Brand identity and consistent digital content

Five minutes with Fleur Video series – Video #2

How do you make sure you collaborate and manage your brand effectively while working remotely? In a series of videos, Fleur Elise Muller – Account Executive at Lytho, shares some tips, tools and tricks so you and your team can be more efficient and stay on brand during these trying times. 

Everyone is forced to work from home right now, which is a new situation to many if not all of us. Fleur Elise Muller is an Account Executive at Lytho, helping our customers in getting the most value from a Digital Asset Management Solution. This means she speaks with and advises a lot of marketing teams around the globe about how to collaborate and manage their brand (Assets) remotely. Many of these teams have the challenge of staying consistent in creating their digital content. 

To provide you with some tools and tricks so you can be more efficient during these times, Fleur created a series of short videos where she highlights certain subjects and offers some expert tips, tools and tricks, all relevant to collaborating remotely as a marketing team. 

• In Video #1 Fleur shared some tips about managing your brand while collaborating remotely. Watch that video here. 

Video #2: 5 Tips for creating consistent Digital Content and managing your Brand Identity 

As a brand manager or marketeer, you’ll often find yourself working in a company with many other colleagues who also like to create communication materials themselves. Although not everyone will always be creating those materials using the brand guidelines.  
 
In this short video Fleur gives you five tips about how you can communicate your brand guidelines to your colleagues and make sure that they will follow them as well. 
 
How do you make sure your Brand Identity stays solid and Digital Content is consistently on-brand? Watch the video below to find out. 

Enable your coworkers to stay on-brand

In the video Fleur shares the following five tips, which will help you work more efficiently, enrich collaboration and make communication more effective: 

1. Store and share brand guidelines in a centralized location 
   Make sure your team knows your brand guidelines and teach them how to use these. In your organization there should be one place where the most recent version of your brand guidelines are stored. Together with your most recent logo, font and brand colors.  
   Your team should know where to find these guidelines and assets, and should get a proper introduction/description on how to use these branding elements as well.
   
   
2. Offer a user-friendly design solution 
   Not everyone has InDesign knowledge or experience. Actually, having InDesign knowledge is a profession, you need trainings to learn how to use this solution very well. So, in order to empower your colleagues to create materials, find a solution which is easy to understand and which is very user friendly. 
   Various marketers have reported using a solution like Canva or Adobe InSpark (both of which are free tools) to be of help. To be consistently on-brand, especially in a larger organization, a centralized and managed Digital Asset Management system is often the best way to go.
   
   
3. Use presets and restrictions to stay on-brand 
   Give your colleagues freedom to create their own materials, but put restrictions in place. For instance, make sure they are only able to choose out of a certain amount of pictures, let’s say ten. They can use whichever picture they want, but they have to choose one of the ten.  
   The same with your brand colors. They can choose among all your brand colors which one they like to use, but they can only use that color in a specific combination (which is pre-set).
   
   
4. Make use of templates  
   Previously created content which is perfectly on-brand brand can be easily used to create a template. Creating a template ensure that only a few changes can be made, which are pre-set by the creator of the template. The creator of a template will likely be a professional designer.  
   So, for instance, the logo will always be in the left corner and the same font will be used. Users of the template will be able to change the text fields and the photos, but the place where they are in the document will not change. Templates help make sure that your communication will stay on-brand.
   
   
5. Be in control 
   The last tip is about checking the made documents, so if a colleague made a document which is not completely on-brand, you can give them feedback on how it should be and/or how to change it. In order to be sure that marketing/brand management always does the final check before something is published, having a create & publish workflow in place is usually very helpful. 

So, there you have it - these were the five tips that we wanted to share with you in this video. All these tips are related to a Digital Asset Management solution, which can help make sure that you are in control as a Marketing Manager or Brand Manager. A DAM solution helps you manage all your marketing content in an efficient and effective way. 

This has been the second of a series of videos. The next video will focus on sharing files externally. Keep following Lytho on social media or be sure to check in with our blog next week. 

Need more info? 

At Lytho, we're all about delivering brand consistency. We'd be happy to get in touch with you to chat more about best practices for managing your visual brand assets in order to get more work done with less effort, all the while strengthening your brand and staying consistent.  

Finding and effectively using the right Digital Asset Management Platform for your organization can be of great help in that respect - it can save you a lot of time and money, especially if you're working as a marketer for a larger organization. Would you like to understand more about the value of a DAM system? 

• Download the whitepaper “Improve your marketing performance with DAM” to understand the added value of a Digital Asset Management tool, or: 
• Get in touch with us if you have any specific questions about Brand Management and/or selecting the right DAM solution for your needs. We'd love to help!