Examining Your Digital Assets

How Can Marketing Content be an Asset?

Every year your company makes a significant investment in the development of marketing materials with an objective to effectively produce sales. The resulting 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 we consider assets to be tangible elements like equipment & machinery that a company uses to generate income or reduce costs. For instance a printing company may purchase a new printing press that allows them to complete projects in shorter time and at a higher profit. Quite honestly, even if your product imagery is excellent, they may not fit the definition of an “asset” because they are not by themselves developing additional sales or reducing your costs. In fact the expense of managing this imagery may be much greater than you realize. As you begin to examine the organizational issues related to managing this imagery, it becomes clear that marketing, design and sales resources all are being quietly eaten away as they create product imagery and coordinate these requests from your retailers and sales force.

The good news is that this depletion of your resources can be reversed. Through a process of Digital Asset Management these organizational challenges are resolved and your images begin to behave like assets with increasing value. This allows your company to generate additional income and reduce costs.

3 Areas That Encompass Your Digital Assets

Although your organization has much to gain by implementing a digital asset management process, any solution needs to consider the three key areas that encompass these digital assets.

The first step: Identify what your digital assets are.
All of the branding materials produced by your company have the potential to be digital assets. These may include product imagery, sale sheets, presentations, product packaging, point of purchase materials and other digital elements used to promote your brand. The first step in assessing a process that encompasses these digital materials is to look at how these materials are currently organized and where they are located.

The second step: Plot out the asset creation process.
Typically the coordination of new images and branding materials is performed by email, phone and paper exchanges between product managers, advertising, marketing and supporting vendors. These various groups collaborate to develop product imagery and drive the asset creation process by updating printed catalogs, displays, packaging and sale sheets. However, each individual product or product grouping follows an independent life cycle for its promotional elements. This life cycle becomes even more complex for companies with large product lines where hundreds of products are changing simultaneously yet each with an independent timeline. This process of evaluating the workflow cycles and the communication process for the development of these materials is the second step to evaluating a process for managing your digital assets.

The third step: Detail the process for making these materials available.
As soon as these materials are created they are needed by your business partners, product teams, retailers and sales force, often before the actual product is even manufactured or available. With the advent of the Internet and desktop presentations, your sales force, retailers and web site partners require imagery immediately instead of at incremental cycles. The third step in evaluating your digital asset management process is to detail the various ways that your retailers and sales force need images.  This process looks at the file formats, materials and fulfillment process that best optimizes your organizational resources.

How does Digital Asset Management Change the Behavior of your Images?

Once you have completed the process of examining the three areas that encompass your digital assets, you will have the necessary details to put a process in place that transforms the behavior of your images into performing assets. By understanding what your digital assets are, how they are created and how you will make them available, all of the elements are in place to calculate the Return on Investment that can be achieved by implementing a digital asset management process.

By implementing the DAM process through a system that meets your organizational needs, you can achieve direct cost benefits and indirect cost benefits that taken together will change the behavior of your imagery into highly performing assets.

Areas that produce tangible financial benefit include:

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

As these tangible financial benefits are realized through the use of a digital asset management process, there are also areas that produce an indirect return on your asset investment. In some cases these indirect benefits may be even more important then the tangible financial return since they resolve organizational issues that allow marketing, design and sales to focus on their core responsibilities.

Areas that produce an indirect financial benefit include:

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