Brand assets are the soul of your business. They give each of your campaigns a unique voice, so consistency is key. Only 10% of B2B companies report their brand presentation is consistent. But if you nail this across all channels, you could grow your revenue by 23%.
This is why organizing for marketing is so important. If you don’t have a clear, consistent way to organize your marketing materials, you could find yourself reinventing the wheel for every new campaign. Far better to build on your success and make each campaign better than the one before.
To do that, you need a better way to organize your brand assets. And we don’t just mean your brand assets, but also those of your clients. Taken together, all of these bits and bytes can lead to greater results, or even greater stress.
The choice is yours.
Organized marketing teams have a clear method for finding everything they need. What do we mean by “everything?” Brand assets consist of all the marketing materials you need to grow your business and generate new revenue for your clients. Brand assets include the following:
Now, take a deep breath, put on some soothing music, and picture your ideal organized marketing team. These teams are calm, clear, and confident even in the face of multiple deadlines. They thrive on new challenges because they’ve taken care of the basics. This is how they organize their brand assets:
But if you look carefully, there’s one thing organized marketing teams lack. They don’t have one person who’s informally responsible for remembering where everything is. That’s because they’ve implemented a folder structure, file naming conventions, and font management best practices that are resilient to employee churn and the stress of new projects.
And it shows. The most organized marketing teams are almost 400% more likely to report success. How do you get results like this?
The most organized marketing teams understand that organizing their brand assets leads to success. It’s not something they do in their spare time. It’s built into the way they do business.
In fact, it’s hard to succeed at marketing or any creative task without it. It’s like oxygen to a runner. You might think about it occasionally during training. But if you don’t have it during a race, that’s the difference between winning and obscurity.
The key to success?
Start slow.
Begin with your next campaign. Setup folders in advance to receive new digital assets and existing brand assets. This is just one part of creating a consistent process of digital asset management and font management. Just like you can’t be a world-class marathon runner by deciding to run more often, you can’t organize your brand assets just by wishing and hoping. You need to commit to the process every day, like a runner maintaining peak form.
Do a little bit at a time. Start with your next campaign, and as you get comfortable with the process expand your efforts to earlier projects. This can also be a good time to archive old versions of files you no longer need.
Of course, not every agency or marketing team has a full-time employee committed to organizing their marketing materials. That’s another reason to do it bit by bit. Plus, if you only work on a few folders at a time it’s easier to stay focused.
Now that deep breathing and soothing music have brought you inner calm, it’s time for a reality check.
Like any new project, you can accomplish much more – and more quickly – if you work together. Digital asset management systems and font management tools can help, but any new technology will require buy-in and collaboration to be successful. Once you identify champions for brand asset management in your organization, introduce them to the new process first. Once they see how organizing brand assets can be improve productivity and simplify their workflow, show these quick wins to the rest of your team to demonstrate the value of digital asset management. Then you can repeat the process for more and more team members until everyone is on board with the new system.
And that’s when your real journey begins.
How do you organize your brand assets? It’s not a linear path with a fixed destination. Whatever changes you make today will ripple outward and affect all your future campaigns. But one thing’s for sure. Digital asset management is not a luxury. It’s the foundation of your productivity, the work that makes all your other work possible and enjoyable. Nothing kills innovation faster than having to stop what you’re doing to *prepare* for innovation. The sooner you begin the crawl, walk, run process of organizing your marketing materials, the sooner you can reap the rewards of effective digital asset management.
Need a better way to organize your digital asset collection? Société Générale, one of the largest banks in France, turned to Extensis for help with their collection of over 20,000 images.