What is marketing asset management?

Marketing asset management (MAM) is central to a thriving business’s success. It is the process through which businesses collect, create, organize, and manage a centralized library of all of their marketing assets, from brand guidelines and logos to approved photo and video content.

Throughout this guide, you’ll learn all about MAM and discover how to find a marketing asset management software that can help your team implement effective marketing asset management.

What are marketing assets?

Marketing assets are the tools that your business uses to market your products, attract new customers, and drive sales. These resources tell potential new customers about your product or service and the positive impact they promise to your target audience.

While the term “marketing assets” may bring to mind tools like social media accounts and advertisements, marketing assets encompass a much broader group of tools and resources, both internal to your company and external. Let’s take a look at some marketing asset examples:

Internal

Internal marketing assets are resources that empower your team to become expert marketers for your brand. Internal marketing tools give your team the information they need to sell your products or services. These can include:

Sales training materials: Sales playbooks and scripts, SOPs, and customer knowledge resources
Brand guidelines: Rules surrounding your brand’s appearance and voice to help maintain brand consistency, including tone of voice, iconography, logos, color palettes, typography, and photography
Internal updates: Newsletters and other tools that keep your team informed of company news, product updates, and industry updates
Product knowledge libraries: Centralized database of information regarding your products or services

Internal marketing assets are never themselves shared with potential customers, but the information gleaned from them is. When using your internal marketing assets, a new team member should theoretically be able to become an expert on your business and how to market its products.

External

External marketing assets are any tools and resources that are shared with potential new customers to drive sales. While these do include tools like social media accounts and advertisements, they encompass so much more.

External marketing assets include:

Your logo: Perhaps the most important customer-facing marketing tool, your logo is the visual face of your company that customers will remember
Your website: Both your primary website and any landing pages you create
Social media: Your company’s Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and additional social media platforms
Customer-facing emails: Newsletters, promotional emails, surveys, and announcements
Online resources: Whitepapers, eBooks, infographics, case studies, and blog articles
Print resources: Business cards, flyers, brochures, and books
Advertisements: Digital ads on websites and across social media and physical ads like billboards
Images and videos: Any brand creative that is used to market your company

Your marketing assets are among the most important resources your brand has. With organized, secure access to these tools, your team can collaborate to promote your brand across multiple channels.

Benefits of marketing asset management

It’s clear that marketing assets are vital to your business’s survival. However, creating marketing assets is only one piece of the puzzle. Once assets are created, your team needs regular access to them. With such a significant range of assets, each with its own designated use, rules, and formats, it can be challenging to manage and distribute these resources to the team members who need them. To tackle this task, companies look to marketing asset management.

Marketing asset management is a system through which teams store, manage, access, and share all vital marketing assets in a single, centralized location. Marketing asset management platforms provide strategic solutions to make these materials available to all team members at a moment’s notice, whether in the office, at home, or on the go.

There are so many reasons to invest in marketing asset management. Strong marketing asset management may benefit your company by:

Ensuring brand consistency: Brand consistency is essential for driving strong and lasting customer relationships. Marketing asset management helps in this process by acting as the system of record for all branding assets, such as logos, color palettes, brand voice, tone, and typography.
Fostering efficient collaboration: Collaboration between geographically and departmentally siloed teams can be challenging when everyone is not on the same page. Internal marketing assets like SOPs, company updates, universal training materials, and more can foster efficient content collaboration across teams and even continents.
Improving employee experience: Time spent searching for disorganized marketing materials is not only time-consuming but may also lower your employees’ morale. Organizing all marketing assets in a single, centralized location can boost employee satisfaction, decrease turnover, and improve performance.
Version control: Version control has a plethora of benefits. It promotes transparency, enables collaboration and experimentation, and acts as a fail-safe for all assets. In the event that technology fails, version control provides a backup for vital assets, as well as an audit trail to find when errors may have occurred to promote accountability.

Security and access: Your print and digital marketing assets may contain the secret sauce to your business’s success—and that information shouldn’t be shared with just anyone. Strong marketing asset management protects your business from potential information leaks and allows you to confidently and securely share marketing assets with external partners and more.

Challenges of marketing asset management

As with adopting any new process, there are a few challenges on the road to marketing asset management. These may include tasks like:

Adoption and training: The larger your team, the harder it can be to get everyone on board with new processes. It may take time to get everyone up to speed on your new marketing asset management system and in the habit of using it. To encourage adoption, review our tips on building a business case for DAM.
Standardization: For a marketing asset manager to be effective, it needs to be logical. That means all naming conventions, processes, and more need to be standardized. In some cases, determining the standard can be a challenge.
Volume of content: The larger and more complex your business, the more marketing assets you likely have. Simply locating and centralizing all of this content can be a significant task.

Fortunately, you don’t need to go about marketing asset management alone. Instead, turn to marketing asset software. MAM software has already laid the groundwork by creating a structure and providing the tools you need to adopt a new marketing asset management system. It’s up to you to move your marketing assets in.

What to look for in marketing asset management software

Ready to adopt a marketing asset management software? Look for these hallmarks of a strong MAM solution:

Scalability: With marketing asset management, you may find that your business’s growth speeds up. It’s important to find a solution that will grow alongside your business and allow you to manage content at scale.
Tagging: Marketing asset management isn’t just about storing your resources in a single place; it also involves setting up a system that helps your employees find those resources. A strong marketing asset management solution makes content management simple with an easy-to-follow tagging system to improve discoverability to find assets when needed.
User access management: Not all resources need to be available to everyone. Look for a solution that allows you to grant users access to only the assets they need.
Analytics: There’s a lot of data behind the usage and performance of your marketing assets, and a good digital marketing asset management tool should help you access this vital information so that you can compare your performance to content marketing trends and competitors'.

Marketing asset management best practices

To successfully and effectively adapt to your new marketing asset manager, be sure to follow these best practices:

Input asset names accurately and consistently
Use tags, metadata, and descriptions to ensure all assets are easy to find
Provide thorough training to your employees

Manage your marketing assets with Bynder

Marketing asset management is an essential tool for your company’s success, and a strong solution can help you achieve it. Bynder is a leading digital asset management solution that smartly and effectively manages marketing assets and branding guidelines while also providing workflow and collaboration tools to produce content at scale and reduce time to market. Book a demo today to learn more.

What is marketing asset management?