There are countless marketing terms discussed on the internet, and it’s easy to get confused between similar terminology. A “brand portal” is one such term, as it is often used interchangeably with a DAM when there is a significant difference in both terms despite having overlapping features. Chances are, if you’ve landed on this page it is because you want to know more about what a brand portal is and whether it can benefit you. Alternatively, you might be wondering if you should pick a DAM system and if there is any alternative tool catering to your requirement. In this blog, we have comprehensively explained what a brand portal does to help you with your research.

What is a Brand Portal?

Think of a brand portal as a subset of a digital asset management system. While enterprise DAM systems incorporate all kinds of digital assets, the key difference is that a brand portal only contains assets used for branding and marketing purposes. A brand portal acts as a centralized hub for sharing all assets related to your brand’s identity: logos, fonts, user guidelines and more. In other words, a brand portal allows you to conveniently manage your digital assets internally (with employees) as well as externally (with clients or agencies) based on your requirement.

Why Do I Need a Brand Portal? 

Giving certain team members, agencies or users direct access to your digital assets is a more efficient way to work for many reasons. But that doesn’t mean you want to share everything. You want extended teams to be able browse and download only the assets they need — not the entire database, right? You would also want to provide your agency partners with an easy way to upload assets back to the author environment. And you probably want to see how your assets are being used and distributed so you can manage users more efficiently and securely too. A brand portal solves these exact pain points and since these challenges are universal among marketing teams they provide great value to businesses. 

Key benefits of a brand portal 

A brand portal enables you to set up an organized digital library

Similar to a DAM system, a brand portal is a centralized asset management system which helps you organize and track digital assets (specifically, assets revolving around marketing and branding.) These assets could be photos, videos, logos, music and other media files. Your team members are able to retrieve the relevant asset that they require regardless of location or time.

A brand portal helps you track your asset usage

With a brand portal, you are able to effectively track the usage of digital assets to optimize your future campaigns and also gather insights in real-time. This data is invaluable and can further help you in growing your business.

A brand portal decreases your turnaround time

A brand portal makes marketing processes much more efficient. With a high degree of control over user access, the internal and external branding process becomes much simpler. For example, if one team or user only needs to use assets from a particular campaign, they are only granted access to those assets. Or if you want certain employees to be able to use assets without modifying them you can set these controls as well. This ensures brand compliance and optimizes your branding and marketing efforts thanks to less manual errors, ultimately leading to faster turnaround times. 

Should I pick a brand portal or a Digital Asset Management system?

One of the most common questions among executives interested in a brand portal is whether to use a DAM system instead. A Digital Asset Management system (or DAM) acts as a repository of digital assets just like a brand portal, but the truth is that choosing which software to use depends on the use-case. Here are some things to keep in mind: 

What is the complexity level of your workflows?

This is perhaps one of the most important questions to consider. A brand portal encompasses fairly simple collaboration and validation workflows that do not typically involve many different roles within the company, while a DAM is able to manage far more complex workflows. 

Within the DAM, different users have different roles and responsibilities and user permissions and workflows must reflect this, since it enforces global content management and branding processes via customizable editing and approval workflows. Marketing teams gain granular control of how content is used and distributed across all channels and touchpoints. 

A DAM’s collaborative workflows are designed for organization-wide adoption, distributed marketing scenarios. Furthermore, it is easy to involve legal, risk and compliance managers in the content validation process.

What is your intended business outcome?

A good brand portal ensures that marketing teams can easily develop and manage their brand. It increases understanding and engagement around your brand.

However, a DAM can offer much more than a portal solution for simple brand management and publishing use cases. 

An enterprise DAM is designed for global, distributed organizations with large volumes of diverse online and offline content. A DAM’s capabilities span both high-performance, mission-critical asset delivery in digital and commerce operations and publishing (distributed marketing, controlled template-based personalization or web-to-print, and product packaging localization) in the offline realm.

Ultimately, a DAM aims to support the customer experience and to improve selling, taking it way beyond the capabilities of a brand portal. 

A brand portals acts as a more affordable tool for smaller companies (in exchange for less functionality) – this is also an important consideration you should make.

Which type of user will be accessing the system? 

Brand portals are primarily designed to accommodate brand marketing teams and a baseline of casual users across a limited number of roles. Users don’t necessarily require any specific training for using the platform. They have all the tools and resources they need to get their job done in one place.

In terms of usability, DAMs also include streamlined search capabilities and sophisticated indexing strategies that harness AI to make casual, self-service access easy – and even more powerful! They are equally designed to serve the needs of specialist users, such as DAM librarians and professional taxonomists.  

In terms of organizational scale, DAMs can implement sophisticated content access permissions, user provisioning and workflows without limitation in size or in scope.

Conclusion 

A brand portal is a versatile tool that acts as a repository for your digital assets and can be used in a multitude of ways. While a brand portal and digital asset management system have largely overlapping features, they have different uses depending on your business requirements. If you seek a tool to optimize your branding and marketing, along with maintaining corporate guidelines a brand portal is your best bet. However, if you are a large enterprise requiring more granular control you are perhaps better suited for a complete DAM system.

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