Strategic Brand Management: Building, Evaluating, Overseeing Strategy

An exceptional brand serves as your competitive edge. A comprehensive brand experience engages your target audience, fosters enduring loyalty, enhances brand recall, and is intricately tied to sales performance. Strategic brand management guarantees that every aspect of the customer, employee, and partner experience is consistent, easily accessible, aligned with your business strategy, and utilized appropriately. In this guide, we will elucidate what strategic brand management entails, its significance, and how to develop a brand management strategy that instills confidence in your company.

- Brand Management vs. Brand Strategy: What’s the Difference?
- Why Is Strategic Brand Management Important?
- Six Steps to Developing an Effective Brand Management Strategy
- Selecting the Optimal Brand Management Software for Your Organization
- Optimize Strategic Brand Management Using DAM

Understanding Strategic Brand Management

Strategic brand management involves establishing and upholding standards for overseeing all branded digital assets, both internal and external. While branding focuses on the creation of a brand, brand management is concerned with its maintenance. It is crucial to understand that brand management extends beyond mere aesthetics; it encompasses the management of all components that form a brand's identity, ensuring a consistent image is presented to the end consumer. These components range from packaging and press releases to blog posts, social media accounts, and in-person experiences—essentially any point of interaction a potential customer may have with a brand.

Brand Management vs. Brand Strategy: What’s the Difference?

Establishing a definitive brand strategy and implementing it through brand management are essential steps to achieving a robust brand identity. Your brand strategy defines the fundamental elements of your brand, including your values, purpose, positioning, target audience, and other brand guidelines. Conversely, brand management is dedicated to executing this strategy through continuous efforts such as developing marketing campaigns, creating brand assets, monitoring brand performance, and ensuring compliance with brand standards. Together, brand management and brand strategy work in tandem to uphold a consistent brand image that grows stronger over time.

Why Is Strategic Brand Management Important?

Effective brand management is the cornerstone of any successful brand strategy. Regardless of the size of your brand, brand management is essential for maintaining consistent brand guidelines, preserving your brand image, enhancing customer loyalty, and elevating your brand perception. Without strategic brand management, your brand strategy would disintegrate. Key elements of effective brand management include:

• Brand Awareness: This pertains to the level of familiarity your brand has within your industry and among your target audience.
  
  
• Brand Experience: This relates to the feelings customers have when they engage with your brand.
  
  
• Brand Identity: This encompasses the elements that help customers recognize your brand, such as your logo, tone, voice, and colors.
  
  
• Brand Reputation: This is about how your brand is viewed by the public.
  
  
• Brand Loyalty: This explains why customers repeatedly choose your brand over competitors.
  
  
• Brand Recognition: This involves how easily customers can identify your brand through visual cues established by your brand identity or by name recognition.

Strategic brand management targets these specific areas, enabling you to build and manage your brand across all pertinent touchpoints.

Six Steps to Developing an Effective Brand Management Strategy

Brand management is initiated by the marketing team but encompasses everyone representing your company across any platform. Your strategy should incorporate your entire internal team, along with vendor partners, freelancers, agencies, and influencers who serve as extensions of your core business. With a clear understanding of strategic brand management and its role in fostering organizational success, let's explore how to construct a robust brand management strategy that can safeguard your business's future.

1. Establish Brand Values and Positioning

Your brand strategy must clearly define your brand values and positioning, ensuring they are in harmony. Brand positioning highlights the distinct value your brand offers to customers. What sets you apart from your competitors? How do you wish your customers to view you?

Your brand positioning is closely linked with your brand values. Your target customer should connect with these values, ultimately choosing your brand over others.

To maintain a competitive edge and adapt to industry changes, your brand positioning should evolve as you consistently monitor your competitors, which we will explore further below.

