Brand Asset Management (BAM): 5 Best Software & Practices to Use in Your Company (2024)

Having a rock-solid brand presence can set your company apart from the rest. Better yet, consistent branding can actually increase revenue by up to 20%.

But maintaining a consistent brand image is no easy feat. This is where effective brand asset management (BAM) can help.

By utilizing your brand elements in a consistent, organized manner, you can create a unified brand experience, streamline marketing and drive sales.

In this article, we'll discuss what brand asset management is and why it’s important for your business. We’ll also cover the top brand asset management software and best practices to help you build a strong, memorable brand.

Table of Contents

• What Are Brand Assets?
• What Is Brand Asset Management (BAM)?
• Benefits of Brand Asset Management
• 5 Best Brand Asset Management Software
• Best Practices for Brand Asset Management

*Disclaimer: The comparisons and competitor ratings presented in this article are based on features available as of Apr 27, 2023. We conduct thorough research and draw on both first-hand experience and reputable sources to provide reliable insights. However, as tools and technologies evolve, we recommend readers verify details and consider additional research to ensure the information meets their specific needs.

What Are Brand Assets?

Brand assets are all the visual, auditory and experiential elements associated with your brand. This includes your logo, the distinct colors you use and even your brand’s unique voice.

Here are some other examples of brand assets:

• Typography
• Tagline or slogan
• Jingle or sound
• Images and illustrations
• Social media templates
• Product packaging

These elements, when skillfully managed, come together to form a powerful brand identity that'll help you stand out from the crowd and win over loyal customers.

What Is Brand Asset Management (BAM)?

Brand asset management (BAM) is the process of storing, organizing and controlling your company's brand assets to create a cohesive and compelling brand identity.

Your brand assets are the valuable elements that define and distinguish your brand. By effectively managing these assets, you can foster brand consistency, enhance customer perception and boost your bottom line.

Brand asset management is made easier with the help of BAM systems and software. These platforms are designed to centralize all your brand assets and restrict access to specific team members.

The purpose of BAM systems is to make it easier for employees to access the right, up-to-date assets quickly, protect your brand, and reduce errors and inconsistencies across the board.

Brand Asset Management vs. Digital Asset Management

Made with Visme Infographic Maker

Brand Asset Management (BAM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) are often used interchangeably, but they are two distinct concepts.

BAM focuses on the strategic use of brand assets like logos, fonts and messaging to maintain a cohesive brand identity. It involves establishing brand guidelines and ensuring compliance of those guidelines across all marketing channels and touchpoints.

In contrast, DAM is a broader term that involves the organization, storage, retrieval and distribution of all types of digital assets. This includes brand assets and other media files used by your company, like images, videos and documents.

Technically, BAM is a subset of DAM as it focuses only on brand-specific digital assets. DAM also includes general business assets like financial contracts, website data, reports, social media images and other digital files.

There’s also a difference in the main purpose of BAM and DAM systems. While BAM prioritizes brand consistency, DAM aims to improve efficiency and team collaboration when it comes to managing all kinds of digital files.

Benefits of Brand Asset Management

Effective brand asset management plays a huge role in maintaining a consistent omnichannel brand. But that’s not the only benefit of BAM.

Here are a few reasons why you should prioritize brand asset management.

Improve Brand Value and Perception

Did you know 90% of customers expect consistent brand experiences across different channels?

Brand asset management ensures all marketing materials reflect your brand's core values and messaging. This helps create a positive perception of your brand in your audiences’ minds.

Additionally, BAM involves monitoring the quality of your brand assets over time as well as adapting to changing trends and customer demands. All of this ensures your brand remains relevant and maintains a strong connection with your audience.

As your brand's value increases, so does its potential to attract new customers, retain existing ones and ultimately boost your bottom line.

Streamline Creative Workflows

According to Coveo, employees spend around 4.2 hours a day searching for relevant information—that’s more than half of an average work day!

Brand asset management helps save this valuable time by centralizing brand assets and brand-specific information.

Consequently, your company saves money by improving productivity and optimizing the use of resources.
BAM systems also improve team collaboration and reduce the likelihood of errors and miscommunication. For instance, everyone on the team can easily grab the latest and most accurate versions of your logo and brand fonts.

This results in an overall cohesive creative process and improved end results for all kinds of branded projects.

Protect Your Brand

Brand asset management helps safeguard your brand by establishing robust control mechanisms and ensuring the proper use of your assets. Here’s how:

• Manage and restrict access: BAM systems let you control access to your brand assets and grant permissions based on individual roles or teams. This way, you can ensure that only authorized personnel can view, edit or share your assets.

