How to collaborate effectively and manage your brand remotely

Five minutes with Fleur Video series – Video #1

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 collaborating across various countries and sometimes even continents. 

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 working remotely as a marketing team. 

Video 1: 6 Tips for managing your brand remotely collaborating with teams all over the world 

At Lytho, we speak with a lot of Marketers who experience working in companies with different locations all over the world. They experience working in different time zones, with different teams that sometimes also speak different languages. 

Most of the time, a remote team will be asking for your input, while you don't always have the time to answer them directly. Think about questions about the correct layout for a presentation, where to find certain images or other specific requests. We understand that you are very busy and that it would be beneficial if these teams can find this stuff themselves very easily without your help.  

How do you make sure you collaborate and manage your brand effectively while working remotely? Watch the video below to find out. 

Work more efficiently, enrich collaboration and communicate more effectively 

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

1. Use a cloud or SaaS solution 
   Whatever system you choose to use for managing your brand assets, make sure to use an online cloud solution instead of an on-premise solution for making marketing material available to colleagues.
   
   With a cloud or SaaS solution, everyone is able to log-in whenever and wherever they want, 24/7 and collaboration is therefore not dependent on the timing of when a colleague in a different time-zone is working or when they are working remotely, away from the office.
   
   
2. Make sure only up-to-date brand assets are available 
   Make sure that only the most recent versions of files are available to your colleagues. This goes for pictures, videos, but also for your other visual brand collateral. Colleagues should be able to easily find the most recent logo, fonts or brand colors, without having to search Google for them.
   
   
3. Make assets available to specific teams only 
   Make sure that files are only available to the specific teams that need them. In other words, make sure that access is limited to the team that needs these files. Think for instance about the sales, marketing and HR departments. They do not need to know what’s going on in the other department, so communication could be more effective and more directly applicable to them if you follow this best practice of restricting availability of assets to specific teams only.
   
   
4. Make assets available to certain locations or regions 
   The same applies for availability tailored to the different locations, countries or regions. Make sure that files are only available for that specific location, so the different locations/regions won’t see the files meant for other locations. When you work with different countries, you probably also have different marketing strategies for these areas. Therefore, it's usually not a great idea if one country uses marketing material from the other, because it could hurt your brand.
   
   
5. Enable your teams to stay on brand 
   Make sure that the teams know how to create on brand marketing materials themselves. This means they should know your brand guidelines and how to use them. This tip includes the use of templates, which you can use to let them know where the logo should be in a document or where text can be placed.
   
   
6. Create an approval workflow  
   Lastly, be sure you can check the marketing materials that have been created by your colleagues. If you are not able to check these, chances are those materials are not on brand, which can also end up hurting your brand image.  

So, there you have it - these were the six tips that we wanted to share with you in this first 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 first of a series of videos. The next video will focus on brand identity and creating consistent digital content. 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.  

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 white paper “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!