Why Protecting Your Business’s Visual History Is as Important as Financial Security

As a business owner, you always try to avoid insecurity and uncertainty. In many ways, running a business comes down to future-proofing it. You want to ensure you’re isolated from potential market turbulence. In this regard, business owners and operators often only discuss financial security. While this is logical, there’s more to running a business than securing revenue streams. If you want to secure the future of your business, you need to view it as a long-term brand.

With that in mind, protecting your business’s visual history is vital. Keep in mind that credibility isn’t something you can buy. As you grow your business, you build credibility over time by properly treating an increasingly loyal client base.

If you want your target audience to keep your company in mind, you need a strong, long-term visual identity. And you need to be able to call back on old promotional materials and other visual elements.

Physical Media Won’t Cut It

You may think that you’re keeping your visual assets safe. Maybe you’re storing them carefully, out of sunlight and away from extreme temperatures. And that’s great — but it’s not a long-term solution, and your business needs to adapt.

Nowadays, people usually scan documents and transfer photos to digital formats to ensure these assets remain intact for future generations and branding efforts. You should do that with your company’s visual assets, too. Why? Because there’s no such thing as “mint condition” if you’re keeping your visual assets on a physical medium — like paper, a CD, or something even more outdated. Over time, all of these formats will deteriorate. Their materials weren’t made to last forever, unfortunately.

Risk Management

Let’s take a simple marketing brochure as an example. You want a copy of it for various reasons — as a keepsake, as something to reference in a few years, and to ensure your brand identity is seamless when you work on marketing content in the future.

However, marketing brochures generally aren’t made of sturdy stuff. They turn brittle in a few years, even if you don’t expose them to sunlight or humidity. The same goes for old photos and archived records.

Keeping your visual assets on a physical medium is just risky. What happens if your assets are damaged by a flood, fire, or something else you can’t predict? Physical backups are expensive and take up space. Plus, if you have your visual assets from old marketing campaigns in a visual format, you can use them for new online strategies later.

Why Digitization?

You may think it’s not very old-school cool, but we all mostly do business in the digital world nowadays — and your business needs to adapt. Everything from writing a simple document to the entire banking system is digital. If protecting your business’s visual history is important to you, all your visual assets should be digital, too.

First, digital files are much easier to secure against loss or theft. You can lock them with passwords and other security mechanisms. And you can easily make as many backups as you want — digital space is much cheaper than physical storage space. Plus, you can find and retrieve a specific digital file much more easily than you would from any physical archive. Digitization is really a no-brainer.

How To Implement a Digitization Strategy

If you’ve decided to digitize your firm’s visual history, awesome — here’s how to get started.

First, you need to decide which materials you’ll digitize. Obviously, you want to prioritize the most important visual assets. Also, anything on a physical medium that’s already deteriorating should go first — along with stuff you don’t have backed up anywhere.

Once you have your digitization schedule, it’s time to get the right tools for the job, including:

• High-quality scanners
• Optical character recognition (OCR) software
• Cloud storage platforms

Now, depending on your line of work, it may not be smart to invest in high-quality scanners yourself. They can cost thousands of dollars, so they’re not cost-effective if you won’t need them after digitizing.

An alternative is finding a reliable service that can digitize assets from physical formats. Capture helps businesses securely convert and organize their archives, allowing them to retain their historical identity in a format that stands the test of time. Besides, it’s the most cost-effective, no-hassle option because they do all of it for you and at a much lower price than the hardware you’d otherwise have to buy.

After you have your documents in a digital format, you can use OCR software to turn them into text documents automatically. Otherwise, they’ll just be images of scanned documents — which you can’t edit or search easily.

Finally, you choose a cloud storage platform where you’ll keep your visual assets and documents. Popular options like Google Drive and Dropbox are usually the way to go. Just make sure to make backups once you’ve uploaded your files.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, protecting your business’s visual history by digitizing isn’t just important — it’s also easy, with some planning and forethought. If you prioritize assets properly and outsource most of the work to a third party, you can have a virtual library of your visual assets up and running in no time.