What is your brand’s message to the world? How effectively is it getting out?
The answers will come through a close examination of your marketing strategies and the assets used to execute them.
Your company’s marketing assets are a bigger deal than you might think. They are precious commodities that must be organized and used intelligently in order to keep generating leads and sales in today’s super-competitive landscape.
Keeping tabs on all these assets across a large multi-location organization, as well as sharing them efficiently and responsibly with both internal and external stakeholders, is a very challenging task — but it can be done.
Welcome to RevBase’s Ultimate Guide to Marketing Asset Management. Read on and apply the knowledge for a stronger, more comprehensive, and more effective approach to your marketing!
What Are Marketing Assets and What Is Marketing Asset Management (MAM)?
Marketing assets are any materials you use, whether digital or physical, to inform audiences about your brand’s products or services.
These assets must be managed by your company properly, hence “marketing asset management.” It refers to organizing, tracking, and getting assets to the right personnel at the right time to streamline marketing operations, improve efficiency, and boost overall marketing ROI.
Marketing asset management, or MAM, is normally accomplished with the help of software. It’s a subset of digital asset management (DAM), which involves a company’s management of all kinds of digital files. The difference is that MAM is limited to items that serve a marketing purpose, and can include non-digital assets.
Why Is Marketing Asset Management Important?
Internally, well-executed marketing asset management accomplishes 4 big functions for an enterprise marketing department:
- It brings together all collateral in one place for internal access. According to Demand Metric’s report, The State of Digital Asset Management, 51% of marketers have wasted money producing assets that aren’t used because employees can’t find them. A good MAM software solution will allow everyone to find, view, download, or print marketing collateral when needed.
- It creates a base for collaboration and unified focus over messaging. With the right solution, your staff can get together to work on updates to marketing collateral, make sure the messaging is on target, and contribute ideas that make assets stronger.
- It streamlines sales enablement. When sales representatives need persuasive materials to sell your brand’s products in a one-on-one context, a high-quality MAM platform can help route the right content pieces to the right sales team member, instantly.
- It enables your channel partners. If you serve “professional customers” such as local dealers, contractors, or others who resell or use your products as part of their jobs, a high-quality MAM solution can get the right assets to them when needed.
A digital marketing asset management solution, for all these reasons, will be a crucial part of your company’s operational infrastructure. It will help marketing activities run much more efficiently, and can have an outsized impact on your marketing ROI.
MAM is a gargantuan task that would overwhelm human resources if it had to be done manually. Fortunately, modern software tools make it a fairly simple task to collect your assets in one place, file them in computer systems according to their type, intended audience, purpose, and other attributes, and distribute them to defined audiences.
Some Examples of Marketing Assets
Marketing assets can be broken down into internal assets, which inform your staff about marketing priorities and enable them to create on-brand marketing messages, and external assets, which go out directly to your audience of prospective customers.
While they can take a wide variety of forms, all marketing assets have one general purpose: to spread the message about your brand or your products to a target market.
Internal Marketing Assets
- Messaging platform – A document that details everything about how your brand should be communicated through marketing content and sales efforts, including tone of voice, brand vision and mission, and key product differentiators.
- Sell sheets – One-page sales enablement documents that list key features, benefits, and value propositions for your products or solutions.
- Emails – Internal emails that are sent out to staff regarding company initiatives, priorities, and strategies.
External Marketing Assets
- Website content – The main pages of your website, which communicate key facts about your brand and what kind of products your company makes.
- Blog posts – Informative posts, published on a regular schedule, that work to establish your brand authority.
- Ebooks – Digital content pieces that explain your products, offer how-tos and explanations, or give other useful information to prospective customers.
- White papers – Downloadable reports that go in-depth on an industry issue with claims that are backed up by research, and an optional conclusion that positions your products as possible solutions.
- Emails – These can include one-off broadcast emails announcing promotions or new product launches, or full-length campaigns with several pre-written messages meant to educate, persuade, and sell products.
- Brochures – Documents in either digital or print formats that explain your product offerings, along with their features and benefits, and info on how one can buy.
- Social media advertisements – Ads that run on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media outlets.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements – Ads that allow you to bid on the number of impressions or clicks desired, such as provided by the Google Ads platform.
- Landing pages – Web pages that prospective customers “land” on after clicking links from elsewhere (such as ads or social media posts) and that act as gateways for downloading information or taking the next step in the customer journey.
- Trade show materials – Posters, samples, and other materials used to communicate your product’s features in person at trade shows.
- Billboards – Large boards for public display that feature your brand’s key messages and promises.
