Managing a Brand Course
Module 2 — Lesson 2
Welcome to lesson two of the content and brand module! Today we’ll be discussing social media from the lens of brand management. How can you as a brand expert make sure that all your social posts, profiles and ads are on brand but also in line with the demands of that specific platform. Afterall, what your marketers post on Linkedin will probably be very different to what they post of Instagram, right? Efficient and consistent brand management is not trying to make all your posts the same and imposing strict guidelines that limit creativity. It’s about providing frames to great content that is consistent and that your audience immediately recognizes as a message from your brand.
Keeping up with your social media presence takes up a lot of time. You need to plan your posting schedule, source images and banners, create posts and be mindful of hashtags, check analytics, and monitor and respond to comments and other reactions. Ideally, you’d also be active in posts and conversations that are trending in your industry and regularly check the posts you’ve been tagged on. Now multiple this list of activities with the number of your active social media channels and you’ll get an idea of how much time social media will take.
Thankfully, there are many tools that make your social media management more streamlined and consistent. There are tools that help you with coming up with creative content, and tools that help you with efficiency. Let’s view the three most popular categories of tools and our recommendations for them:
Online dashboards, such as Hootsuite, Buffer or TweetDeck help you with planning your content calendar and allow you to easily post in bulk for most of your social media channels. The best of them also offer you analytics and an overview of comments, impressions and likes, all in one view.
Lacking ideas for your next post? Use a blog title generator offered by Hubspot, Link Bait Generator or Portent’s Content Idea Creator if you need inspiration or new angles for posting content.
Most of us need help making sure all our digital assets like images, banners and videos are easy to find, always up-to-date and accessible for everyone who needs them. A Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution can save you 70% of time and make sure all your assets get used. Lytho’s award-winning DAM solution is a great choice if you are looking for the most user-friendly, quick to implement system.
Prioritize for the best strategy fit
If you only had time or resources to implement one type of tool to improve your social media strategy, I’m going to make a bold statement and say that you should choose DAM. Why? Because it can offer so much and improve your social media performance in a variety of ways. The right DAM solution is not just a tool for efficiency but a strategic partner in all your marketing efforts.
“For a truly effective social campaign, a brand needs to embrace the first principles of marketing, which involves brand definition and consistent storytelling.” Brand consistency is key in marketing. The right digital asset management solution helps everyone in your social media management team access the same, on-brand content. The result of using a DAM as your single source of truth is not just many saved hours but also that no one is using an old version of your logo, the wrong font in a banner or a poor quality image which result in poor branding consistency.
Easily find the right images. In a DAM environment, you can access all your media. Are you searching an image from a certain period in 2015 containing product x? Thanks to the smart search tool you find the image you were looking for with just two clicks. In a DAM that’s been designed with the end-user in mind, images are categorized by characteristics, not by a complex folder structure. These characteristics or tags are descriptions of files and speed up the search process.Browsing through folders and files or requesting colleagues for images is no longer necessary once you work with DAM software.
Resizing and adjusting images. A seasoned marketing professional might know these by heart, but for most people it feels like the search for the correct social media image sizes is a constant battle. DAM software doesn’t just help with the search for the right image, it also allows you to convert them to the appropriate size and format without downloading them to an image editor first. For instance, if you want to upload a photo on your Facebook timeline, the recommended size is 476x714. In a DAM solution, you can scale these images to this exact size so you can quickly get started with your marketing campaign.
Campaigns according to theme. Another nifty DAM feature is the possibility to find images with corresponding colors. For instance, for your spring campaign you need images that contain nice, bright colors to reflect the fresh feeling that your new product launch hopes to emulate. Or maybe you would like to support your branding and you are looking for images with color codes that correspond with thecolors of your company logo? With a DAM, these actions are just one click away. By searching for illustrations with the same exact color code, you gain a consistent look in your marketing communications. Color searching is one of the many features of DAM software that strengthens your branding in social media.
In conclusion, using a dashboard, blog- or quote generator enriches and speeds up your social media marketing processes. But only a DAM can help your marketing on all social media channels by increasing efficiency, consistency, and giving you tools to take your performance to the next level. We’ll be discussing this further in the third module where we explore different tools to help you out keeping your brand in line.
Bonus content: How to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media.
Index
Module 1: Brand management
- Introduction video
- How to improve brand management across all channels
- Managing a brand remotely
- Pivoting a brand to fit customer objectives and revenue goals
- Managing brand consistency with external stakeholders
- Brand KPIs
- Brand metrics: measuring brand awareness
- Brand reputation management
Module 2: Content and brand
- Introduction video
- How brand ties into content
- Social media management
- Workflow management
- Why content marketing works
- Challenges and opportunities in modern content marketing
Module 3: Managing branded assets
- Introduction video
- What is the best platform for you to manage branded content
- What is the best taxonomy for managing digital content
- The benefits of Digital Asset Management for your brand
- The business value of Digital Asset Management
- Guide to choosing a DAM + Implementation checklist & ROI calculator
- Never download an asset again!
Originally published at https://www.lytho.com.
