Brand Asset Management (BAM) is used interchangeably with Digital Asset Management (DAM). But in reality, it amplifies the latter’s functionality. 

BAM combines the best features of both systems and helps employees work together on initiatives relating to their brands in addition to storing their assets. 

The assets include brand assets — brand standards and logos — and digital assets — marketing materials, digital media, and other projects aimed at customers.

As a result, it provides a long list of advantages that influence corporate growth and helps firms get closer to their objectives. 

In this article, let’s look at these advantages in detail and discover important factors to consider while purchasing a BAM tool. 

What is the difference between Brand Asset Management and Digital Asset Management?

Brand asset management is a step up from conventional digital asset management. 

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BAM has four unique purposes, as opposed to DAM, which merely focuses on storing, managing, and distributing digital assets. We’ve explained each of these purposes in detail below. 

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1. Promotes better teamwork

Every project needs workflow automation to be successful. But it can be challenging to collaborate effectively, especially when you're working with many teams or utilizing various tools, apps, and systems.

BAM offers a virtual workplace where projects may be developed, annotated, and approved, making collaboration simpler.

It also enables you to design a logical workflow, delegate work to various team members directly from the platform, and automate transitions between tasks. 

2. Centralizes asset storage

Not having access to the necessary tools and information can become tiresome and annoying pretty quickly as it involves hunting down marketing and brand management teams and sifting through folders in search of information.

BAM does away with this problem by giving you a centralized location to store all of your assets. It makes it simple for your teams to access logos and graphics as needed and to make use of brand guidelines while they work on projects connected to digital marketing and branding. 

This guarantees that all digital materials precisely reflect your brand identity and fit into your overall brand plan.

3. Improves productivity

Nobody enjoys completing monotonous work or extraneous activities. Nevertheless, we generally end up doing it. BAM employs several strategies to reduce these kinds of inefficiencies.

It eliminates the need to frequently recreate content for campaigns by storing all brand assets (in high-resolution formats) on a single platform. 

It also shortens project turnaround time by providing a forum for collaboration and communication on digital marketing efforts. 

Additionally, it keeps track of modifications made to projects and brand assets, enabling them to be updated and saved in the most recent revision.

4. Quickens approvals 

Your consumers will quickly switch from one brand to another if you don’t keep up with the trends. So, you should launch products swiftly to take advantage of this window of opportunity.

This is made feasible through BAM’s expedited approval procedure. Managers and teams may easily assess projects and provide comments on exactly where the team is working using its virtual workspace. 

As a result, projects are able to advance through the pipeline more quickly enabling earlier publication, shipment, or sharing.

How BAM caters to the needs of every team in an organization

Designers want to produce work that stays aligned with the brand while collaborating seamlessly with marketing and product teams. 

BAM improves its efficiency and gets them closer to this goal by centralizing design elements, rules, and brand assets across the organization. It also saves designers time when locating, recreating, and distributing designs as it stores everything in one place. 

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Marketers want to automate marketing tasks and drastically reduce the expense, time, and effort involved in developing campaigns and related materials.

BAM helps create streamlined approval processes for internal or external teams which expedites the production of on-brand content like guidelines and brand collateral templates.

Dedicated BAM tools like Artwork Flow go beyond this functionality and also provide free tools to catch errors and ensure that your brand assets stay compliant with legal guidelines. You can check out our free proofreading tools here. 

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Brand managers aim to boost brand value by improving the brand’s consistency across internal and external channels, both online and offline. 

BAM tools make brand values, assets, and guidelines easily accessible to all teams and offer tools that help you check color and font consistency across brand assets, improving brand awareness throughout the organization (and to the general public).

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Now that we’ve looked at how BAM tools are different from DAM, let’s look at what you should look for in a BAM tool before investing in one.

What kind of BAM should you look for?

Here are the seven main features you should look for if you’re considering purchasing a BAM. 

1. Cloud-based

Your BAM program should move assets from the local folders to the cloud. Otherwise, it’s impossible to create a single repository and guarantee that all users can access the most recent materials, prevent misuse, and improve brand consistency.

2. Localized search features

The number of assets in your asset management system will grow over time so if you don’t have a smart search option in place, it’ll get difficult to quickly find what you’re looking for. 

So, you should choose a BAM with smart search options, filters, and other facets that can help you find the asset.

It should also be able to categorize your digital collateral into categories, set up asset relations, assign tags and statuses, and manage assets in folders and collections to make the search easier.

3. Control & security

Digital security concerns are frequently brought up, and with good reason. Your BAM should have centralized download controllability, copyright and license notices, and trademarks to maintain control over the circulation of your assets and guard against any misuse.

4. Support for all asset types

A BAM shouldn’t be limited to just PNGs and MP4s. It should allow you to upload, preview, and work on all kinds of files to serve as the sole repository for digital assets. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck switching between multiple apps to manage your assets, and that leaves room for confusion and inefficiencies. 

5. Automation 

Automation plays a significant role in improving the efficiency of your processes, so your BAM shouldn’t come up short on this one. It should possess features like automated tagging, expiry actions, and approval processes to improve your collaboration and ensure your product launches on time.

6. Collaboration

You should find a DAM that enables you to mass edit assets, create custom workflows and leave or get feedback on assets to make the most of them and improve team cooperation and collaboration. 

7. Support

You don’t want to be left waiting for days for a response. So, check for in-app support, and test the team’s availability and willingness to help during the trial period.  

Why Artwork Flow is the preferred BAM tool for compliance-bound industries 

When you operate in industries that require you to stay compliant with organizations like  FDA and GXP, you’re going to need a BAM tool that also helps you stay on top of regulations. 

This is where Artwork Flow comes in. It helps brands streamline their design and artwork approval process and save time and money that they’d have to spend on label rejection loss and delayed go-to-market. Here are some of its best features. 

• Cloud-based: Artwork Flow scales as you grow, and all of your assets are secure and stored in one single repository.
• Centralized storage: The platform has an artwork library that stores all your brand assets and helps you organize, store, proof, share artworks, and even start projects from the Artwork Library. 
• Advanced search function: The artwork library has a categorized search function that allows you to search for assets by product, brand, category, variant, and more.
  
  

• Workflows: Every project needs to go through a series of steps before it’s completed. Artwork Flow helps you create workflow templates for each step and assign tasks to your team. This brings accountability and ensures that information doesn’t slip through the cracks.
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• Annotation: Collates feedback from multiple teams in a single place, so designers don’t have to keep track of them manually. 
• Version tracking: The Artwork Library has a version tracking history that allows you to see the changes made to the document. 
• Security: Artwork Flow’s database complies with the best business practices and offers the most secure AES-256-bit encryption for all your data. 
• Support: You can go through the support documentation, contact a support agent over chat, or fill in a form with your email address to sort out any problems with the platform. 

Wrapping up

BAM tools take digital asset management one step further and help bring your teams together to collaborate seamlessly on a project. 

This helps organizations achieve their goal within the stipulated time and improve their bottom line.

A good BAM must be cloud-based and support all asset types to be able to create a centralized repository. 

It should also provide advanced search functions and automate processes so teams can communicate and coordinate with each other effortlessly to complete the task without going through multiple revisions. 

The best example of a BAM tool that embodies all these features is Artwork Flow. So, sign up for a free demo to see how it can help improve your business. 

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