The right set of creative assets can make or break your next marketing campaign. Coming up with a clear strategy around creative asset management can be a game changer for content production, campaign execution, and overall results.
Without a strategic approach to managing creative assets through their lifecycle, you can easily waste resources and diminish the impact of your team’s work. With a solid strategy, you can deliver engaging omnichannel marketing campaigns that convert and build brand loyalty. Here’s a look at what creative assets are, what asset management entails, recommendations for software, and some tips on how to get started.
What are creative assets in marketing?
Creative assets in marketing are any media files you use for your campaigns on any channel. They include images, videos, gifs, rich media, 360º photography, product simulations, virtual reality (VR) files, brand documents, and more.
Think of any digital file you use to create experiences on your website, on mobile, for ads, for print, or for social channels. Anything you can think of that’s directed toward selling or building awareness for your brand, products, or services is a creative asset. The hero image on your home page with the clever tagline overlaid? That’s a creative asset.
Your creative content could be produced in-house, by an outside agency, or both. Counting all the different sizes and versions in addition to the original files, you could produce thousands of assets every year. Most of the people outside of marketing take these assets for granted until they see how much work goes into creative asset management.
What is creative asset management?
Creative asset management includes every step in the lifecycle of your digital marketing files from their ideation and creation to their storage and distribution.
Anyone who’s produced creative assets for marketing knows that the process begins in the meetings where creative briefs are formed. From there you have to file requests to get into the production schedule of creative teams. And then the work on each asset begins. With the creation of a new creative asset, you’ll end up with a number of versions before you get through the approval process to land on the final set of files.
Managing this whole process from start to finish requires clearly defined workflows, cooperative teams, and collaborative software.
What is creative asset management software?
Creative asset management software helps you efficiently manage, store, and distribute your creative assets across teams and through systems — both internal and external.
These software platforms help you manage all of your digital assets and improve your creative workflow. This marketing technology lets you make changes to a file in one place and cascade those changes across websites and other systems. And you can organize your file library with detailed metadata so that creative assets are easy to find and share.
Imagine that your remote workforce and global creative team can all work together on the same files, no matter what the time zone. Here are a few creative asset management software suggestions.
Monday.com
Monday.com is a newer player in the creative asset management space that excels at workflow automation and collaboration. They’ve designed a clutter-free interface for you to create your creative marketing assets and manage them in one secured workspace.
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- Store and manage your branded assets
- Search and find in seconds
- Accelerate your feedback loop
- Keep your information safe
MediaBeacon
MediaBeacon centralizes creative feedback, review, and approval into a single stream. It helps drive asset creation, makes creative assets easy to find, and distributes your digital assets across teams and through systems.
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- Drive asset creation
- Enable asset discovery
- Empower asset (re)use
Widen Collective®
The Widen Collective simplifies how your creative assets are delivered to market. Keep your teams collaborating, coordinating, and in control of your brand across the content lifecycle. Widen delivers the centralized foundation for your entire content lifecycle and creates operational efficiencies by providing a central source of truth for your creative assets.
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- Catalog, control, and deliver rich media assets from a central source of truth
- Enrich product data with marketing copy and digital assets for distribution
- Track and measure assets, and build site performance dashboards
- Streamline collaboration, reviews, and approvals with online proofing
Tips for using creative asset management software
Once you find the right creative asset management software, you’ve got a big sandbox to play in. So where do you get started? Instead of spending time lost in corners that won’t add value, here are some tips on how to use your new software.
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- Store and organize campaign images, videos, graphic files, 360º photography, etc.
- Centralize brand documents
- Eliminate versioning issues
- Define creative asset workflows
- Automate creative asset publishing
- Organize metadata categories and standards
Get started with creative asset management
Creative asset management can help you optimize your marketing workflows and get results in your campaigns. The right software provides a central source of truth that makes all of your digital assets easy to organize, access, and distribute across complex teams and systems. This turns your library of marketing images, videos, rich media, 360º photography, and brand documents into a strategic asset instead of a frustrating mess.
More than 800 of the world’s most respected brands use the Widen Collective to store, manage, and publish their creative assets for marketing campaigns and product offerings. 
for a free demo to see how the Collective can help you with creative asset management.
