Running a business involves wearing many different hats that can take a tremendous amount of effort to master. From employee relations to lead generation and beyond, you and your staff have a lot to get done on a daily basis. One thing within many companies that we see as a challenge and teams don’t even realize there other solutions is a marketing asset management system. So what is it and how can save you money, time and marketing cost by looking for a better solution.

The Basics Of Marketing Asset Management

Your marketing team (whether it’s you as the owner or designated staff) likely have some very specific objectives and goals, designed to drive more profit and facilitate sales. To accomplish this, most all companies need are physical marketing materials. This includes products like:

• Flyers
• Business Cards
• Newsletters
• Physical Mail Messages
• Promotional Posters
• In-store Physical Marketing pieces
• Signage
• And more

Anything that physically needs to be developed and printed to represent your company and brand, falls into this marketing asset category. It’s important that they are a good representation of your company in design and quality.

So What are the Challenges of Marketing Asset Management?

How is it that something as simple as business cards can be such a big deal? One key issue we see is that with numerous types of marketing assets available, mistakes can quickly and easily happen. Some examples include the following.

• Typos on a flyer or business card.
• Inaccurate information.
• A brand is inaccurately represented with wrong colors, placement, or bad quality print.
• Different information between different marketing pieces.
• Location budgets get blown because an office doesn’t price out their print.
• Not having a reliable vendor or having too many vendors handling all the different pieces.

All of these can create major problems. Typos make your business look less professional, poor branding won’t speak to the real message of your company, and different information can lead to confusion. Many businesses we work with, find these issues to be relatively common, which makes it important to pay closer attention to different marketing assets your company is using. Improving the way you handle these seemingly simple items, can translate into not only better representation of the brand itself but actual bottom line savings in both time and money.

A Better Way

The primary issue with marketing asset management for many businesses can also simply be that their marketing team is already stretched then. It can take a lot of effort and time to create multiple assets, manage online marketing, build a brand, and develop the right marketing strategies. Catching every typo and proofing a simple set of business cards 3 times, adds even more work to their job. Also considering that a single person within the company can make a change to a piece, without telling someone and trip over all of the above issues, it becomes clear that a better way needs to be found.

For plenty of companies, outsourcing your marketing asset management to a partner with good technology tools is the easiest way to improve things. This offers numerous benefits including:

• More freedom for your marketing team to handle other tasks.
• Better accuracy.
• Improved productivity.
• Faster turnaround times.
• Streamlined vendors with predictable costs.
• Maintaining your brand integrity.

In short, if you’re struggling with marketing asset management or just want to improve your employee’s capabilities, this is a solution worth looking into. Master your marketing asset management, and your bottom line will improve in the long run.