5 Ways to Take Control of Your Branding During a Creative Production

Consistent branding builds trust and authenticity. With inconsistency, your customers get confused and lose trust in your brand. 18.6% of companies say that inconsistent branding damages brand credibility. This becomes significant when up to 80% of customers find authenticity to be an important factor when trusting the brand. 

Not only that, but organizations also expect a 33% increase in revenue with consistent branding. 

However, with multiple teams creating assets for your company, you run the risk of losing consistent branding. Employees might develop alternate logos, colors, photography treatments, or tone of voice that contributes to the loss of consistency over time. 

How to Maintain Branding During a Creative Production?

Messy creative workflows can easily make branding inconsistent. Here are five ways to take control of your branding:

1. Create Brand Guidelines

A brand style guide, or brand guidelines, is a document that outlines rules regarding your branding elements. It contains your strategies, brand mission, value proposition, tone of voice, logo, color palette, fonts, photography treatment, media formatting, photography and graphic styles. 

But only creating a brand guide is not enough. 95% of organizations have brand guidelines, but only one-fourth of them enforce them consistently.

Make sure you distribute the brand guidelines throughout the organization and train employees to use them properly. 

Another benefit of a brand guide is the ability to share it with third-party vendors, freelancers, or consultants who create assets for your brands. As a result, you receive content aligned with your brand.

2. Create Templates

Creating every asset from scratch wastes an excessive amount of time. Plus, it exposes your brand to the risk of having altered branding. 

Templates can make content creation as easy as drag-and-drop for your team and keep branding consistent. For example, you can use templates for your social media graphics or business cards. 

In addition, using templates allows you to create and publish content faster, boosting the productivity of your creative workflow. Creating recurring content becomes a breeze instead of a hassle.

3. Have a Centralized Storage Location

Inconsistent branding is created overnight. It’s the result of several loose threads. 

Imagine a team member unable to find brand collateral because it’s buried under hundreds of files. They would have to create another from scratch. And such instances keep altering the branding slightly. 

Even when you’ve created templates and guidelines, storing them properly in a central location where employees can access them is crucial. You can use a digital asset management system (DAM) for this purpose. DAM solutions make it easy and quicker for teams to store and find creative assets.

You can also distribute updated guidelines and templates throughout the teams with a DAM. This avoids miscommunication and keeps everyone on the same page—a simple way to help the production team stay brand compliant.

4. Set up an Approval Process

An approval process is important to ensure your assets have the needed branding. But approval time can be one of the major bottlenecks of creative production. Only 8% of marketers say the majority of their projects move along efficiently. 

To avoid that, set up an approval process where everyone can collaborate easily which saves everyone’s time. An efficient approval process will avoid delays and help publish content faster, while also ensuring the branding is in place. 

A creative asset management system like globaledit can come in handy here. It makes the approval process easier for creative teams by allowing convenient commenting and ratings on assets.

5. Audit Your Brand Regularly

Use your brand guidelines to audit your branded assets like webpage, social media posts, brochures, letterheads, business cards regularly. Every brand touchpoint should be examined from time to time to make sure things are on the right track. This can’t be ignored since 60% of millennials expect a consistent brand experience.

Having branding in control during creative production ensures a consistent branding of your organization. This, in turn, maintains customer trust and facilitates the internal teams, as well. Employees have clarity on the type of assets they need to create which saves time in approval.

Request a demo with us to help you take control of your branding.