Prevent misuse of digital files: ACFE estimates around 5% of revenue is lost to fraud each year, which includes intellectual property theft and misuse. This stat prompts organizations to implement strong security measures to prevent identity theft and safeguard their organization's assets.

With BAM, you can establish guidelines and policies for utilizing assets and avoid potential legal issues or reputational damage.

Brand asset management serves as a protective shield for your brand. By managing access and usage, you can maintain a consistent, secure and strong brand presence in the market.

5 Best Brand Asset Management Software

Brand asset management platforms accelerate the process of finding and leveraging assets, collaborating with team members and navigating creative processes. Having the right software makes it easier to maintain brand consistency across various touchpoints.

Here are five top brand asset management software for your team:

Visme

Visme is an all-in-one content creation platform that helps you design and share all kinds of visuals quickly and easily. With easy-to-use features like customizable templates, a drag-and-drop editor and collaboration tools, Visme enables your team to create stunning visual content that perfectly aligns with your brand identity.

Here are some key features of Visme that help it stand out as one of the best brand asset management software:

Brand asset library: Store and organize all your brand assets in one easy-to-access location. Upload up to 25 GB of images, videos, icons, fonts and other assets to always have the right material on hand. Use the built-in search bar to find assets quickly.

Brand kit: Save your updated brand elements like logo, fonts and color palette in the brand kit and automatically apply them to future projects to stay on-brand every time.

Branded templates: Choose from a vast library of professionally designed templates that can be tailored to match your brand identity. Or, use our AI brand design tool to automatically generate a set of 40+ templates that align with your brand.

Slide library: Save custom presentations to your slide library to always create on-brand decks. Simply tweak master slide information to immediately reflect the changes across all content in your dashboard.

Reusable content blocks: Save and repurpose parts of your designs to speed up content creation and stay on-brand across multiple projects.

Customizable design elements: Browse thousands of built-in icons, images, videos and illustrations inside the Visme editor. Our design elements are fully editable to match your brand colors and style.

Team collaboration: Empower your team to work together seamlessly on projects, providing feedback and sharing ideas within the editor. Additionally, use whiteboarding to brainstorm, stay on the same page and produce consistent content.

Role-based permissions: Maintain control over your assets by managing user permissions. Easily assign roles to team members, making sure they have the appropriate level of access.

Watch this video to learn how to give role-based permissions and streamline team collaboration in Visme.

Visme analytics: Measure the performance of projects shared via Visme and track key metrics like views, unique visits and average time spent.

Multiple sharing options: Download your brand’s content in any format, from JPG and PNG to PDF and HTML5. Or, skip downloading to share your projects online with a public or private link. You can also embed assets and projects with responsive code.

Pricing

You can create an account on Visme for free and use it for as long as you want. If you want to scale your branding efforts, here are the paid plans it offers:

• Starter: $12.25/mo
• Pro: $24.75/mo
• Visme for Teams: Contact for pricing

Frontify

Frontify is a comprehensive brand management software that focuses on centralizing and organizing your brand resources. With its user-friendly interface, the platform facilitates smooth collaboration, making it easier for teams to access and share assets.

Below are Frontify’s key features:

• Digital brand guidelines
• Centralized asset storage library
• Powerful search functionality with metadata and tagging
• Collaboration, feedback and annotation tools
• Digital and print templates with design tool integrations
• Customizable access permissions
• Asset usage analytics
• Automated file format conversion
• Direct asset embedding and sharing

Pricing

Frontify offers a free 14-day trial, where you can test out many of its features. And to unlock the complete solution, you’ll have to book a demo and contact the sales team for pricing details.

Bynder

Bynder is a user-friendly digital asset management platform that centralizes your brand elements in one place. Its unique features include advanced metadata tagging and dynamic asset transformation. The platform is ideal for medium to large-sized businesses with complex branding and content creation needs.

Here are Bynder’s key brand asset management features:

• Integrated brand guidelines
• Digital asset management
• Versioning and annotation tools
• Content review and approval hub
• Advanced metadata tagging
• Customizable templates for digital and print
• Dynamic Asset Transformation (DAT)
• Customizable access permissions
• Asset performance analytics and reporting

Pricing

Bynder does not offer a free trial, but you can request a demo and test out its features. For pricing-related details of Bynder’s asset management plans, you can contact their sales team.