2. Focus on Managing Brand Reputation

A strong brand reputation is crucial for cultivating a successful brand image. To sustain your brand's reputation, focus on enhancing the customer experience, consistently providing high-quality products or services, and staying informed about your audience's perceptions of your brand. Consider the last time you dined out or contemplated a purchase; you likely reviewed feedback or checked social media before making a decision. Managing brand reputation involves assessing how your target audience perceives your brand, evaluating customer feedback, and fostering a connection with your audience to preserve your brand image. But how can you effectively monitor your brand reputation? Here are several methods:

• Online Reviews: Reviews are often found on third-party platforms and contribute to your business's overall rating. Monitoring these reviews is a vital aspect of reputation management as it offers an honest insight into customer opinions about your services or products. Not all reviews will be positive, and that's acceptable. Effectively addressing negative reviews is essential for maintaining a positive reputation.
  
  
• Social Media: Your online presence significantly influences brand reputation. You can track comments on your brand's social media profiles, as well as mentions and tags. Social media also serves as an excellent platform to engage with your audience, fostering brand trust and loyalty.
  
  
• Customer Testimonials: Testimonials, akin to reviews, can be gathered from previous customers to feature on your website. If your brand has had a positive interaction with a customer, capitalize on it by requesting a testimonial to bolster your brand reputation.
  
  
• Other Online Mentions: Employ tracking tools that notify you whenever Google or other search engines discover new mentions of your brand. This is another method to monitor your brand's perception, ensuring you remain informed.

By continuously monitoring, you can adjust your strategy to maintain a positive brand reputation.

3. Implement Brand Management Software

Managing a brand requires overseeing numerous dynamic elements, including channels, touchpoints, and stakeholders. Additionally, you must ensure brand consistency, manage your reputation, and secure market share. Given these complexities, brand management software can be invaluable.

Typically, brand management software offers six core functionalities: asset creation, management, distribution, storage, collaboration, and measurement. It provides a suite of tools to assist users in creating, organizing, distributing, updating, archiving, and controlling all branded assets from a centralized library that serves as the brand's definitive source of truth.

However, not all platforms are identical, so it is essential to select a solution that aligns with your business strategy, industry, and internal workflows.

In essence, any organization seeking to maintain a professional, cohesive brand can benefit from brand management software. Here are some indicators that it might be time to consider implementing such a solution:

• Difficulty in staying organized: Advanced tagging and labeling simplify file storage, eliminating the need to duplicate files across multiple folders.
• Need for improved version control: Brand management tools are designed to address version control challenges, ensuring stakeholders always work with the most current and relevant version of every business asset.
• Requirement for secure storage of branded assets: Dedicated DAM tools are specifically designed to keep your digital assets secure.
• Collaboration with multiple external partners: The more contributors involved, the harder it is to maintain control. Brand management software facilitates the distribution of approved content to sales teams, retailers, distributors, etc., reducing unnecessary requests and misuse.

While brand management software is just one of many tools in a marketer's arsenal, these solutions play a pivotal role in delivering a cohesive, on-brand experience for all stakeholders, both internal and external.

4. Ensure Uniformity Across Distribution Channels

Ensuring brand consistency is crucial for your brand's success. While having a recognizable visual identity is important, brand consistency extends beyond mere appearance. It encompasses maintaining your brand's communication, messaging, and core values across all content and customer interactions. This consistency should be evident across all touchpoints, including your brand's website, social media platforms, blog, and advertisements.

Craft a content strategy for each distribution channel that considers:

• The demographic of the audience engaging with the channel
• The type of content the channel emphasizes—whether text, images, video, etc.
• The manner in which customers interact with the channel

Although the content type may vary across platforms, each piece should remain "on brand," effectively conveying your unique message and allowing your brand personality to shine through.

5. Monitor Your Competitors

Effective brand management necessitates adapting to industry and market shifts. Keep a close watch on competitors to sustain your competitive edge. Identify what similar brands are doing that you could improve upon. Understand customer perceptions of your competitors and analyze their content strategies. Conducting a competitive analysis can reveal your brand's strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to discover opportunities to enhance customer service.

