You know how important it is for potential and existing customers to feel good about your brand. Their impression of your brand creates expectations around the quality and value of your offering, and what it will feel like to use your product or service. Create positive expectations and your customers buy from your brand before they think of others in your market — that’s branding 101.

To create that kind of impression, every business needs to tell a memorable story about who they are, what they stand for, and why that’s valuable. Once you’ve got this story down, you’ve got to tell it consistently across all touchpoints to foster a clear, reliable, and strong recall of your brand story and its value.

That’s where your brand style guide comes in. It bundles up all the information and resources your internal and external teams need to represent your brand. With clear instructions on how to use all your brand assets, you can create and maintain brand consistency.

The Portals app in the Widen Collective^® offers a flexible, attractive, and easy way to share content within a branded environment. 

Our blog post Portals Examples and Use Cases showcases a range of creative and powerful ways that our customers are using portals to share assets, connect teams, and advance brand stories. In this article, we’ll share functionality details and best practices that will help you build a portal that meets your unique content and business needs.

Managing your brand to deliver great customer experiences is no easy task. You need efficient content distribution, effective marketing automation, on point social media, relationship management, and so much more. A digital asset management (DAM) system helps teams create, organize, publish, and analyze content in today’s complicated marketing environment. It is the central content hub from which you can deliver top-notch customer experiences.

Brand experience is the sum of all the sensations, thoughts, feelings, and reactions that individuals have in response to a brand. Brand experience is not specific to channel or media type. Rather, it’s the result — or the lasting impression that remains after someone encounters or engages with a brand in any environment.

Whether you’ve been using the Widen Collective^® for months or years, you might wonder: How are we doing?

Your company’s brand is the culmination of every experience a person has with your organization. It tells the world who your company is, and what you do. It is a differentiator that identifies your products or services as distinct from others in your market. And it’s a compass for making business decisions. 

A range of elements — both tangible and intangible — contribute to a brand, including tone, voice, and visual design. And each of these elements are thoughtfully and strategically developed over time, using brand assets. 

Locating the current version of a creative file can often feel like a wild goose chase. You might have a dozen to choose from, each with a slightly different headline, or logo, or font. Why have they all been updated recently? Did the company font change? Was the headline rewritten based on analytics? Which one do you use?

Trying to manage various versions of brand assets can be downright maddening. 

Fortunately, version control can help you easily organize every last asset and retrieve the one you need, instantly.

Business environments today are tough. Things change fast. From a new competitor on the scene to shifting market conditions, technologies, and buyer dynamics, there’s a lot that’s simply out of our control. Because of this, organizations are putting more and more emphasis on the things they can control — like their brand. 

Brand management, once a practice reserved for the Coca-Colas and Nikes of the world, is now a commonplace practice for any organization looking to win the hearts, minds, and spend of their target audiences. And, just as you see with other business priorities, it helps to put a dedicated person like a brand manager in place to ensure it succeeds. 

For better or worse — but hopefully, for better — my fashion sense has evolved over time.  It’s changed with the times, my environment, and my purpose. 

Your brand is exactly the same. No one gets their look and feel right on the first try. It’s an evolution influenced by many factors. Including company acquisitions, updates to an organization’s purpose statement, expansion into new locations, or just the march of time. You’re slowly acquiring the pieces that make you, you and the same is true of your brand. 

That’s why it’s important to be strategic in your approach to a brand relaunch. 

Whether your brand is traveling down the hall to a colleague's office or across the globe, you need to safeguard it for the journey ahead. With freelancers, marketing agencies, internal teams, and many others using your brand in communications and content, it's easy for inconsistencies and misuse to arise. A brand identity kit can help by providing disparate groups and individuals with the tools and information they need to uphold your brand consistently. In fact, a brand identity kit is an absolute must-have for all businesses!