Branding Assets: How to Identify and Leverage Your Brand Assets

What makes your brand unique? What differentiates you from the competition? Is it your colors, packaging, slogan, marketing visuals, or unique offerings made by Delesign? Now that the world is undergoing digital disruption, it has become important for companies to pay attention to items that form part of their image. These items are referred to as branding assets.

Defining Branding Assets

If this is your first time hearing about brand assets, then it is important to define what they are. In layman terms, they are assets that are unique to your brand and will attract automatic attention.

Do you feel that building your brand is getting more difficult than ever? Whether your company is a legit essay writing service or an online T-shirt store, you still need to care about its reputation and unique selling point. And it should be an ongoing process if you want your business to thrive.

Simply put, only your brand has these assets so they cannot be associated with any other brand. However, these assets should be recognizable by consumers, and not you and your team alone. Considering these criteria, any of the following can be your branding assets:

• Themes, fonts, and colors
• Slogan and logo
• Mascot
• Product packaging
• Scripts, scents, and music

Here’s the logic: Depending on having any of these alone is not enough to stand out. A strategy is very important in deciding what assets your brand should focus on. Your assets need to be in line with your mission statement and core values. This makes it easy for them to tell the world about your brand.

Many top brands have invested in their brand assets which have added success to their marketing campaigns. Classic examples are the Coca-Cola font and bottle, the Nike “swoosh” logo, and McDonald’s’ golden arches.

Benefits of Using Branding Assets

The place of brand assets in your marketing campaign cannot be overemphasized. If you can channel them right, success is inevitable. There are so many benefits these assets bring to the table. Two very important ones include:

Better ROI – When consumers see an ad, they should be able to recognize that it is for your brand at a glance. Once they are not able to, that campaign isn’t successful. With brand assets like a theme song, colors, or a mascot, your ads become unique. Such uniqueness gives you better returns on your investment in that campaign.

Boosts conversions– The stretch between seeing your product for the first time and making a purchase is long. Many times, consumers lose the brand message before they make a purchase. With brand assets, you can keep consumers engaged every step of the way. This helps to increase sales conversions.

Identifying Branding Assets

Many brands don’t even have an idea of what their branding assets are. As a result, they are not able to leverage to improve sales conversions or achieve better brand recognition. Here’s how to identify the brand assets at your disposal:

Assess brand elements

The first thing you should do is write down a list of all the elements connected to your brand. Choose the ones that are distinct to your brand and can be used as brand assets. This is important for further study and evaluation.

Include in your list all the historical elements from when you began the brand. Don’t leave out anything, whether they are still in use of not. Now evaluate their potential of making your brand distinct in the nearest future.

Collect data and feedback

This requires you to engage your target market. Speak to them and ask questions to get data and feedback.

What is your aim? To know their demographic information and how much they can recognize your brand. The best way to do this is to roll out surveys via your brand’s social media pages. You can also pay for ad space asking them to fill a quick survey.

Finally, you can use AB testing. This helps you know which of your ads with different assets gets the highest clicks.

Analyze your data

Collecting data or feedback is only the first step. You need to breakdown this data and analyze it to squeeze out the juice. Check the number of consumers that can recognize your brand by seeing your logo alone.

Also check out the same results with your slogan, font, mascots, and colors. Check to see how your results fare against those of your competitors. This gives a clear picture of how much consumers can recognize your unique element.

Use this information to plot a graph after converting your numbers to percentages. This may take a while but it helps you identify your branding assets in the end.

When you have done all three, you’ll be able to split your elements into four categories:

a. Avoid – These are elements that are synonymous with other brands. There’s no point in using them.

b. Use/Lose – Elements in this category can replace or supplement your brand name when advertising.

c. Ignore/Test – The market doesn’t recognize these elements. You’ll need to put in extra work to develop their value.

d. Invest Potential – These elements have are potential brand assets but they need development. You need to use them along with your brand name until you develop a unique association to make them assets.

Leveraging Branding Assets

After testing the market, receiving feedback, and analyzing your results, you have your branding assets. That’s great but that’s not all. It is time to leverage these assets. This is where the challenge lies for many brands.

Here are some tips to help you leverage your brand assets:

Consistent use

The idea behind brand assets is to ensure that consumers associate these assets with your brand. That means that they must accompany everything your brand does in the market. Find out touchpoints related to your brand and pair them with the assets.

You must maintain consistency across all your channels. This implies that every asset you use in physical packaging should accompany online campaigns.

Organize your assets using a digital asset management system

All the members of your marketing team must have access to the chosen brand elements. This is only possible if you make use of a digital asset management system. Team members will have access to these elements, organize them, and use them when necessary.

Seek feedback often

Even if you have a strong and reliable marketing team, their knowledge is always limited. The people that know how your brand performs on the market the most are consumers.

This is why you must run constant surveys to inquire about your branding assets. Keep asking and testing, get the results, and keep analyzing. This is the best way to find out the strength of your elements on the market.

Copyrighting or Trademarking

It is no secret that when your competitors notice your winning formula, they’ll want to copy it. You cannot let that happen. How can you avoid this?

Protect your top assets. The best way to do this is to copyright or trademark these assets. This will ward off competitors automatically.

Conclusion

Branding assets are important in building a unique image for your brand. The most important way to leverage these assets is consistent use. Now will be a great time to check for your most unique brand elements and start to develop them into assets. If you’re having trouble with this, you can reach out to the experts at Delesign.