Brandfolder

Brandfolder is an enterprise-level digital asset management software that helps you with end-to-end brand management. The platform is owned by Smartsheet and integrates seamlessly with the latter for smoother workflows, data visualizations and reporting.

Here are Brandfolder’s key features:

Digital asset management
Workflow, proofing and approval tools
Easily accessible brand style guide
Automated content creation
AI-driven asset tagging and recommendations
On-demand printing of brand materials
Smartsheet integration for custom reports and dashboards
Integrations and Custom API

Pricing

Brandfolder does not offer a free trial, but you can reach out to their sales team to book a complete demo and get pricing details.

Widen Collective

Widen Collective — part of Acquia — is a scalable digital asset management platform designed for large organizations and enterprises. Its unique features include seamless integration with various tools, advanced AI capabilities like image recognition and high-level security.

Here are Widen’s key brand asset management features:

• Digital asset organization
• Product information management
• Insights for tracking and measuring content
• Portals for sharing assets and information
• Web-to-print templates
• Workflow tools for reviewing and proofing
• Digital watermarking and rights management

Pricing

Widen Collective does not offer a free trial, but you can request a demo to take it for a test drive. They offer three paid plans and you have to fill out a form to request pricing information.

Best Practices for Brand Asset Management

Brand asset management is about more than just storing your assets in the cloud.

It also involves getting your entire team on the same page, evolving with changing market and consumer trends and customizing access to protect and nurture your brand.

Here are some of the top best practices for effective brand asset management.

Establish Clear Brand Guidelines

BAM systems help you store and organize your assets. But to ensure your assets are utilized properly by team members, you need clear brand guidelines in place.

Your brand guidelines or style guide should include instructions—preferably visual—on how to correctly use your logo, typography, colors, imagery, slogan, packaging, tone of voice and other brand assets across various channels.

For example, you might want your logo to only be used horizontally or against a white background. You may also want to specify primary and secondary colors to be used in content shared on social media.

Make sure you include any logo and font variations and provide examples of correct and incorrect usage.

Fortunately, most BAM software lets you upload your brand style guide so employees can easily access and leverage it in their creative workflows.

Don’t have a brand guideline or style guide? Visme has a rich library of templates you can use to create one for your brand.

Pro Tip: Visme lets you create a Brand Kit that stores your logo, fonts, color palette and templates. Whenever you create a project, you can easily apply your branding with a few clicks. No more worrying about inconsistent branding, regardless of who is working on the project.

Evolve and Adapt Your Brand

Brand asset management is not only about storing and organizing existing brand assets.

It’s also about revisiting those assets and updating them to keep up with new trends and changing customer demands. Your brand is a living, breathing entity that needs constant nurturing. This includes evolving with grace over time.

For example, you may want to polish your logo or change your brand colors to align with consumer preferences. You may also want to adapt your website to resonate more with your target audience.

Whatever it is, you need to ensure your assets are all up-to-date, properly organized into folders and tagged in your brand asset management software. This will make it easier for your team members to quickly grab the right assets and refer to old assets as needed.

Also, regardless of how you choose to update your assets, ensure they align with your authentic brand voice and core values. Always ensure your rebranding efforts are backed by extensive market research, testing and refining to increase your chances of success.

Empower Your Team

Your employees are your brand's ambassadors, so it's crucial to equip them with the knowledge, tools and resources they need to effectively represent and manage your brand.

Conduct regular training to educate your team on brand asset management. Offer workshops, webinars or seminars to update them on brand guidelines. Show them how to use the BAM software and emphasize the importance of staying consistent.

Additionally, encourage feedback from your team. Foster an open line of communication, allowing employees to provide input on brand assets, share ideas and voice their concerns.

Pro Tip: Work on branded projects with your team with Visme’s collaboration features. Take advantage of advanced annotation, freehand drawing, whiteboarding, commenting and more to create stunning, on-brand content together.

Finally, don’t forget to recognize and reward team members who make the effort to stay on-brand. Celebrating them will help build a culture of brand consistency, encouraging other employees to do the same.

Easily Manage Your Brands Assets & More with Visme

Brand asset management can help you stay organized, improve brand consistency and ultimately grow your company’s revenue. Choosing the right BAM software is a big part of that, empowering your team to be more efficient and stay on-brand.

Ready to put your knowledge into practice? Elevate your brand with Visme’s content creation platform. Leverage digital asset management, AI-powered branding tools, thousands of customizable templates, sharing options, built-in analytics and more.

Find out more about how Visme can help your marketing team create and implement a powerful, multi-channel brand strategy.