Why Marketing Asset Management Matters Now, More than Ever

What is marketing asset management? To answer that question, refer to our guide, “Busting the 5 Myths About Marketing Asset Management, DAM, and Project Management.”

Marketing • Asset • Management (MAM) (n): The use of a central repository to customize, organize, and distribute finished sales and marketing content to both offline and online channels. Includes workflows, dynamic and locked content, integrations, security controls, and measurement.

Sounds fun, right? Don’t sleep onmarketing asset management. Here’s why it matters today, perhaps more than ever before.

There are 120+ channels available to marketers (yes really)

It’s a multichannel world – omnichannel, to be precise.

15 years ago the average consumer typically used two touch-points when buying an item and only 7% regularly used more than four. Today consumers use an average of almost six touch-points with nearly 50% regularly using more than four. (Marketing Week)

One recent initiative counted all possible marketing, service, delivery, and transactional channels, and revealed that in today’s marketing realm, there are a whopping 120+ content delivery channels available to marketers!

From digital banners and signage in-store to email signatures, to field sales materials, there’s a massive variety of ways in which our message can reach out consumers.

Marketing Asset Management ensures brand compliance across every channel – anywhere a modern buyer can connect with a modern brand.

Global business growth requires the ability to scale

The pace of global business expansion has never been faster. As companies broaden their reach into international markets, each faces the same problem of scale.

How do you do business globally, while marketing locally? After all, each territory must personalize and customize assets at the local level to ensure relevance to local buyers.

Whether language, tone, or imagery, centralized marketing teams who seek to balance the elements of content needed for global personalization often rely on Marketing Asset Management to do so at the global level.

Marketing asset management enables all offices to access, localize, and distribute approved marketing materials, empowering them to create a cohesive brand experience as every touchpoint is on-brand and up-to-date.

Customer experience is the charter of the modern CMO

A Global CMO Study by Sirius Decisions found that customer experiences, aligning with customer needs and acquiring new customers, will dominate marketing strategy for the next two years.

Brand assets comprise the majority of the touchpoints a modern buyer has with a brand. MarcomCentral research found that “off-brand assets affect brand management and degrade the sales and customer experience process. Whether a channel or a franchise, every touchpoint is an extension of the brand.”

Marketing Asset Management directly impacts each of these top priorities for marketing teams today by:

1. Creating a cohesive experience,
2. Ensuring the most relevant content is always available to a global, distributed workforce, and
3. Helping every corner of the business attract new customers with approved, up-to-date assets

The channel needs support – now

Marketing asset management can help corporate marketing teams serve the needs of distributors, agents, and dealers as you need to provide up-to-date product materials and marketing assets to your network of channel partners. When systems are ineffective, distributors risk simply skipping the process of marketing, deflating opportunity for growth.

With a marketing asset management tool, all distributors need to do is choose a template and add their own regional touches to enhance engagement at the local level. Distributors who never had the time to do marketing of any kind can now produce complete campaigns (flyers, banner ads, emails and more) in a matter of minutes. Giving them this power to create informative and engaging marketing pieces that are also 100% on-target with corporate marketing’s latest compliance, product, and brand messaging helps the company stay on brand in the public eye.

Productivity is a competitive advantage

According to the Aberdeen Group, “Best-in-Class marketing organizations are far more likely to leverage content and associated technologies to speed time to market…”

Today, speed is critical. One study found that workers waste, on average, up to 8.8 hours EVERY WEEK hunting down the right information. That’s 52 working days a year. This is a tremendous burden on the business when you factor in hourly salaries and limited bandwidth.

A Marketing Asset Management tool can help employees reduce the time they spend searching for, or recreating lost assets. For marketers, that’s more time to spend driving revenue and acquiring customers.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 18% of companies feel their organization has the right technology in place to manage their content marketing efforts. Think Marketing Asset Management is a “nice-to-have?” Think again. It’s a “must-have” in the modern enterprise marketing technology stack.