At every stage in marketing, there’s a need to look back and take stock of all the marketing assets that are there in your organization. Marketing assets include not only assets that you or your team has created but also ‘marketable’ assets, such as presentations or research, from other teams that you could refer to or use. Before you begin or while creating any market asset, you use other assets both as a reference and to make sure there is no repetition. When you are ready to publish, you put together links, images, videos, and other visual assets related to your article. Whatever you do, you need to know what marketing assets you have already and where they are at all times. This knowledge comes through managing your marketing assets, and without it, you waste hours racking your brain and randomly searching through emails and folders for an elusive asset that you are not sure even exists. Marketing asset management may seem intimidating at the get-go due to the sheer volume of assets created by a team over time. But by following a few easy, everyday practices, you can create a working system that brings out the true potential of every asset and makes your life as a marketer far simpler. Here, we share some tips and tricks on how you can make your marketing assets manageable-

Centralize

Maintain a centralized asset repository, preferably in the cloud. Tools like Google Drive and Dropbox are good options to start with, and you can create shared folders and workspaces for better organization and collaboration. Centralizing marketing assets makes them more visible, so when someone who has no clue what they are looking for lands in the repository, they can quickly skim the contents and pick the desired asset(s).

Follow naming conventions

By naming a blog document on Five Ways to Optimize Sales as Sales-1 and another containing insight from the sales team as Sales-2, you are effectively paving a shortcut to chaos. Be as explicit as possible when naming assets. Along with keywords from the asset, you can include the date of creation and version to make finding it easy. Make sure to set an organization-wide or at least team-wide naming convention to avoid clashing or confusing names.

Categorize

Categorize assets based on type, topic, function, etc. You can create folders for each category, but one asset may fall under multiple categories, and you may have to add it to all of the folders, resulting in manual effort and duplication. One way to get around this is by using tags – each asset can have as many tags as relevant, accommodating quick and easy search. Some marketing asset management solutions use AI to automatically place tags by identifying asset type, format, keyword, and so on.

Implement Search functionality

Have a search bar on your asset repository to make finding assets easier. Users can search for assets by entering keywords, type, etc.- and all the assets that have the keyed-in tags on them can be listed. Marketing asset management tools usually have this functionality built-in.

Have version control

Version control is one of the most crucial aspects of managing marketing assets. You don’t want an older, error-riddled version to be published accidentally. Or you may need to go back to an older version and pick something up from it. Naming and tracking versions of marketing assets are essential to maintain the assets’ integrity and help prevent slip-ups. Make sure to specify the version number and also the date of creation when naming the asset. Marketing asset management solutions automatically do version control for you and always pull up the latest version when you are ready to publish.

Enforce access privileges

Always grant collaborators access permissions appropriate to their role and function when sharing an asset or posting it in a shared drive. Giving everybody a general “edit all” permission opens the door to accidental and deliberate tampering of assets and can change them beyond recognition. Even when giving edit access to content marketing assets, make sure you turn the “suggest” mode on to avoid direct, messy changes to the doc.

Relevant articles:

https://scatter.co.in/scatter-calendar-april-2021-2/

https://scatter.co.in/leveraging-technology-to-up-your-content-marketing-game/

Contributors: Aastha, Sanchea and Swapnil