Understanding what Brand Portals Are

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, it’s more important than ever to ensure your assets are easily accessible to improve collaboration and ensure your organization is accurately reflected across all channels. A brand portal is the key! 

While distributing your assets is important, equally as critical is ensuring they're distributed in a way that reflects your brand. Not only is brand consistency reported to generate a 33% increase in overall growth, but it’s also been linked to improving employee morale. Ensuring asset security is crucial in this process, as it protects digital assets while providing appropriate access for users.

With this in mind, it’s no longer enough to share assets using traditional distribution solutions like Dropbox, Flickr, or WeTransfer. You need a solution that looks and feels like your unique brand.

Brand portals, like MediaValet’s Branded Portals, enable you to extend the reach of your assets while maintaining your brand identity.

Brand portals can be used across numerous industries for better content distribution initiatives. From brand management to agency collaboration, brand portals can streamline and enhance organizations across various industries. They also enhance process efficiency and provide a streamlined digital experience for internal teams.

In this blog post we cover:

• What is a Brand Portal?
• What are the Benefits of Brand Portals?
• Common Brand Portal Examples and Use Cases
• A Quick Peek at MediaValet Branded Portals

Understanding what Brand Portals Are

A brand portal enables organizations to curate and share collections of digital assets with internal and external users as a custom-branded online library. With an easy-to-use page builder, you can customize portal sections to organize your assets by project, campaign, file type, and more.

Connected to your digital asset management system, brand portals update in real time as you upload new asset versions or delete assets within your digital asset management (DAM) system. This ensures your portal is always up-to-date, without having to manually swap-out images, re-upload PDFs, etc.

What are the Benefits of Brand Portals?

Brand portals help brand and marketing teams get their files to the right people, while maintaining their visual identity. They alleviate a number of pain points and introduce countless benefits, including:

Streamlined Brand Consistency: Brand portals allow organizations to maintain a consistent brand image while sharing vital assets. Whether for internal team members or external stakeholders, these portals ensure that all shared content aligns with the company's brand guidelines. This feature is particularly useful for distributing marketing campaigns, brand guidelines, and onboarding materials, where the brand portal sets the tone for the engagement.

Effortless Sharing and Management: Each portal can be shared through customizable URLs, making it simple to direct stakeholders to relevant content. This ease of management not only saves time but also enhances the effectiveness of communication campaigns. By organizing portal sections by asset type, campaigns, or projects, users can find what they need quickly and efficiently, streamlining the user experience.

Unrestricted File Sharing: Brand portals eliminate the common barriers associated with file size limitations by enabling you to share large collections of assets effortlessly through a simple, customizable URL. This feature is especially beneficial for sharing high-quality multimedia files (such as videos), extensive document sets, and other large-scale resources without compromise.

Optimized for All Devices: Accessibility is key in today’s mobile-first world. Brand portals are designed to provide a seamless viewing experience on any device, including a responsive mobile platform. This ensures that users can access content conveniently, whether they are on desktop computers or mobile devices, enhancing user engagement and satisfaction.

Enhanced Security and Accessibility: With the option to add a password and expiration date, brand portals offer flexibility in controlling who can view your content. This security feature is crucial for safeguarding sensitive information while making it readily available to authorized users. The added convenience of password-protected access helps maintain the integrity and exclusivity of your content.

Brand Portal Examples and Use Cases

Brand portals can be used for countless projects, including sharing brand guidelines and supporting various campaigns. Below are 4 common use cases and examples for brand portals including:

1. Brand Management,
2. Approval and Collaboration,
3. Post-Event Asset Sharing, and
4. Partner Enablement.

Let's dive into each in more detail below.

Brand Portal Examples 1: Brand Management

Brand Portals are a prime tool to use when sharing assets that enable those in your organization (or external parties) to represent your brand. You can share your brand guidelines, logos, brand colors and more all in a single, branded location that’s always up-to-date, eliminating the risk for old logo versions or the pain of constantly re-sending lost brand assets.

