Think of your favorite brand. You’re probably picturing its logo and colors, or even a unique tagline or tone of voice.
A company’s brand is its identity. It’s what customers remember and what sets the brand apart from competitors. Companies must protect their brand at all costs to ensure they portray a unified image across every touchpoint. Inconsistencies can confuse customers, erode trust, and damage a brand’s reputation — not to mention drag down its value to consumers.
Brand compliance and brand management are tough to get right — and keep right. However, the right tools can help companies alleviate that burden, positively impact everything from how customers interpret product marketing to how internal teams collaborate to deliver an asset.
What we'll cover
Table of contents
What are brand management tools?
Brand management software is like a command center for your brand identity. It centralizes all aspects of your brand so everyone who touches it can create, maintain, and distribute resources and assets consistently.
It can be hard to keep branding in check and cohesive across platforms, channels, and departments.
Say your company sells uniforms to other businesses. A potential customer calls and asks if your company can embroider individuals’ names onto uniforms. They speak to a member of the sales team, who assures them this is possible and tells them they can place their order right away: 200 customized uniforms, quoted at the standard price.
Many confused phone calls between fulfillment, marketing, and sales later, and the original salesperson has to call the customer back with the bad news: they promised a service the company doesn’t actually offer.
Not only is this embarrassing for your team member, but it also leaves a sour taste in the potential customer’s mouth. Unsurprisingly, they take their business elsewhere and drop a few nasty reviews online along the way.
Brand management software includes specialized digital tools that make this task a lot easier. Some of the most common features you’ll see in these tools include:
- Collaborative proofing: Helps teams simplify their review and approval process
- Digital asset management (DAM): Centralizes a brand’s visual assets
- Brand monitoring: Allows companies to stay on top of how consumers perceive their brands online
- Reputation management: Gives companies the tools to nurture and grow their online reputations
Who should use brand management tools?
Anyone who plays a role in shaping or communicating a brand’s identity should take advantage of brand management tools. These tools allow stakeholders across roles and departments to ensure a cohesive, on-brand experience and build trust and loyalty among customers.
- Creative teams: With a centralized library of brand assets, including logos, images, templates, and guidelines, creative teams always have the latest approved assets at their fingertips. A brand management tool can boost collaboration and spark creativity.
- Creative operations: When it’s time to provide feedback and manage the approval process, a creative approval tool helps streamline communications and reduce bottlenecks.
- Marketing teams: From social media to the company’s website, marketing teams are responsible for creating and distributing marketing materials that align with the brand’s personality and guidelines. A brand management tool helps them ensure consistency and maximize the impact of their marketing efforts.
What to look for in brand management software
Here are some factors you’ll want to consider when exploring brand management software for your team.
Collaboration features
Brand management is an all-hands-on-deck task. Content marketers craft messaging. Graphic designers create visuals. Customer support fields brand-related inquiries. With so many tasks in motion, it’s easy for teams to become disconnected and silo off into their own areas.
Brand management software creates a bridge between teams. It grants everyone access to the latest information so they can provide feedback on projects and collaborate in real time.
Workflow and approval processes
A clearly defined workflow outlines roles and responsibilities for each stage of a project. When team members know what they need to do and when, there’s less confusion and fewer bottlenecks in the process. As a result, teams can create high-quality assets faster and without as many starts and stops along the way.
Many brand management tools offer automated routing features. This moves projects through predefined review and approval stages, eliminating manual handoffs and involving the right stakeholders at the right time.
Version control
Version control acts as both a safety net and a time machine. When marketing teams disagree over which version of a file is the latest, brand management software gives them a single source of truth to rely on.
Teams can see when and where other team members made changes. If unapproved changes slip through the cracks, they can revert to previous versions.
Brand guidelines management
Brand guidelines set the foundation for consistency and compliance. No matter the asset or who creates it, these style guides give the brand a unified look and feel. They also help anyone who interacts with the brand know what to do and what not to do. For example, if you’re working with an influencer, these guidelines will tell them what type of messaging to use, what language to avoid, and how your product should be positioned.
Your brand management software is a repository for the most current and approved guidelines. This is especially valuable for remote teams and global organizations where time zones and physical locations can be barriers to accessing information.
Customization and scalability
Plan for the future of your brand, not just your current reality. As your brand evolves, so will your needs.
Let’s say your team gets larger or you begin taking on more complex projects. You’ll need brand management software that enables you to maintain control over your growing company. Being able to customize the software to fit your organizational needs is important.
Integrations
Consider how you might integrate the software with your existing marketing tools and CRM. This will allow your teams to work without switching between multiple applications.
Integrations with project management and communication tools facilitate better collaboration among team members, ensuring everyone is on the same page. When teams are already familiar with tools, they’re also more likely to use them.
The best digital brand management tools for creatives
When it comes to helping creative teams maintain brand consistency, brand management software is a no-brainer. It simplifies and automates workflows so teams can collaborate more effectively.
So let’s dive into some of the top contenders. We’ve included various types of brand management tools — collaborative proofing, DAM, brand monitoring, and reputation management — to address a range of needs.
