What is a Brand Portal?

And why is it important for your business?

A Brand Portal helps stakeholders like agencies, employees, partners, and the press to access and use digital content assets efficiently. In addition, a portal creates process efficiency and offers a streamlined digital brand experience to internal teams and customers.

This article explains everything you need to learn about brand portals and why they are vital for digital brand management.

What is a Brand Portal?

In simple terms, a Brand Portal provides all the relevant brand information and content assets that you need to share with different stakeholders.

It’s a resource centre that gives access branded content assets like brand style guides, videos, graphics, logos, marketing collateral, product and company photos, presentations, brand advertisements, and training manuals. Plus, you can make them accessible to whoever may need them.

Why is a Brand Portal essential?

In a world where breaking through the digital noise remains a considerable challenge for most online businesses, staying on-brand is the best way to build trust with potential customers, employees, and business partners.

Let’s learn how a Brand Portal can be the one answer to all your digital branding woes.

Pave the way for efficient brand processes

Every department in an organization needs brand assets to meet its communication objectives. The same holds for external partners such as advertising and digital media partners.

• How do you ensure that all stakeholders have access to the precise brand content assets whenever they need them?
• How to keep tabs on what content assets are shared with whom and when?

By waiting for the sun to show up in the sky? Of course not.

A Brand Portal works as a hub of all your branded content assets. It’s the one place to distribute and control branded digital content. That’s why a brand portal creates the foundational efficiency in aligning your brand voice throughout internal and external communication.

 Save time and effort

Is your marketing team exhausted with threads of endless emails to designers, agencies, and other departments? Whether you’re scaling up your marketing efforts or not, synchronizing brand communication is one of the key ways to get your business the desired level of sales.

When you start working towards creating holistic digital experiences for all stakeholders, you realize it’s next to impossible; why? That’s because most of your branded content assets are disorganized and scattered!

➢ A Brand Portal helps you create a hub that stores the latest product photos, logos, ads, etc.
➢ A single place where you can store pre-approved content assets and make them accessible as and when required.

A Brand Portal works as a recipe kit with all the required ingredients. That’s how it can save your marketing team time worth thousands of dollars that’s otherwise spent on mundane tasks like finding and sanctioning branded content.

Simplify new product and campaign launches

A new product launch can give a CMO many sleepless nights. It’s natural because you have a hundred things to manage:

➢ You need to collaborate with the agency partners to ensure all the new product collateral is in sync with the brand guidelines.
➢ Once the collateral designs are ready, you need to ensure that all those are sent to your sales team, the distributors, and the press.
➢ Plus, you need to make sure all of this happens well before the launch date.

To tell you the truth, a Brand Portal can help turn the nightmares of new product launches into laidback poetry discussions — it’s not a joke!

With a password-protected Brand Portal, you can share all the brand guidelines with agency partners in minutes. Similarly, it’s easy to automate access to all the latest product collateral with the sales teams, distribution partners, and journalists.

 Make sure everything is brand compliant

“For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.” – Seth Godin.

The right way to attract the right customers, employees, and partners is to maintain brand consistency. So you first develop a steady communication style and then lead a tribe of those who believe in your brand’s core values. Sounds unbelievable? It’s not.

A Brand Portal is your tool to ensure and automate consistent brand communication. Whether it’s a webinar for customers or a training session for the HR team, a Brand Portal keeps your branding worries at bay.

And you must remember:

➢ The key differences between a Digital Asset Management System and a Brand Portal, so you know that it’s the latter that plays a pivotal role in offering your stakeholders on-brand digital experiences.
➢ And, while a digital asset management system and a Brand Portal complement each other, you can implement a Brand Portal with or without a DAM.

A portal helps you keep tabs on who has downloaded which content assets. And it offers complete and real-time checks over every branded content asset, within and outside the organization.

Are your brand assets still fragmented everywhere?

•  You can use a brand portal alongside your Digital Asset Management system, ERP system, or web CMS. A portal ensures that all the branded content assets are available in a single place while, at the same time, fully aligned with your brand guidelines.
• It’s possible to integrate a portal to commonly used tools and achieve brand synergy across platforms, devices, and teams.
• As all stakeholders require brand content assets daily, a portal needs to become a core organizational process rather than a supplementary tool.

By centralizing creative approvals, a Brand Portal allows marketing leaders and functional heads to create brand communication on the fly. It’s where you keep all your brand assets, manage permissions and control who has access to what.

Whether you’re a small business owner or the CMO of a large business enterprise, if you’re looking to build a trusted brand, you can’t deny the value of consistent brand communication. And if  you work with multiple teams and partners, a brand portal is a single solution to keep a constant eye on brand communication and content assets without losing time or money.

As a marketer, are you still using PDF brand guidelines to ensure consistency in brand communication? Are you looking to switch to a  brand portal but have no clue how to do it? In this article, I explain everything you need to know (including the process, the cost, and the complexity) about building a brand portal for your business.