What is a brand asset library?

A brand asset library, also known as a brand library or digital asset library, is a centralized digital repository for storing all the brand assets of an organization. Examples of brand assets include logos, images, videos, fonts, marketing collaterals, and more. Marketing and creative teams rely on these brand assets for the latest branding guidelines and approved content. This way, a brand library ensures consistent visual identity and branding across all marketing communications.

A brand asset library uses cloud-based storage to organize all these digital brand assets so that they are easily accessible from anywhere in the world. It offers advanced asset organization techniques and powerful search functionality to store assets efficiently and retrieve them quickly.

How to create a brand asset library?

Implementing a digital asset management (DAM) system is an effective way to create a brand asset library. A DAM system manages the complete lifecycle of brand assets, from upload to publication on different platforms. A DAM library acts as the central place where teams collaborate on brand assets for creative feedback and approvals.

Centralizing brand assets in a DAM ensures that different asset versions and corresponding feedback are stored in one place, reducing the risk of distributing outdated versions. Teams can revert back to older versions or share the latest version as per the requirements.

DAM systems provide features such as virtual collections that help collate brand assets from different folders in one shareable group without duplicating the assets. These collections maintain and share multiple brand assets, internally or publically, from a single location.

Additionally, teams can publish the approved content from the brand library on various channels like websites, apps, and social media.

What are the benefits of a brand asset library?

A brand library helps organizations manage a large volume of assets while maintaining the brand’s visual identity globally, optimizing resource utilization, and reducing costs. Benefits of using a brand asset library-

Brand consistency

One of the primary benefits of having a brand asset library is to have absolute confidence in the distributed assets for being brand consistent and having a unified visual identity across all touchpoints. A brand library ensures consistency by-

Version control

Transparent and centralized versioning of assets ensures the latest version is being used everywhere.

Authorized access

Brand libraries offer granular access control so that you can collaborate with agencies, freelancers, and internal stakeholders without getting concerned about unauthorized edits.

Integrations

Having streamlined integrations with CMS platforms makes asset distribution easy and error-free, which means approved assets can be directly shared on the website or app from the brand library.

Time and Cost Savings

A brand asset library reduces business expenses by optimizing workflows and saving employee time.

• With a centralized library, creative feedback and sharing happens inside the library, eliminating the need for multiple storage and communication channels like email, drive, slack, etc.
• Search for assets faster in a brand asset library with an AI-powered search.
• Increase asset reusability by discovering similar assets with visual search features, thereby preventing rework and duplicate assets.
• Automate creative transformations to generate multiple variations from one master asset in real-time, saving storage costs and employee time.

Go-live faster

A brand asset library helps you launch new products and campaigns faster by offering advanced collaboration features and in-built image editing. You can finish projects faster, which once involved multiple back and forth with agencies and freelancers. A brand asset library allows you to-

• Add precise comments on images & videos by pinpointing areas or timestamps for contextual feedback, leaving no room for wrong interpretations.
• Use virtual collections to share assets residing in multiple folders without duplicating them, reducing confusion when managing thousands of creative files.
• Use browser-based editing tools to tweak creatives, reducing reliance on designers for manual rework.

What are some business use cases for a brand asset library?

E-commerce management

E-commerce businesses manage thousands of products and exponentially more digital assets like product images, videos, ad graphics, etc. A brand library organizes all these assets with custom metadata and AI-generated auto-tags. For example, product category, color, size, gender, price range, etc., can become the parameters for asset organization, which helps in easy searchability and fast deployment on channels like websites and ad campaigns.

Managing Press and Public Relations

A brand library manages the press kits, including logos, fonts, and marketing collateral for journalists and other collaborators. It ensures that all brand communications are consistent, factually correct, and aligned with the brand’s messaging. By housing the latest brand assets, the brand library ensures that PR and content teams can respond with accurate information quickly when they are collaborating with publications, event organizers, media agencies, etc.

Brand Library for an Agency

A brand library is a valuable tool for agencies managing advertising and marketing operations for multiple brands. It allows agencies to store digital assets for all brands in one place with an organized asset structure.

With a brand library, agencies need not waste time creating zip folders and uploading and downloading files every time they want to collaborate with the brand. A DAM library offers URL-based sharing with access control and password-protected links for secure public sharing.

Agencies can store their weekly and monthly reports, sales collaterals, campaign audits, etc. for different clients in the digital asset library so that the entire communication and feedback can be tracked, and new versions can be added transparently.

Wrapping up

A brand asset library is crucial for any organization seeking to maintain consistency in its branding & communication efforts and to deliver a seamless visual identity. It streamlines the workflows for product launches, marketing campaigns, and public relations, helping brands save costs and increase productivity across the organization.

Want to create your own brand library? Visit ImageKit DAM