1. Ziflow
Ziflow is a cloud-based collaborative proofing tool that enables teams to review all creative assets on one platform. With simple, easy-to-use markup tools, team members can accurately capture feedback and reach decisions on projects faster. This means fewer brand slip-ups and greater transparency.
Built with scalability and enterprise-readiness in mind, Ziflow makes it easy for businesses to stay on top of brand management — whether you’re dealing with a few projects a month or dozens. Ziflow can easily grow with your business and accommodate changing needs.
You can choose between monthly or yearly billing, with the Standard plan starting at $199/month for up to 15 users. A free option is also available.
Key features
- Review all types of creatives on one platform.
- Compare versions side-by-side to quickly review changes and comments.
- Create templates for all your workflows.
- Track who has opened, reviewed, and approved creative projects.
- Connect with thousands of tools and apps, including Adobe Creative Cloud.
- Collaborate online from any device — no downloads or installs required.
2. Frontify
Frontify is a brand-building platform that offers user-friendly digital asset management and customizable portals. It moves the brand management process online so teams can collaborate in one unified digital space.
The number of monthly active users drives Frontify’s value-based pricing.
Key features
- Boost collaboration and engagement with easily accessible, editable digital guidelines and interconnected digital asset management.
- Upload, store, organize, and share any type of asset from one platform.
- Curate your customer brand portals to inspire your teams.
- Enhance the power of the platform with the open developer toolkit.
3. ReviewStudio
ReviewStudio puts an end to long email chains, unclear feedback, and messy approvals. With this online proofing software, teams can gather and manage feedback, reduce turnaround times, and get sign-offs faster.
The platform connects both internal and external teams of partners and freelancers, eliminating some of the most common workflow challenges.
ReviewStudio offers four plans, including a free plan. Plans are billed monthly or yearly and start at $12/user/month.
Key features
- Assign, track, and manage tasks, resolving feedback as you work.
- Compare versions side-by-side with synced navigation and a difference highlighter.
- Markup over 100 file formats including video, PDF, images, web, and documents.
- Control comment and version privacy with internal/external privacy mode.
4. Bynder
An AI-powered DAM, Bynder is the single source of truth for digital content across systems and marketing channels. It’s a scalable solution that helps big and small businesses ensure 100% brand consistency across touchpoints. Bynder offers an intuitive user interface and a rich set of integrations.
Multiple factors determine Bynder’s subscription plan pricing, including the number of users, storage, products included, and the desired level of support.
Key features
- Centralized management of your digital assets.
- Leverage AI to organize and find files.
- Build a narrative around your brand assets to enable audience-specific experiences and educate stakeholders on correct content usage.
- Eliminate bottlenecks and automatically route finished assets.
5. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a unified social media management platform built to transform not only your marketing strategy but every area of your organization. With help from Sprout’s advanced AI and machine learning (ML) technology, businesses can stay ahead of their competitors and make strategic decisions based on accurate data.
Sprout plans are billed monthly or yearly, and the Standard plan starts at $199/seat/month.
Key features
- Eliminate manual tasks and handle large volumes of social messages through AI and automation.
- Quickly and easily assess if you should prioritize a message to avoid brand damage with spike alerts.
- Simplify collaboration on social media posts with unanimous approvals and drag-and-drop features.
- Share your content calendar with external stakeholders and interact in real time with internal conversations.
6. Brand24
Brand24 is an AI social listening tool that helps companies protect their brand reputation and measure brand awareness. Find out what people are saying about your brand across social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews, and more.
Plans are billed monthly or yearly, starting at $79/month for the Individual plan.
Key features
- Discover what people say about your brand and take action in real time.
- Identify sudden changes in discussion volume to protect your company image.
- Spot problems before they escalate and maximize the potential of positive publicity you’re receiving.
- Turn your data into automated PDF reports, .xls files, and infographics.
7. BrandMaster
BrandMaster offers online brand management tools that help users easily access their digital assets. Focused on collecting and distributing digital marketing assets, BrandMaster’s online tools foster more efficient communication flows and operations for brand, marketing, and human relations managers.
The number of users in your organization will determine your pricing.
Key features
- Eliminate the challenges of outdated content and assets in circulation and learn how, when, and where content appears.
- Take control of past, present, and future marketing activities and know where your marketing expenses are going.
- Collect and share information in one place to engage employees.
- Leverage tools for news monitoring, semantic search, workflow management, and content creation.
8. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool with scheduling, content creation, analytics tools, and social listening capabilities. Even those with beginner knowledge of social media marketing can manage social platforms and optimize audience engagement using this tool.
Hootsuite offers two pricing plans billed every month starting at $99/month.
Key features
- Create, schedule, and publish content for all platforms from one dashboard.
- Generate captions and post ideas using Hootsuite’s exclusive AI tool.
- Find out which marketing campaigns drive the most leads and conversions with advanced analytics.
- Monitor online conversations about your brand and product and identify emerging trends.
Strengthen your brand management procedures with Ziflow
At the core of every successful business is a consistent brand. Brand management software helps companies build stronger, more impactful brands that resonate with their target audiences and drive business growth.
Ziflow gives teams everything they need to manage their brand in one place, making it easy to collaborate and ensure brand compliance.
