& How it Happens
As we’ve noted in other blogs, and tell our clients day in and day out – asset management is key to business success and reputation management. Not only is it key, but poor asset management can truly be the downfall of your marketing, and even of other aspects of your company. Asset management isn’t just the use of the right logo or letterhead. It’s fully utilizing all of your available, valuable content and resources across the board to get the most out of your messaging and produce the highest possible ROI. Failing to use materials isn’t just a waste – it’s a loss!
What is Asset Management
When it comes to business marketing and communications, asset management is the organization, distribution, and utilization of all marketing and communications resources, from logos to sales sheets. It’s the process a company uses to execute, keep track of, and share resources that are pertinent to a company’s proceedings. If you’re looking to learn a little more about the importance of asset management, feel free to check out this blog “Managing Your Marketing Assets to Protect & Reinforce Your Brand”.
How Does Poor Asset Management Happen?
Bad asset management can happen, and continue to happen, for a variety of reasons. Here are some of the most common:
Too Many Communication Channels
When too many channels are used to communicate, distribute, use, and edit materials, it can be really confusing for your team. This confusion can cause a loss in productivity. Plus, when there are several versions on numerous channels – it’s easier to make mistakes and share or use the wrong materials.
Lack of Processes/Organization
As you may know, when it comes to many business practices, SOPs are vital, and asset management is no exception. If your company doesn’t have a system of processes for managing marketing and communication assets, how can employees be expected to know about materials, and to use the right materials? With SOPs, employees know what to use, when to use it, and how to use it. When employees have to guess and search, a lot of valuable time gets wasted (and, as you know, time = money).
Additionally, SOPs for the actual naming and organization of assets is just as important – as files can be labeled and sorted in a way that makes them easier to find.
No Versioning Control
If how you create, edit, update, and delete asset versions is not communicated and well-established, the wrong versions of marketing assets end up getting distributed and used.
Additionally, if there’s no standard for when assets get thrown out, things can get trashed too soon – causing a huge time waste of having to recreate already-created materials.
Using a Bad Platform (or No Platform at All)
It’s important that employees are able to find what they need, and that it’s easy for them to create, manage, and adhere to processes, communication, and organization. Sometimes, it’s not within budget to have a specific employee managing and creating these processes, and even if your company does have the money for this – one person likely doesn’t have the bandwidth to manage it all. We’d recommend an asset management platform, like MarCom On Demand, to store and distribute your company’s assets.
No matter what platform you choose, make sure it makes sense for your company’s individual needs, as they likely don’t call for a one-size-fits-all approach!
Costs of Poor Asset Management
As noted above, bad asset management can cause a variety of unwanted, unnecessary costs for your company. Let’s discuss some of the big ones.
Money
Of course, we’d be remiss to not talk about how poor asset management can cost you, in general, lots of money – impacting your bottom line. “51% of marketers waste money producing or recreating assets that go unused because people don’t know they exist or can’t find them. In addition, 46% waste time downloading and uploading assets into different tools.” – Demand Metric.
Additionally, turnover is more likely to increase if employees feel confused, out of control, and lost, and it becomes more difficult to keep good talent (which you can’t truly put a price on). This difficulty hiring and keeping employees also impacts all the expenses used to hire – from recruitment and onboarding to training and corporate culture.
Lastly, when assets are unorganized, it’s so much harder for teams to accurately measure the ROI of marketing materials. In turn, teams waste time making materials that don’t produce ROI, or miss out on creating materials that would be highly impactful.
Time
As mentioned above, poor asset management causes confusion and reduces employee productivity. Tons of time gets wasted when employees can’t find materials, or when employees are forced to frequently fix mistakes and re-create. Poor asset management often causes a lot of additional, unnecessary effort from the marketing team, who are more likely to create duplicate content due to a lack of organization.
Credibility
This one is fairly self-explanatory, but can be highly detrimental. If assets are unorganized and poorly managed, and wrong or old materials are distributed, customers are more likely to lose trust in your company. Inconsistency in messaging and branding can even cause an otherwise happy customer to begin to lose faith in your business.
Inability to Scale
If assets and materials are well-communicated throughout an organization, scaling to support new verticals and brands is much easier and more seamless. But, if your assets and materials are poorly stored and not up-to-date, new pieces often require starting from scratch – or at least close to it. Poor asset management makes it almost impossible for marketing teams to quickly adapt to meet changing business needs.
Opportunity Costs
Last but definitely not least, if an organization’s teams don’t have the right assets for sales, customer service, recruitment and other initiatives, opportunities get missed.
Speed is especially important when it comes to sales and conversions. If your team doesn’t have the right materials and assets right away, your competitors will win customers over.
Interested in better managing your assets and avoiding the above costs? Contact our team or visit our Integrated Marcom Tech page for more information.
Why Effective Marketing Asset Management Matters
What is Marketing or Brand Asset Management?
Marketing Asset Management, also referred to as “Brand Asset” or “Brand Resource” Management, is the strategic approach by organizations to organize, store, and distribute their marketing assets – such as logos, fonts, brand guidelines, presentation templates, and so on – efficiently.
Marketing Asset Management Compliance is the effective handling of these assets by management, employees, vendors, and anyone else in or involved with the company.
Why is it So Important?
Managing, providing, and using organized and up-to-date marketing resources is crucial for enhancing your company’s effectiveness and enables those within your company to confidently deliver lawful, consistent, on-brand messages to your audience(s). Additionally, it ensures consistency of campaign content and designs, strengthening and unifying your marketing messages – which is extremely important, as 70% of consumers visit, use, or see three or more marketing channels before making a purchase. This, in turn, improves your reach and helps to convert customers.
