Strategy: How to Elevate Your Creative Brand
Table of Contents
Introduction How Does a Targeted Brand Strategy Help Elevate a Creative Brand? The Importance of an Agile Brand Strategy The Role Of Visual Content as Part of Brand Strategy Bringing Your Brand Strategy And Brand’s Visual Assets Together Scale Your Brand’s Visual Assets With Modern Digital Asset Management Solutions 3 5 6 7 9 10
Introduction
Your creative brand is much more than that killer logo you paid elite graphic designers to perfect. It’s more than the carefully-crafted words of your vision or mission statement.
Your creative brand is the foundation on which your purpose, values, authenticity and customer experience is built. It’s what sets you apart from the rest.
To really create an authentic brand and voice in the market, creative and creative-dependant brands like retail, e-Commerce, talent and photography studios must ask themselves:
The ever-evolving era of digital modernization - coupled with new market demands from consumers - has made it exponentially difficult to stand out against a backdrop of white noise.
What makes us and our products stand out from the rest?
What drives customers to our products? How do we take our value proposition to the next level?
It makes sense to leap at the opportunity to be first-to-market (FTM) and capitalize on new market trends to cater to consumers’ needs. But eventually – when everyone jumps on that bandwagon - your unique selling point quickly fizzles out and staying front of mind requires extra gas.
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In this e-book, you’ll discover approaches for solving some of these challenges.
What makes your creative brand such an important commercial asset?
Introduction
FTM trends aside - the trust, opinions formed and decision-making from consumers are the driving forces behind establishing and maintaining a creative brand.
To give you an idea, 81% of consumers need to be able to trust the brand that they are buying from – and it only takes 0.5 seconds for someone to form an opinion of your brand. So, in order to maintain or elevate an agile creative brand in equally agile economies and markets, it’s essential to hone a strong brand strategy that boldly embodies your core purpose, values and value to the market in ways consumers can relate to.
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How Does a Targeted Brand Strategy Help Elevate a Creative Brand?
A targeted brand strategy that’s carefully developed and speaks to brand authenticity - while addressing market needs and preferences - will help create a considerably stronger brand presence alongside a cluster of additional benefits: Brand awareness: A laser-targeted brand strategy will build a stronger presence in the market that will cultivate instinctive brand preference among consumers.
Build credibility: A strong brand and marketing strategy paired with highquality visual content – can boost credibility footprint in the market.
Focused marketing: A clear branding strategy with a targeted audience streamlines the marketing process when creating content for engagement. Through data insights and analysis, understanding customer needs make it easy to promote and maximize products to cater to consumers.
Consumer trust: Combining engaging, relatable, high-quality products and product-branding content can instantly spark a sense of loyalty and brand affinity. Customers tend to stick with what they know, love and trust as an extension of their own personal values.
Increased agility: An agile strategy can’t be developed without anticipating market changes and increased demands. This gives creative brands and creative ecosystems an upper hand with greater resilience to market challenges that may even become opportunities that they’re well-prepared to capture.
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The Importance of an Agile Brand Strategy
The implementation of a comprehensive and agile brand strategy, built around core purpose and goals, will ensure less operational and commercial disruption as your creative brand is evolving.
Those employees’ day-to-day work must become and remain aligned with the overarching brand strategy, purpose and values.
To create a sustainable brand strategy, it’s down to your marketing team and brand managers. They’re the ones who must carry your brand purpose and unique selling points to the market, while engaging your key audiences in ways that set you apart in the market.
However, while the marketing teams and brand managers play a central role in the development of brand strategy and brand-asset management, the representation thereof stretches to employees throughout the entire organization.
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The Role Of Visual Content as Part of Brand Strategy
In today’s attention economy, your number-one competitor is customer distraction. Physical and digital spaces are constantly buzzing with the chatter of a thousand notifications, ads, social feeds and billboards. That’s why stunning visual assets are an imperative layer of a creative brand strategy. A stunning 61% of consumers prefer brands that have a content presence, and they are twice as likely to share text-based content when coupled with evocative visuals.
For grabbing attention among the dirge of scrolling social content, that instant recognizability can mean the difference between surviving and thriving as a creative brand.
Visual assets include images, videos and other rich media that should aim to imprint a lasting first impression on an audience who will eventually instantly associate those digital assets with your brand, wherever they see them.
Visual assets have become so key that many organizations are planning on adding video content distribution channels from Youtube (48%), Facebook Video (39%) and Instagram (33%) to their marketing strategy – which ergo is an extension of an organization’s brand strategy.
Another decision-making driver among consumers stretches a little further than the content creation aspect or the experience and quality the product offers.
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The Role Of Visual Content as Part of Brand Strategy
Consumers also look at the ‘goodness’ of brands by how they are treating their people, their eco-footprint and if they are giving back to the community.