- Product comparison guides – Simple guides that compare your brand’s products to those of competing brands, or that show why your products rise above the industry standard.
- Product images – Images of your product, ideally high-quality and in context, with or without feature explanations or diagrams.
- Infographics – Informative, creatively-designed content that sets your brand up as an authority by sharing facts and figures that matter to customers in a visually-appealing format.
- Videos – This encompasses customer testimonials and success stories, how-to videos, and explainer videos.
- Product samples – This includes small physical samples of your product mailed to customers, so that they can observe the look, feel, and other characteristics before committing to a purchase.
- Webinars – An online “seminar” in which a speaker from your company presents on an important topic, before inviting attendees to try your brand’s products or solutions.
- Instructional guides – Content pieces that instruct your company’s external partners and stakeholders on how to best install and use your products.
- Product specification sheets – Lists of key measurements and technical specifications for your products, often for use by professionals.
All of these marketing assets can play key roles, at different times and in different scenarios, in building your brand awareness, lead generation, sales, and customer retention efforts.
That makes it all the more important to organize them and track their usage and distribution!
Benefits of Digital Marketing Asset Management
Handling all the materials generated and used by your company for marketing purposes must be done with the utmost care.
Done haphazardly, you’ll never be able to accurately appraise the success or failure of any one marketing or sales approach. You’ll be in the dark, and unable to point to the ROI of certain tactics.
Done well, however, marketing asset management can benefit your company in long-lasting, substantial ways…not the least of which are a bigger bottom line, more efficient marketing, and a more robust sales engine.
Here’s more about what a well-executed MAM achieves, in more detail:
Enables Consistency Across Marketing Outlets
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a constant message across various marketing channels can improve purchase intent among consumers by 90% and brand perception by 68%.
Brand messaging that’s inconsistent across your company’s online presence — for example, if a brand makes one kind of statement on social media, but gives a different impression in blog posts, and strikes yet another tone in a webinar — causes confusion, hampers trust, and hurts sales.
Digital marketing asset management will help you and your staff review cross-channel content to make sure it’s fully in alignment with your brand.
Enables Better Internal Communication Over Core Brand Messaging
A Gallup poll found that only about 27% of employees believe in their company’s core values. If your staff fails to understand what your organization cares about, that will certainly carry over into how they represent your public-facing brand.
The right MAM solution will include a hub for marketing personnel to get together and collaborate on core brand messaging for campaigns, sales funnels, and online content in general. This naturally leads to more sharply-focused marketing.
Smart marketing asset management achieves this by organizing all relevant assets into one accessible hub. This helps ensure your staff can see at a glance what messaging is going out, match it up with established brand messaging guidelines, and collaborate to ensure it’s hitting the mark.
Keeps Messaging on Target and Up-To-Date
As your industry, economic conditions, and other factors that affect consumer behavior change, your marketing message will have to as well.
That means staying up-to-date with what matters to your customers, and updating your marketing assets to reflect their changing world — just as your company might develop new products to address emerging opportunities.
Digital marketing asset management is your ally here as well. With a scalable MAM solution, you can stay on top of changes to thousands of assets, while ensuring only specific content pieces are removed or updated as needed.
Keeping info up-to-date across all channels also prevents mishaps like materials with different pricing – which can easily hurt trust and loyalty in a brand. This could also hurt your channel partner relationships.
Reduces Sales Enablement Bottlenecks
One of the key problems that many salespeople face is trouble accessing content that enables sales when they need it. A SiriusDecisions (Forrester Research) study once found that 60-70% of B2B marketing content goes unused due to sales reps not knowing where it is.
Marketing asset management solves this problem, and even creates smoother, more productive integration between marketing and sales departments.
The right MAM software will empower sales reps to find and retrieve content such as sell sheets, product specs, and comparison guides — even if they’re out in the field, using a mobile device — at any time.
Designated personnel can manage the distribution of this content and track how much it’s being used. Sales reps can even give feedback faster on which assets are most effective.
The result? Fewer bottlenecks, and more sales.
Leads to Improved Messaging and ROI From Assets Over Time
Because a quality MAM solution allows for seamless, easy updates, it’s easy to iterate on messaging over time as product offerings, consumer trends, or other factors change. It’s also simple to act on market research and conduct split tests by distributing two versions of the same assets to the same audience, equally.
What does that mean? Better messaging will emerge. You’ll be able to switch out older assets for better-performing ones.
That, in turn, leads to more efficient marketing and a bigger return on your investment from all your efforts.
