How to Improve Your Marketing Campaigns with Creative Assets

Since the digitization of marketing, brands possess unique new opportunities to elevate the way they attract prospective customers. Through digital marketing, brands can now insert themselves into almost every facet of consumers’ daily lives, fighting for their constant attention and—more importantly—their loyalty. 

How? By using creative assets that not only tell a compelling story but also resonates with their target audience. Here’s what brands and marketers should know about creative assets.

What Are Creative Assets? 

Creative assets are files like images, audio, documents, and other digital media that are used in marketing campaigns to target audiences. Typically, they are stored and organized in some type of asset management system that helps manage the overall function of files within a company workflow. 

Creative assets can help enhance the story that your brand is telling by allowing your brand to create a more holistic campaign. For example, many organizations are adopting a combination of in-person and virtual events. To create an event that works across physical and digital space, brands can circulate creative assets like virtual backgrounds, social media posts, and other branded content to virtual event participants to help enhance their experience. For physical event attendees, creative assets should be extremely similar to the digital experience, with similar name badges, signage, and promotion. 

How to Maximize Your Company’s Use of Creative Assets 

While having a nice variety of creative assets can enhance your marketing strategy, it’s also important to optimize their use to ensure that each creative is aligned with your overall business goals. Follow these tips to maximize your company’s use of creative assets when building campaigns:

1). Use software to organize and store creative assets

To make executing marketing campaigns more efficient, make sure you optimize how you organize and store your assets. A digital asset management solution (DAM) can improve the overall organization of your business by providing a one-stop-shop repository for your brand’s assets, making it easier to share files and collaborate on projects. DAM solutions also consolidate assets in one place, which simplifies distribution so that marketers can easily push content out on social channels, web content management systems, marketing automation systems, third-party distribution services, and more.

2). Organize creative assets by using metadata

Once your creative assets are stored in one central location, it’s crucial to access them easily. Metadata places keywords on files to help specify their contents. This allows teams to search and find creative assets stored within your asset management solution, based on what is needed for the next campaign. For example, if team members know that an upcoming campaign will have a video component distributed in an email newsletter, they can use metadata to search for the necessary video clip files and branded email templates. 

3). Review assets periodically to ensure that they are aligned with current business goals 

Periodically reviewing assets is an important part of content lifecycle management, or the process of developing, publishing, organizing, repurposing, and retiring content during its lifecycle at an organization. While updating existing content can help a brand reach more people without having to create net new assets, teams should also consider whether it might be time to retire a piece of content if it’s no longer bringing value to the brand. Reviewing assets every so often will ensure that your brand gets the most out of its marketing strategy and that these assets will continue to support business initiatives for months to come. 

How creative asset management (CAM) can help  

While the tips above will help you get the most bang for your buck out of your creative assets, implementing creative asset management (CAM) along with these strategies can also expedite asset production and workflow. CAM focuses on the design and production processes that generate original marketing collateral for your organization. As a process, it helps marketers better collaborate with creative teams as assets are being produced and more efficiently distribute these assets once they’re finalized.

With the implementation of a CAM process, your design team can optimize its creative workflows at the beginning of the asset lifecycle. Doing so offers many key benefits, including: 

• A centralized repository for workgroups
• Asset usage tracking
• Creative applications integration
• Usage Rights controls for assets
• Management and automation of creative operations
• Enhanced asset metadata 
• Review and Approval features
• Version control

Keep your assets organized with a Brand Management Solution 

Creative assets aren’t just nice-to-have – they are marketing essentials. The use of a brand management solution can help your marketing team keep their creative assets organized and available for anyone in the organization to use for local campaigns. The best brand management solutions help marketing teams democratize their effort, giving other departments access to creative assets in the form of templates. This will not only save your team valuable time but will also encourage greater collaboration with other departments throughout your organization.

This blog post was originally published on September 25, 2020