Modern brands fuel their marketing initiatives with digital assets. These assets include any type of content, from ebooks to videos to sales sheets that help a company market and sell. They also include internal documents that guide content creation like a content strategy, competitive matrices, or training materials. Enterprise content teams have a LOT of assets, and managing them can be overwhelming if there’s no structure — hence the need for marketing asset management.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
- What is marketing asset management?
- Why is it important for content teams?
- The benefits of marketing asset management
- How to develop marketing asset management with processes and technology
What Is Marketing Asset Management?
Marketing asset management describes the techniques, processes, and tools you use to centralize assets.
The objective of marketing asset management is to create a single repository for assets to live. Since everything lives in one spot, you can ensure accuracy and access for all that need it.
Why Is Marketing Asset Management Important?
Simply put, it’s critical because it simplifies the tracking of content creation. Consider how many digital assets you generate on a monthly basis — articles, demand gen content, photos, infographics, videos, etc.
What if all those files were stored in 20 different places? How challenging would it be to find something, much less make sure it was the most recent version? It would add hours to your workweek and cause frustration. That’s a nightmare you don’t want to have, which would only grow as you complete new assets every day.
The centralized storage aspect is a big one, but there are more reasons it’s crucial. In scenarios of sales enablement content, your sales team needs this to be accurate and easy to access. If a salesperson has a presentation and pulls up a deck they had on their computer to use, how confident could you be that it’s correct? Is the brand language uniform? Are the pricing details up to date? Is it accurate in descriptions or legal aspects?
A free-for-all mentality of marketing assets can lead to wasted time, confused customers, and mistakes that could cost you business.
The Benefits of Marketing Asset Management
Implementing marketing asset management can provide your organization with many benefits, making it clear that it’s worth the time and investment.
You can:
- Be much more agile in reacting to market changes: You know where the assets are that need an update due to things like regulatory changes or a competitor’s positioning.
- Provide permission-based access to those that need assets outside of your content team, including sales, product managers, customer support, or legal.
- Improve content collaboration between your team and those you tap for expertise outside the department.
- Eliminate redundancy of work that may happen if you were unaware something already existed.
- Prolong the life of content by updating it with new information or repurposing it to another format.
- Ensure that what’s in your repository is brand-compliant, accurate, and up-to-date.
- Improve productivity and efficiency, as people aren’t wasting time looking for documents. (If you think this isn’t a problem, a recent study reported that 54 percent of office professionals waste time searching for much-needed files online.)
Now, let’s pivot to building a marketing asset management plan and what you’ll need.
Developing Marketing Asset Management for Your Enterprise
The approach to defining your market asset management strategy has many similarities to how you would define your content strategy. You’re creating a process that spans across all your content development efforts, so it needs to be detailed and not leave any ambiguity.
The first and most important question to answer is “where?” There are many options for selecting your repository. You could use a simple file sharing solution like SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Dropbox, or Google Drive. These applications are great for access, but they fall very short of helping you leverage marketing asset management to get the benefits listed above.
You could also choose a standard project management system like Asana or Trello. These are great all-purpose solutions but still not what you want for marketing assets.
The ideal solution that fulfills all possible benefits is a combo of a content marketing platform and a digital asset management (DAM) platform. These technologies are purpose-built for content marketing teams and provide for file management across your entire content supply chain. As such, it has unique features that support marketing asset management, including:
- Unlimited secure storage for content and all asset types
- Content archiving and auditing
- Automated content workflows
- Tracking for changes and version history
- Internal content production analytics
- Metadata management, which allows you to create a content taxonomy and contextual tags, so you can search for assets and identify what’s in your library
Shown above: Canto DAM integration with DivvyHQ
Once you have your technology solution(s) in place, the next things to document will be:
- The basics of how you’ll store content in the solution, who has access, and any other governance rules
- File name standardization that includes whatever you think is most critical, such as topic, format, date, version, etc.
- Creating folder structures to organize assets, which could be by format, status, buyer persona, topic, industry, etc.
- Rules for archiving content once its lifecycle is over
- Roles and responsibilities for who “owns” the repository and ensures that users are following the guidelines
Before you’re ready to launch, there are a few more best practices to consider.
Do These Things Before You Deploy
The marketing asset manager or owner should heed these last tips before you get going.
- Perform an audit before you migrate, as there are probably assets you can sunset.
- Consider any training you’ll need to provide to your content team and others that will need access.
- Determine how you’ll monitor usage and adherence; your platform will help with this.
Marketing Asset Management Is Easy Breezy with Divvy
Your organization has so much to gain from marketing asset management. It streamlines so many components of content creation and distribution. And Divvy has all the features you need, including integrations with many of the most popular asset management solutions on the market. See how it can improve how you manage assets by starting a free trial today!