Facilitates Channel Partner Communication and Distribution
If you’re a large multi-location business, it’s likely that you work with local partners who are your “first” customers.
For example, a large building materials manufacturer may want to get their products into the hands of local dealers, installers, electricians, architects, and other pros who then spread the message about the brand to end consumers, and use the products in installations.
It’s a problem, however, if you’re not empowering those channel partners with the content and tech to use and advocate for your products at a high level. A Forrester study commissioned by Mediafly found that enterprises give their sales staff
access to devices and software at a 1.4 – 1.7x higher rate than their channel partners.
This can be remedied by a well-implemented MAM solution. With the right software, you can give your channel partners access to everything from support documentation to product specs and compliance info, directly within a self-service platform — on demand, without any interference or lag time.
This means your products can be sold and implemented in projects by local professionals, faster.
You’ll also retain more of those pros as customers, gain important leverage in expanding your local market share, and attract even more partners.
Preparing to Implement Marketing Asset Management
Now that you know what a MAM solution can achieve for your business, you might want to get started on implementing it. However, it’s important to prepare.
Laying the right groundwork is essential for ensuring all the assets you’ll want to use are accounted for. By doing so, you’ll also have a baseline from which to improve on old marketing strategies and build new ones.
Here are some key steps to preparing for marketing asset management:
Identify and Categorize All Assets
First, it helps to take stock of all the assets your company uses currently. This might take lots of internal communication over several days or weeks, depending on your organization’s footprint and number of locations, and how many assets are in use.
Once you’ve done that, it may help to divide assets into several categories:
- Internal vs. external – You’ll want to have a clear dividing line between those assets meant to build up your team’s competence and collaboration around marketing materials, and those assets meant for the outside world to see. This can help protect your company’s intellectual property, and prevent the accidental leakage of key strategies meant only for the eyes of internal architects of your brand.
- Consumer-facing vs. channel partner assets – External assets can be broken down further into material meant for end consumers, and assets meant for channel partners such as dealers or installers. Both audiences have very different needs and desires, so it’s key to ensure there’s no accidental cross-distribution here.
- Digital vs. print (and other non-digital assets) – This will make it easy to designate certain digital materials for download, and others for printing with a preferred print service.
Audit and Organize Assets
A full 37% of content marketers never conduct a content audit, according to research by Curata. That means there’s a lot of old content out there, likely losing sales for the companies that created it.
Avoid this by doing a deep audit to weed out underperforming materials and categorize them even further by more meaningful attributes.
First, the audit should involve a quality check. Improve those assets that can be brought into alignment with the core brand messaging with just a few tweaks, and take out of circulation those that can’t be redeemed.
Next, you’ll want to categorize assets by purpose, buyer journey stage, and buyer persona.
- Purpose speaks to what the asset intends to accomplish — whether it’s to generate a new lead, an inquiry, or a sale.
- Buyer journey stage refers to the part of the process a customer is in before deciding to purchase. Think about how your assets fit into each of the 3 essential buyer journey stages as defined by HubSpot:
- Awareness, in which the prospect is simply getting to know that your brand exists and that you sell certain products of interest.
- Consideration, in which the prospect is actively comparing your products to other possible choices.
- Decision, in which the prospect is nearly ready to buy.
- Your buyer personas are modeled on individual theoretical customers who are most likely to need and buy your products. Consider which assets speak most powerfully to the demographics, pain points, beliefs, and desires of each persona.
Devise Rules for Usage and Implementation
After the deeper audit and refined categorization of assets, you should set clear rules for who can access which assets, and how they should be used. This will help ensure clarity and consistency of your brand messaging, as well as build internal discipline about how marketing strategies should proceed.
You can designate certain assets as follows:
- By department (marketing vs. sales)
- By staff seniority
- By channel partner category
Strongly Consider Using Software
Trying to do marketing asset management manually is unsustainable for a multi-location business hoping to grow.
The sheer size of the task can be overwhelming. It’s not uncommon for thousands of marketing assets to be generated on the fly across various locations. Gathering, auditing, and organizing all of them can be a drain on valuable business resources.
In addition, manual efforts at marketing asset management are not scalable. If you ever hope to expand to different locations, build new product lines, or enter new markets, you’ll only have to create tons of new collateral.
The only sensible solution is a digital marketing asset management software that’s regularly updated and grows with your company. It’s the best and most reliable method for creating an organized, accessible ecosystem around all of your marketing assets.
As noted by Walker Sands in their 2017 State of Marketing Technology report, 56% of marketers feel that their companies can’t keep up with evolving marketing technology. If this is a concern in your business, fully leveraging a proper MAM software solution will go a long way in helping your brand keep pace.