While the latter might seem beyond the scope of brand marketing and visual asset creation, it’s something to be mindful of when developing your brand strategy.
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Bringing Your Brand Strategy And Brand’s Visual Assets Together
Digital and visual assets are the wheels that carry your brand strategy into the market. Scaling stunning brand assets consistently across all channels can be what brings the lasting momentum that sets your brand apart from the others.
However, if your digital assets are not managed optimally, it will result in toppling side effects on creative workflows, displaced assets, siloed communications, and ultimately a broken brand strategy.
Brand strategy and brand assets – one simply cannot work without the other.
To this extent, the growth in demand to manage assets and streamline workflows have encouraged organizations to invest in cloudbased software solutions which have dramatically changed the landscape for real-time creative operations between creative stakeholders up and downstream in the ecosystem.
Effectively managing and scaling digital assets and creative workflows is no nominal task and requires ongoing maintenance as the organization evolves, assets expand and workflows increase.
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Scale Your Brand’s Visual Assets With Modern Digital Asset Management Solutions
What is DAM?
A Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a cloud-based software platform with a built-in visual asset library that helps organizations store, organize, access and securely share their brand’s creative assets. As market demands continue to change and workflows increase, organizations are shifting to the automation of workflows with cloud-based software such as modern DAM solutions.
Here is how DAM’s solutions can help organizations better manage their assets while streamlining workflows:
Create a single-truth-repository for brand assets Organizations that do not have modern DAM solutions tend to have multiple platforms that teams and collaborators access in order to work on a brand’s creative assets. 57% of marketers have indicated that they have trouble managing which often means that:
Modern DAM solutions and its built-in custom integrations enable organizations to produce and source content of any kind – whether it be imagery, graphics or videos.
a) They need to do time-consuming searches to locate assets in disconnected libraries;
b) Subsequent assurance is required so that the correct version of the asset
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Scale Your Brand’s Visual Assets With Modern Digital Asset Management Solutions
is being used to ensure that the asset aligns with existing brand quality standards; and
c) They must connect broken communications between collaborators to pre-emptively manage the distribution of correct assets.
A centralized visual and cloud-based asset library enables teams and collaborators to cohesively collaborate on the latest version of assets - all while streamlining workflows by eliminating waste communication of frequent emails or IMs as all communication channels flow in cloud-based software.
Modern DAM solutions create a ‘single truth repository’ where all visual brand assets are stored which makes it easy to search and locate assets within the asset library.
DAM has smart metadata that allows custom schemas to expand an asset library’s search based on version type, date, location and other preferred organizational tags to streamline searches.
Establish brand consistency
Maintaining the quality of a brand becomes difficult when there are many displaced teams that have access to or that work on the same assets for individual projects.As the assets are being worked on over time, small changes are made here and there, which will eventually lead to inconsistency across assets that prolongs the distribution process as assets first need to be rectified.
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Scale Your Brand’s Visual Assets With Modern Digital Asset Management Solutions
An inconsistent brand can tarnish a reputation – but a consistent brand representation? It has the potential to boost revenue by 23%.
A cloud-based DAM offers versioning control over visual assets to ensure that the correct version is distributed timely to clients and/or stakeholders. Produce, source and distribute content
Producing and sourcing content is hard, and 50% of marketers have laid claim to this. But with modern DAM solutions, it does not have to be.
With a DAM’s built-in visual asset
library, it’s possible to easily source and repurpose existing content which can also reinforce operations by:
• Alleviating workflow and use of resources
• Increasing of ROI
• Maintaining quality and consistency of visual assets
Another barrier to effectively produce content is the approval process within an organization. Before an asset goes out, it must undergo a few rounds of approval first. However, with approval acceleration tools built into a DAM, visual assets can instantly be approved or declined right on the platform.
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Scale Your Brand’s Visual Assets With Modern Digital Asset Management Solutions
Track Project and Product Performances
60% of marketers indicated that the hardest challenge for them is measuring content efficacy. DAM’s workflow automation integrations provide organizations with a granular view of ongoing projects and enable the allocation of assignments and the tracking of workflows.
And smart metadata that’s integrated into a modern DAM, scales the creative performance metrics against the production performance metrics. This helps to guide organizations to strategically measure their highperforming assets and to identify areas of inconsistencies that require optimization.
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About globaledit
Since 2003, Globaledit has been a trusted partner to major brands in retail, fashion, health & beauty, entertainment and ecommerce. Our creative asset management platform creates efficiencies in photo production workflows and processes, making it an essential collaboration platform for creatives.
Globaledit is part of the CoCreativ. CoCreativ is a Creative Content Agency Studio Network dedicated to providing scalable creative solutions through Content Agency strategy, creativity, and execution. We serve the industry, along with their brands and agencies, by delivering end-to-end Content Agency solutions to create and run programs at scale, more efficiently.