The Real Cost of Poor Asset Management

As we’ve noted in other blogs, and tell our customers 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! In this blog, we’re outlining the real cost of poor asset management, and what leads to it.

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 interested in further understanding the importance of asset management, feel free to check out our 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 the most common ones:

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, how to use it, and so on (and don’t have to play any guessing games). 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 the ones Strata creates and customizes, 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 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 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 and 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.

And, when it comes to other departments, such as marketing, if your team doesn’t have the right assets to create, for example, an on-the-fly email or a quick social media post, they may miss opportunities to join the conversation, send news of a last-minute promotion, effectively manage your company’s reputation, and so on.

Interested in better managing your assets and avoiding the above costs? Contact our team or visit our Integrated Marcom Tech page for more information.