Steps to Smarter Management of Your Marketing Assets
Revitalizing Your Approach to Marketing Asset Management
We’re marketers, which means we’re driven. Ambitious. And big-time optimists. We resolve to kick off each quarter with the projects that got tabled in the last one. However, operational and process improvement projects such as asset management can often take a back seat to those that appear to have a more direct impact on the bottom line.
With the end of the first quarter quickly approaching, now’s the time to bite the bullet and get one of these projects started before it gets pushed to the wayside again. Let’s focus on ways you can improve marketing asset management.
Organizing Chaos – One of Today’s Big Marketing Challenges
As marketers, we’re here to empower our organization to capitalize on all revenue opportunities out there, while leveraging the most value from our marketing budget. Asset management is a critical component to both of these. If you don’t have a handle on your marketing resources, you’re wasting valuable assets, time, money and more than likely operating in a chaotic environment.
In fact, as an IDC survey on Managed Print and Document Services found, the time spent searching for information averages 8.8 hours per week at a cost of $14,209 per employee per year.
Turning Chaos into Conquest – 9 Ways You Can Revamp Your Marketing Asset Management Practices
By adding some basic checkpoints to your marketing practices around Asset Management, you can optimize your marketing resources, improve agility and get your marketing on its way to operating at its highest potential in 2015.
Below are some steps you can take to improve how brand assets are managed, shared and disseminated in your organization.
- Discovery: Pinpoint where all of your assets are being stored and how and where they’re being referenced.
- Take Inventory: Identify, record and categorize all assets.
- Set Standards: Remember, setting guidelines for how your brand is managed is as important as creating brand standards.
- Collaborate: Review and brainstorm with your immediate team to identify any gaps in asset inventory and make recommendations.
- Implement: Schedule kick off and subsequent meetings, identify who should attend which meetings, and follow-through so you can make all parties accountable.
- Avoid TMI: Avoid providing Too Much Information (TMI) when involving multiple stakeholders. Stick to the key points that affect them directly; remember, they likely won’t consider your project their priority.
- Consider Asset Management Software: Have a Marketing Resource Management system or similar solution in place at your organization.
- Make it Measurable: Be sure you have a way to prove measurable benefits to your VP and/or CMO.
- Follow-up: Interview users a few months after implementation to identify what’s working, what’s not and identify areas of improvement.
Looking to improve asset management at your organization, but not sure where to start?
If you have similar challenges but would like an expert’s feedback on how to get started, let us know. We offer over more than 20 years of experience helping organizations improve operations, efficiency and the integrity of their brand.
You are welcome to email us, complete our online request form or call 610-941-6100.