Examining your Digital Assets

How can digital asset management increase the value of your marketing materials?

The Honeycomb Digital Asset Management System can quickly resolve the organizational challenges surrounding your marketing materials.  When these digital files are handled like tangible assets, your company will increase productivity, reduce costs and generate additional income.

Every year your company dedicates a large portion of the marketing budget to the development of marketing content and materials to effectively promote your business.  The resulting digital images, presentations, packaging and point of purchase materials are developed at considerable expense; however, this doesn’t necessarily make them an “asset” to your company.  Typically, assets are considered to be tangible elements like equipment and machinery used to generate income or reduce costs.  For instance, a printing company may purchase a new printing press that allows them to complete projects in a shorter time and at a higher profit.

Even if your product photography is excellent, it still may not fit the definition of an “asset” because these digital images alone aren’t developing additional sales or reducing costs.  In fact, the expense of managing these marketing materials may be much greater than you realize.  Many times the organizational issues related to managing this digital content quietly eats away at the marketing resources that could be used to create new product photography and to design and produce new collateral materials.  Coordinating and managing all the requests for these materials from your retailers and sales force takes a great deal of time and effort that ends up depleting your marketing budget.

Digital Assets Key Elements

By implementing a digital asset management system, your organization has much to gain in productivity and costs.  Let’s consider 3 current key elements of your existing digital assets: the locations and identifications of all digital assets, workflow development or creation process for new digital assets and the distribution process for new digital assets.

Where are your Digital Assets located and how are they identified?

Digital assets could include all of the branding materials produced by your company.  These may include product photography, sale sheets, presentations, product packaging, point of purchase materials and other digital elements used to promote your brand.  The first step in assessing your current digital asset process is to locate where and how these digital files are organized.

When new digital assets are created, what is the workflow process and how is that communicated?

The coordination of new brand marketing materials and photographic images can be a daunting and tedious process.  It is often handled with numerous email, phone and paper exchanges between product managers, advertising, marketing and supporting vendors.  These various groups collaborate to drive the digital asset creation process by developing new product photography and by updating printed catalogs, displays, packaging and sale sheets.

Because each individual product or product grouping follows an independent life cycle for its promotional elements, this process becomes complex.  This complexity compounds for companies with extensive product lines where hundreds of products are changing simultaneously yet each with an independent timeline.  To properly manage the workflow of your digital assets, you need to evaluate these cycles and communication processes for the development these marketing materials. 

What is the distribution or sharing process for new digital assets?

The need to distribute or share digital assets is often necessary before the actual product is manufactured or available.  Often, your sales force, product teams, retailers and website partners require these new digital assets immediately instead of at incremental cycles.  Evaluate your current digital asset management process to detail the various ways that your retailers and sales force need the digital images.  Determine the file formats, marketing materials and fulfillment process that best optimize your organizational resources. 

How does Digital Asset Management change the behavior of your images?

By locating and identifying the digital assets within your organization and understanding how they are created and made available for distribution, you will have the necessary details to put a digital asset management system in place.  This DAM solution will transform the behavior of your digital images into performing assets allowing you to calculate the Return on Investment (ROI).  By implementing the DAM process through a system that meets your organizational needs, you can achieve both direct and indirect cost benefits that combined will change the behavior of your digital images into high performing assets.

The Honeycomb Archive Digital Management System provides these tangible financial benefits that will:

• Eliminate costs to manually fulfill digital image requests by email & CD
• Eliminate sales force time involved in communicating image requests
• Eliminate sales force time to reformat/optimize digital images for their presentations
• Eliminate web developer time to identify and update current digital images for the corporate website

The Honeycomb Archive Digital Asset Management System also produces financial benefits through an indirect return on your asset investments.  In some cases these indirect benefits may be even more important than the tangible financial return since they resolve organizational issues that allow marketing, design and sales to focus on their core responsibilities.

Indirect financial benefits of the Honeycomb Archive Digital Management include:

• Proper & clear presentation of product brands
• Improved service for customers that are trying to obtain digital assets
• Reallocation of marketing time toward developing improved materials to support the brand
• Reallocation of sales time toward making sales instead of finding/formatting digital images
• Hedge against accidental or malicious loss of marketing content investment