How digital asset management can transform your brand storytelling

Effective brand storytelling has always been critical to marketers, but it’s more important than ever to a brand’s identity and go-to-market strategy. Powerful storytelling can create an emotional connection between a company and its customers. A major challenge that many brands face when developing the framework of their brand’s story is ownership over the narrative and the assets that support it.

With so many channels of communication (social media, video, direct mail, networking events, etc.), it’s easy for a brand’s story to become inconsistent. What if there was a way to democratize the elements of your brand’s story and give each team member the right words, the right images, and the right assets to represent your brand – whenever and wherever they needed them?

The good news is – there is a way.

Multi-media and digital asset management (DAM) support brand alignment across every communication channel without sacrificing brand identity.

Why is brand storytelling important?

The savviest marketers are exceptional storytellers who can crystalize how a brand, product, or service can improve a customer’s life. In a digital world, storytelling is a strategic tool that enables teams to reach their audiences through their preferred medium. Every interaction in person and across the web is an opportunity to engage customers through powerful brand storytelling.

These opportunities come with their own set of challenges since the world of media is fragmented. Businesses have silos, and customers utilize many different digital channels throughout the day – email, social media, ecommerce sites, and other digital properties. Storytellers, marketers and teams need to align on the best ways to tell your brand story. To effectively meet your customers where they are, your team must leverage the written word (blogs, long-form content), video, images, audio, and more. When you democratize this information and supporting digital assets from a centralized platform, you are preserving the integrity of your brand’s story, while empowering your teams effectively share that story. By putting the right information and assets into the right hands, at the right time, with ease of accessibility – you’re giving your brand’s story the best chance at being told the way it should be, every time.

Using a digital asset library to strengthen your storytelling

Empowering your team to share your brand story makes your company more accessible to customers. To accomplish this, your team needs access to the digital media assets that tell your brand story.

Without a clear solution for this democratized approach to brand storytelling, however, organizations quickly encounter difficulties related to asset maintenance and accessibility. Documents, photos, vector images, videos, and other forms of media are often in disparate locations, lacking proper labeling, or outdated. Usage rights, expiration dates, and publication guidelines are unknown.

The time and resources spent locating and recreating assets can hurt your bottom line – but the risks go beyond financial impact. If your social media manager publishes outdated photos or project managers share versioned-out mission statements, then your brand story is bound to be disjointed. Even simple inconsistencies add up quickly, often at a detriment to your brand image and even customer loyalty.

The best way to prevent and overcome these pitfalls is by creating a centralized asset library within a digital asset management (DAM) solution. These systems store and organize digital assets to make them shareable and searchable by teams across an organization.

By providing teams with a single source of truth for documentation and digital assets, DAM platforms are integral to a company’s content marketing strategy and brand identity. Enable and empower your teams to represent your brand while getting back hours lost to searching for files and assets with a DAM solution. Your team will be free to focus on crafting the perfect brand story while aligning narrative, visuals, expression, and authenticity.

How to start (or supercharge) your democratic brand storytelling journey

Content comes from everywhere, but it doesn’t have to be chaotic. Start by creating a content library to help your team better leverage your assets. This will help cement your brand as a trusted authority while better communicating your value to customers. For additional help, check out this helpful guide on how to perform a digital declutter.

Use your new content library or DAM solution to eliminate unnecessary bottlenecks associated with approvals and publications. Within your DAM platform, you have the power to organize, update and share approved logos, copy blocks, tag lines, boilerplates, messaging, and educational materials to every member of your team. When you give them the power to choose from pre-approved materials, you’re saving time and money while preserving brand identity.

Be strategic. DAM solutions should support brand storytelling by enabling you to meet your customers where they are. Every digital platform – from social media outlets to digital advertising – has specific guidelines for which content is most effective for reaching your customer. A good digital asset management solution makes it easier for you to re-use content, cropping and editing for use in multiple channels. This eliminates duplicate work and enables you to leverage your assets to best suit the needs of each platform to tell your brand story.

Lastly, don’t discount the benefits of giving your team their time back. By providing a digital platform to organize and share critical content, they’ll have more time to create, connect and share with customers. Democratized storytelling connects a team to its brand and a company to its customers. Help make it happen with a digital asset management solution to optimize your content strategy.