Why RevBase Is the Ideal Enterprise Solution for Marketing Asset Management
If you’re wondering about the best solution for managing assets across a large, complex enterprise company, look no further than RevBase.
RevBase is a premium software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform recently acquired by Bullseye Locations. It is the optimal solution for marketing asset management, given its capabilities to help you oversee and securely share a vast array of marketing materials with the right people.
Used to its fullest potential, RevBase can substantially boost your marketing ROI. Here are some of the things RevBase enables you to do:
Allows You to Efficiently Organize, Track, and Distribute All Marketing Assets in One Place
With RevBase, you can gather and supervise all actions on thousands of pieces of marketing content.
The platform enables everything from efficient organization of files into distinct categories, to tracking downloads and distributing them to the right stakeholders — all within one convenient digital portal.
This is much more robust and secure than other solutions brands have employed in the past, such as a file server or standard online content management system (CMS) software.
Makes Your Assets Available Across Platforms
No matter whether your users are on a Windows, Apple, or Android device, or whether it takes the form of a desktop computer, laptop, mobile phone or tablet, RevBase enables the quick and easy download of digital marketing assets by any user you authorize.
That means no more frustration by users hoping for quick access to an important piece of marketing collateral, only to be met by digital or logistical roadblocks.
Minimizes Sales Enablement Bottlenecks
With RevBase, you can give sales reps direct, always-on access to brochures, sell sheets, product specifications, technical guides, and more.
That means they’ll be able to furnish qualified leads with the right information without delay, maintaining trust in sales relationships and improving the chances of closing deals.
Brings Sales and Marketing Together for Higher ROI on Assets
Any lack of integration between your sales and marketing departments is a threat to your company’s bottom line. RevBase brings sales and marketing closer together for more cohesiveness and productivity.
Not only does RevBase expedite the distribution of sales enablement content — it creates fertile ground for more conversations between sales reps using assets on the field and gathering real-world data on their effectiveness, and marketing staff who can use insights from sales to make those assets even better.
Allows Channel Partners to Access Materials They Need
Each of your channel partners will need different materials from your brand in order to best use, distribute, and advocate for your products. RevBase is the ideal solution for getting it into their hands.
For one, you can securely designate certain partners for access to specific assets. If you have collateral that you’d like local dealers to see but not your contractors, you can specify and separate assets for each group.
Secondly, you’ll be freer to upgrade the content you share with channel partners. Rather than relying on the same old collateral repeatedly, a solution like RevBase allows you to be responsive to feedback from partners and develop newer resources to address their needs.
It’s a great way to build brand loyalty and expand your local footprint.
Unlocks Faster Access to Physical Assets
While a solution like RevBase may seem tailor-made for digital collateral, it doesn’t exclude physical assets. RevBase comes with exciting possibilities that make the distribution of non-digital assets easier than ever.
For one, you can allow users to request assets for printing. That means for items like brochures or poster boards, users can order printed copies through selected vendors.
Secondly, for such items as physical product samples, you can enable users to request items via mail. These requests are then routed to the right personnel for fulfillment.
Makes Your Marketing More Compatible With Company Growth
RevBase is a solution that can grow with your organization. It can handle vast numbers of assets and categories as your business creates them — without costing you any visibility into who’s using it, or control over distribution.
That means there will be no sudden marketing bottlenecks if your business adds a new channel partner or location, develops a new line of products, or embarks on an ambitious new marketing campaign. All needed assets can be loaded into RevBase, where they’ll be ready for management and distribution at a moment’s notice.
Conclusion
For your physical and digital marketing asset management needs, the right tool is critical. Without it, you’ll likely be left with tons of marketing collateral that won’t be used in a focused way.
Without MAM, even if your marketing collateral is bringing in lead gen and sales results, it’s likely not doing as well as it possibly can.
What’s more, you’re likely missing out on enabling channel partners with assets that will help them get the most out of — and spread the word about — your brand and products.
The best solution: a premium MAM platform like RevBase. RevBase is tailor-made for today’s multi-location companies that want to get a handle on their marketing assets, have a more efficient method of tracking and distribution, integrate sales more closely with marketing departments, and improve ROI.
With RevBase, you’ll never have to worry again about managing huge volumes of assets, keeping them all up-to-date, providing secure access to the right stakeholders, or tracking usage and distribution. It will be all under your control…contributing to more clarity and purpose in all your marketing efforts.
If you’re ready to get marketing asset management right from the get-go, schedule a demo today to understand the power and possibilities of RevBase for your organization.