6. Evaluate and Assess Brand Performance

Strategic brand management must be an adaptable process. Regularly review your brand strategy to confirm its effectiveness and ensure it remains aligned with your core values, both internally and externally. To evaluate your brand's performance and success, consider the following:

• Internal Branding: Ensure that everyone within your organization adheres to your brand standards and guidelines, including your brand identity, values, and positioning. Internal consistency will be mirrored in external assets and campaigns.
• External Branding: Observe how your target audience reacts to your content and identify which types of assets generate the most engagement. Effective brand management relies on comprehending how consumers perceive your brand assets and messaging.
• Customer Experience: Assess your sales processes and monitor both in-person and online customer interactions to determine what is effective and what is not. A positive customer experience can result in repeat business and increased sales.

After analyzing your performance, leverage your insights to guide future campaigns and strategies.

Selecting the Optimal Brand Management Software for Your Organization

Implementing your brand management strategy can be challenging, but the right brand management software can significantly ease the process. This software can assist in organizing and editing assets, facilitating both internal and external collaboration, conducting analytics, and more. Below, we highlight essential features to consider in a potential solution:

Efficiently Store and Organize Brand Collateral: Seek solutions that minimize the time spent on manual file uploads and organization. Custom rules that automate tagging and organization, sorting assets into collections, portals, and categories, can simplify locating necessary materials without requiring training.

Rapid Access to Brand Assets: When teams struggle to find needed information, they may resort to misusing marketing materials or creating ad-hoc content to fill perceived gaps. A robust brand management system enables stakeholders to quickly find and share the information necessary to perform their roles efficiently and effectively. Key features to consider include pinned searching, auto-tagging, in-document search, filtering, and suggested search.

Edit and Convert Brand Files: Your brand management solution should facilitate easy editing, conversion, and updating of all digital assets from a single location. This approach prevents time wastage from switching between platforms, eliminates unnecessary downloads, and enhances productivity. Look for features such as templating, resizing, integration with Adobe Suite, and video editing.

Define Media Rights and Permissions: Brand management software should allow you to establish rules, permissions, and usage rights to safeguard your digital assets. Features to consider include asset approvals, content expiration and availability, access requests, and user activity analytics.

Facilitate Collaboration Across Brand Assets: Your software should support seamless collaboration among internal and external stakeholders. A crucial feature is the ability to create custom rules that govern who can access, edit, and share your digital assets. This capability allows external collaborators to modify certain elements within a document while preserving the formatting, design, and other components.

Develop and Share Brand Portals: Brand portals streamline access to digital assets by serving as a customizable homepage for accessing your branded materials. You can create distinct portals for various user segments, such as sales teams, marketers, local franchises, influencers, or affiliates.

Evaluate the Impact of Brand Materials: Look for a solution that simplifies monitoring asset usage from a centralized, controlled location and offers in-platform analytics and reporting tools to assess assets from multiple perspectives. Seek asset-level analytics that track content usage, user analytics that delve into individual activity, and insights that quantify the impact of brand materials on achieving overarching goals.

Integrate and Streamline Existing Workflows: Ensure the platform you choose integrates with your existing tech stack and internal workflows. This integration is crucial because the primary benefits of DAM platforms arise from connecting all data sources and content repositories your organization uses, such as your CRM, the Adobe Creative Cloud, your sales enablement platform, and communication channels.

Strategic brand management ensures your brand fulfills its commitments by providing consistent experiences to both partners and customers. Utilizing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform such as Brandfolder by Smartsheet allows you to efficiently organize and distribute brand assets from a single, centralized location. This platform enables users to collaborate on creative assets and campaigns, establish custom rules to safeguard assets in your absence, and gain insights into asset performance. Why wait any longer? Let us assist you in effortlessly managing your brand.