customer service teams find support documents and promotional assets relevant to helping customers use and expand services. 
• Brick and mortar store locations download and print assets for use in their advertising. 

Do you need a brand portal?

If you ask most brand specialists when you should implement a digital asset management system, they’ll respond with “yesterday.” The more complex your brand and marketing needs, the more critical it becomes to stay organized and compliant. 

When weighing the need to upgrade, here are seven signs your organization could benefit from a brand portal:

1. You have a cross-functional marketing team. Immersive experiences are created when a dedicated team pulls together in the same direction. Managing a multi-faceted branding and marketing team is easier when you centralize and automate your content access. 

2. You have distributed, remote, or outsourced teams. Keeping an in-house team organized through dedicated in-house servers may be feasible for a short time—however, distributed and remote teams need more resources, security, and speed to get their jobs done efficiently. Likewise, external agency partners need secure, curated access to assets. A brand portal provides the technological means to deliver the correct assets from anywhere. 

3. Your brand uses multi-channel or omnichannel marketing. Managing an omnichannel message requires marketing teams to access assets and brand resources to successfully deploy the message across video, text, social, email, and more. Centralizing your assets allows each stakeholder total visibility into the asset portfolio to deliver a positive experience across channels. Using a brand portal eliminates issues such as incorrect or outdated content appearing in marketing channels. 

4. You manage multiple products or brand strategies. As the business grows and more products join the portfolio, it’s vital to establish effective asset management for each. Likewise, if your brand relies on the strength of an umbrella or family branding strategy, centralizing branding allows teams to deliver the exact message they want across all brand properties. Cross-promotion and dynamic marketing strategies come together faster when teams can access the needed assets easily.

5. Asset management is decentralized or fragmented. No one has time to conduct an expedition to find necessary assets or email the marketing team asking for confirmation on asset use. A centralized system prevents your team from getting bogged down by searching through emails or poorly-structured folder systems for what they need.

6. Your company struggles with brand compliance. Adhering to brand standards within a large and fast-moving team is difficult. It’s further complicated without a centralized, curated management system for digital assets. If brand compliance slips through the cracks or makes tasks like localization difficult, it’s time for a better system. 

7. Cost and time savings are a top priority. Lost productivity and time are expensive and unnecessary side effects of ineffective asset management. If your organization needs to move quickly while preserving its budget, a brand portal is the best way to secure better outcomes without overspending. 

Key benefits of a brand portal

A modern DAM solution with strong portal functionality powers the marketing process from content creation through delivery.  

The right DAM gives creative teams a place to find the in-development assets they need, communicate clearly across departments, understand the objectives and timeline for every project, and create assets that fit campaign needs and goals. It also enables teams to provide those deliverables to non-creative stakeholders with ease.

Seamless collaboration: The brand portal serves as a bridge between creative teams that develop assets and other teams that use them. It offers a safe way for creative teams to confidently deliver the right assets to non-creative users, external stakeholders, and customers. 

Secure communications: In the new, global world of work, secure communication and document access are vital to smooth operations. The modern brand portal allows stakeholders to work from anywhere with confidence, transmit and secure assets with best-in-class encryption, and deliver experiences to customers from anywhere.  

Brand continuity: Brand continuity across the board matters. In a world where brand judgments are made in fractions of a second and over 80% of consumers know brands by their color before their name, there is very little margin for error in delivering a consistent, on-brand experience.

With advanced guidelines built into a brand portal, creative assets come together without endless revisions or continuity checks. The system puts the proper guardrails in place to ensure all messaging adheres to the brand’s style guide without stifling creativity or slowing the production cycle. 

Easier campaign planning: Modern marketing campaigns are larger and more complex than ever. Coordinating the development and launch of a new campaign from a centralized brand portal allows teams to see campaigns holistically. This visibility helps them plan and execute on budget, using the right resources to deliver a first-class customer experience. 

Faster time-to-market: With the increased efficiency and communication of a centralized brand portal, projects go from planning to execution quickly. This allows teams to bring products to market faster and get results with a better return on investment.

Brand portal use cases

Brand management: A brand portal allows creative teams to easily turn over control of approved assets to the teams that drive market messaging. With a portal, your internal and external marketing stakeholders deliver customer experiences and brand communications that move the needle on revenue and customer engagement. 

Modular asset management: Use a portal to deliver customizable content and ready-to-use templates that allow compliant repurposing of assets, images, and text. Access to modifiable assets allows users to create localized and personalized marketing touchpoints that remain consistent with brand guidelines and across channels. 

Media repository: Non-creative stakeholders such as sales and customer service teams need access to media, marketing slicks, blog content, and other creative assets to connect with prospects and customers. A brand portal delivers access only to approved-for-use assets, meaning individuals and teams have access to only the assets approved for use within their functions. 

External end users: A brand portal safely distributes materials to outside stakeholders such as resellers and brand partners. A cloud service delivers these assets, so they are transmitted safely and accurately. Outside partners have the tools they need to successfully resell products, so they don’t need to develop materials independently. 

How Aprimo empowers the content lifecycle 

Serving your internal and external teams using a modern DAM with native brand portal capabilities allows everyone to work effectively from a single platform, without the need to string together siloed tools. Aprimo empowers creative teams to plan, create, iterate, and reuse assets with dynamic version control, and deliver the results to stakeholders quickly and easily. 

To learn more about using modern DAM solutions to provide a streamlined experience for users across your organization, request a demo of Aprimo DAM today.