Brand Management Example

Erin is a Brand Manager at Urban Square, a leading Canadian furniture retailer. Her role is to ensure that all internal and external stakeholders use the correct logos and assets to maintain Urban Square’s brand identity. Recently, Urban Square rebranded as part of its 50th anniversary. With this rebranding, Erin has received multiple emails from colleagues and agency partners, requesting the new brand assets.

Erin curates all of the new brand assets (JPEGs, PNGs, videos, etc.) in a Branded Portal and shares it with all employees and partners, ensuring everyone has access to the new brand assets. When new versions of the shared assets are uploaded to the DAM, the Portal is instantly updated.

Brand Portals Example 2: Approval and Collaboration

When working with external parties, such as agencies, clients or partners, brand portals can help keep everyone on the same page and streamline any approvals needed. You can add assets for review in a view-only portal, or enable downloads for final assets.

Approval and Collaboration Example

Digital Agency, BEAR, is currently working on a new social media campaign for their client, Tourism Express. The Art Director, Monica, needs to submit the final assets for approval to the marketing team at Tourism Express. Email is not an option to share the multiple assets that need to be shared.

To securely share the assets with Tourism Express’ Marketing Manager, Monica creates a password-protected Branded Portal. The Marketing Manager of Tourism Express accesses the Portal using the password provided. They are able to view the assets for the upcoming campaign. She is not able to download them as Monica did not select this option when setting up the Portal.

Brand Portals Example 3: Post Event Asset Sharing

Brand Portals are the perfect way to re-engage with event attendees with visuals from the event or additional information. They can be leveraged to share on-demand recordings of any live sessions, professional photography taken during the day, additional material about your products or services, and more.

Post-Event Asset Sharing Example

In June, Hill University will host its graduation ceremonies for its Science, Education, Business and Art faculties. As there are four faculties and multiple grad classes, Hill University will need a system to organize and share ceremony photos with the graduates.

Using Brand Portals, Hill University is able to share a single portal for each graduating class. The appropriate degree program name is added to each section, allowing visitors to quickly jump to their graduating class photos. Each section is synced with a category within the DAM, so as each photographer adds photos to the category, the Branded Portal is automatically updated. With this portal, the university can easily share the ceremony photos with each graduating class, using the same custom URL, without needing to continually update the portal.

Brand Portals Example 4: Partner Enablement

Brand portals can allow you to better enable your external team members and partners, such as franchisees, distributors and re-sellers. It enables them with seamless access to the product collateral, specs, pricing sheets, and anything else they may need to effectively sell your products – both in the office and on-the-road.

Partner Enablement Example

Leed Lighting, one of North America’s largest lighting manufacturers, is preparing to launch its newest LED flood light. For the launch, the Leed team wants to ensure that all of its distributors are equipped with the necessary product collateral – including product images, specification sheets, product pamphlets etc.

To prepare for the launch, Leed’s Marketing Manager, Dominic, creates a Branded Portal and organizes it into several sections: Product Photos, Specification Sheets, Brochures, and Videos; making it easy for distributors to find and download what they need.

Learn More About MediaValet Brand Portals

Introduce a new level of asset shareability with MediaValet's Branded Portals. Curate content, maintain brand identity, and share collections via simple URLs without file size limitations.

According to the DAM Vendor Comparison Guide (based on G2 reviews), MediaValet customers report enhanced brand guidelines at a higher rate than alternative DAMs.

A DAM system is pivotal in reinforcing brand guidelines across an organization, ensuring that all marketing and communication efforts are aligned with the brand's core identity and values. 

According to G2, MediaValet stands out as the premier DAM in the enterprise space for this critical function.

Customers across industries have achieved amazing results with Brand Portals:

“I LOVE Branded Portals! I can just quickly throw together a portal and share some amazing content. It’s so easy to update a portal quarterly to share current photo assets of staff volunteering and working events with HR to use in their recruitment efforts.”

Jannette Whippy, United Way of King County

Start distributing your content, while maintaining your brand identity - Learn more about MediaValet's Branded Portals here.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.