If not managed, communicated, and used correctly, things can go quite awry – even as awry as ruining your brand’s reputation or causing legal trouble. With that said, let’s get into the main reasons for ensuring top-notch asset management efforts.
1. Quality & Operational Control
Mitigating Legal Risks: Marketing asset compliance influences how consumers, competitors, and peers perceive your brand – and sometimes parts of your brand can be subject to legal compliance. Management and compliance ensure that your company adheres to industry laws, regulations, and policies concerning your assets. While this is more commonly observed in specific industries, particularly within the financial sector, it’s best to stay on the safe side by checking and abiding by your respective industries’ guidelines.
For example: Your company has no asset management, but one of your sales associates really needs to send a product image to a potential customer. Since they don’t know where to find the asset they need, they find one online that’s actually (accidentally) a competitor’s product that looks almost the same. At the very least, this will likely cause the customer to lose trust in your company. At the very worst – it could cause legal issues down the road.
Protecting Reputation: Noncompliant assets can harm your brand’s reputation, portraying it as careless or deceptive, making compliance vital for protecting your brand image and maintaining a positive reputation.
For example: Without asset management, due to a lack of branding and voice guidelines, an Account Manager creates a poorly branded presentation and sends out communication that doesn’t properly represent your company.
Preventing Downtime: Implementing asset management compliance saves time and money by avoiding the need to remove noncompliant materials from the market, which can be a time-consuming process when it comes to both digital and physical assets.
For example: Without asset management, because of a lack of asset communication surrounding branding and product language, your Social Media Specialist adds a non-asset-compliant photo and caption to your social media platforms. Now, the post has been shared to other profiles and has gained a lot of traction – which will take time, energy, back-peddling, and explaining to take back and recover from later.
2. Marketing Performance
Brand Awareness: Marketing asset management and compliance ensures consistency in colors, graphics, logos, and fonts across your company, which in turn enhances brand recognition and establishes credibility. With “two-thirds of businesses (saying) brand consistency has contributed to revenue growths of at least 10%”, you truly can’t afford to allow asset variability.
For example: Without asset management resources, your Head of Human Resources sends out paperwork with inconsistent fonts, the wrong logo, and odd colors choices. They weren’t aware of guidelines and didn’t have the right assets at hand, so they “did their best”. Now, all of your employees have poorly branded communication in their inboxes that reinforces brand inconsistencies.
Customer Trust & Satisfaction: A recent study found that 81 percent of consumers need to trust a brand before making a purchase, and another study found that 46% of customers will pay more for products that come from brands they believe in. Inaccurate marketing materials can erode customer trust, making them less likely to buy from a brand they perceive as unreliable. Good asset management and compliant materials allow those in your company accurately depict your products or services through documents, platforms, and communication, aligning customer expectations with reality. This accurate representation leads to higher customer satisfaction – and satisfied customers are more likely to return for future purchases.
For example: These days, scamming claims and instances are running rampant. Without asset management resources, the use of an old logo, incorrect product name, inconsistent brand elements, inaccurate or blurry product image– or anything else (that just seems off) – could scare a customer away. These instances of inaccurate and non-systematic marketing assets can lead to customer distrust and disappointment.
Challenges to Meeting Marketing Asset Management Compliance
Lack of Consistent Updates & Standards
One of the biggest challenges to meeting marketing asset management compliance is upkeep. Consistently updating your resources and ensuring current materials are available, organized, and communicated to teams is extremely important – especially when your business is growing. If employees don’t have or aren’t aware of the most up-to-date materials, you can’t blame them for failure to comply.
Agreed upon brand standards must be reinforced consistently, from the top down. Those lower down in the chain of command will likely only comply with standards if their leaders do. It’s important to ensure that everyone – from CEO to part-time employee, takes marketing asset management and compliance seriously and is reminded of it regularly. Set the standard from the start, and make sure it’s well communicated.
Insufficient Organization & Understanding
If you aren’t aware of a lack of consistency and compliance – you can’t fix it. With that said, if your organization is not well organized and fails to communicate or check in on how assets are being managed and utilized, it’s easier for members to make mistakes and misuse assets.
Consequences of Using Noncompliant Marketing Assets
As we touched on above, non-compliance and lack of asset management can lead to a jumbled, untrustworthy, inconsistent, and less recognizable brand image. Continuous customer exposure without compliance often leads to a lack of brand recognition, or worse – distrust. Lastly, some non-compliant materials can even lead to fines, lawsuits and further legal consequences.
How to Enforce Your Brand Standards and Correct Asset Usage
Educate
The key to enforcing your brand standards is to educate management, marketing teams, employees, partners, stakeholders, and so on. Anyone that can and does communicate for or as your company should be aware of how to access assets and how to communicate in a manner that best represents your brand. Not only does managing and communicating your marketing asset management and compliance to your team keep things consistent – it helps employees feel confident in themselves and in your company! Moreover, it ensures that your teams have the knowledge and tools to create and communicate effectively – and within brand standards.
Implement
As we noted earlier, it’s important for all employees – from the top down – to understand, respect and enforce correct asset management and usage. Companies will often put procedures in place (such as check-ins, checklists, or other specific processes) that your company and employees must practice and adhere to. This way, all your internal and external parties understand the importance of maintaining compliance and not deviating from the company’s brand consistency.
Consult
Dealing with the constant ins and outs of asset management compliance can be a hassle, especially on top of daily operations. In this ever-changing landscape, and with the associated risks to brand reputation, consulting with a professional and/or using a custom portal for all your marketing and brand assets is often the best route.
Looking for an asset management tool or resource? Click here to view Strata’s marketing resource management tools, custom portals, and more. Interested in discussing asset management and compliance or talking through a more specific solution for your company? Contact the Strata team.