Managing brand assets via your intranet

However, in the increasingly complex world of multichannel marketing, one of the biggest challenges for all businesses is to maintain a consistent brand message. This challenge is further compounded as a business expands into multiple locations and territories where different languages and cultures add an extra layer of complexity in the control and delivery of effective brand messages.

Key to these messages are, of course, the visual assets which have themselves evolved considerably in recent years. Gone are the days of branding corporate communications with a simple jpeg of the company logo. These days multiple formats of the logo, supported by a color palette and corporate font collection are the norm, along with a plethora of other brand assets such as video idents to top and tail branded videos, for example. Discover how your intranet can help you manage brand assets.

Improved asset control with your intranet

So how can an expanding business with a growing workforce and increasing number of locations control such an array of brand collateral and maintain a consistent brand identity? Common sense dictates that a central repository of such material would be a logical approach, but what is the simplest, most efficient means of managing these assets whilst also providing employees with instant access and the ability to collaborate across a range of brand communications?

That’s where an effective intranet comes in.

Centralized Brand Asset Storage

The efficiency and flexibility of the modern enterprise intranet provides the perfect platform for centralized brand management, enabling brand managers to maintain a single source of the truth in terms of marketing assets. Where enterprises operate across regions and languages your intranet’s document management system should allow a logical hierarchy to support the management of regionalized assets. By ensuring that all staff go to this single point for their brand assets consistency is maintained and all staff should be using the latest version.

Version Control for Your Assets

Images and brand guides may not change as frequently as some marketing assets such as product brochures. It is important that your intranet can provide you with version control for these assets. In this way, the staff can see when and what has changed over time, preserving brand integrity.

Guidance on Brand Use within Your Intranet

Your intranet is far more than just purely an asset store. It can also provide training and guidance for employees in how to use the brand assets – when different elements should be used. By incorporating internal social networks within your intranet you can also allow less experienced members of the marketing team to connect with your brand guardians and their more experienced colleagues to ask questions and learn from them. Sharing best practice of the use of materials and brand assets is a way of increasing the knowledge across the whole organization. It is even possible to use your intranet to provide a method of sign-off for brand communications. By creating workflows and forms, your processes for approval can be made faster while improving control and being made more efficient. These workflows ensure the brand guardians that need to sign off marketing assets are alerted, and the recording of their approval or edits required are held centrally – not in some long email trail!

Your intranet as a Marketing Tool

There can be no doubt that as the number and variety of marketing channels evolve, the need to maintain a consistent brand identity across these channels becomes ever more important and, potentially, ever more difficult to manage. However, the efficiency and centralized control afforded by the modern enterprise intranet can overcome these challenges and ensure every brand manager can sleep easy at night.

To learn more about how Unily has been used by some of the world’s biggest brands why not read some of our case studies or contact us with any specific questions you may have.