Today’s businesses are constantly creating a wealth of marketing and branding materials—digital content that will be used in countless ways to deliver your brand’s message and reach new audiences every day. In order to make the most out of your branded content and other materials, it’s worth considering marketing collateral management software for your company.
Here are five basic steps to effectively manage your marketing collateral so you can make the most out of your digital assets to meet and exceed your business goals.
1. Take inventory
Whether you’ve got a marketing collateral management system in place or are approaching the process for the first time, a great first step is to take a detailed inventory of all your marketing collateral so you have a good idea of what you’re working with.
Once you’ve fully audited all of your content, whether it’s images, video, advertising graphics, email templates, logos, screenshots, or any other content format, start categorizing it. Select what can be repurposed, what needs updating, and what pieces should be retired.
Establish a process and timeline for refreshing the content that needs it, archive what’s no longer being used, and correctly label everything that’s currently being circulated.
2. Examine marketing collateral
When taking stock of all of your marketing collateral, you may find many versions of the same files floating around in different folders or servers. These copies usually cause confusion and lead to inconsistent materials being used, which can end up damaging your brand’s reputation.
Eliminate duplicate content by controlling different versions in marketing collateral management software. This will help you significantly lower the risk of materials being used improperly or old versions of content being distributed on accident. Version control and intuitive organization is a huge part of creating and maintaining a consistent brand image.
3. Make materials available
We can all relate to the frustration of searching endlessly for files only to be frustrated and have to create an asset again from scratch. Make sure all of your important marketing collateral is easily accessed and found through powerful search functions. Keep in mind what devices all of these assets can be accessed from. Marketing and creative teams are increasingly working from remote locations all over the world, which means they need access to marketing collateral at all times from any number of devices. Ensure your system is mobile-friendly and robust enough to enable users to do business on the go, at anytime, anywhere.
4. Control access
Of course, it’s important to note that the concept of access has two sides. On one hand, you want your teams to be able to quickly find and pull the materials they need. On the other hand, security and privacy can become concerns if access is completely unfettered.
Establish concrete permissions and rules for different users to ensure that individuals can only access what they need and nothing more. This is especially crucial with the increasing globalization of marketing teams—there’s nothing worse than a team in China presenting marketing collateral that’s meant for Latin America, or vice versa.
5. Adapt Your marketing assets
Finally, squeeze the most value out of your marketing assets by repurposing the content across different media types for a range of situations. For example, it can be really useful to download images in any format you need, eliminating the need to convert files after the fact.
Since social media now plays such an important role in marketing campaigns these days, make sure your marketing collateral management software can easily facilitate social sharing to all of your relevant channels, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and a host of others. Finally, sometimes it’s just not possible to have your laptop open and ready to launch a presentation—perhaps you’ve run into an unexpected opportunity to make a sales pitch at the airport or any other unexpected location. The best marketing collateral management software lets you present your materials right from your mobile device.
With the right marketing collateral management platform, you’ll get the most out your content to deliver key brand messages and never miss an opportunity to make your brand shine.
See how Bynder can help you optimize the management of your marketing collateral, by trying out a free trial.
