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. 

Many nonprofits use digital asset management (DAM) systems to coordinate marketing efforts between chapters, partners, and volunteers. Our case study of YMCA England & Wales showcases how they use the Widen Collective^® across 101 local organizations to create collateral that aligns with national campaigns and brand guidelines. 

In this article, we’ll explore how their evolving use of the Collective advances broader organizational initiatives and goals.

Marketing teams are always looking ahead, preparing for deadlines that will bring the next big campaign or project to life. But it’s important that they also periodically look back, and review all of the content that’s been created. Conducting a content audit gives teams a holistic view of their content inventory, helps them identify gaps, and surfaces opportunities for repurposing or reuse.

While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to a content audit, there are four major steps that any team or business can do. Plus, there are tools to help make the process more manageable.

Smart businesses of every kind know that they need a content strategy to create a stellar customer experience and succeed in today’s information-overloaded world. They need a guiding beacon, a grand vision that’ll steer the development, delivery, and management of their content.

Your digital asset management (DAM) solution is one tool you can use to support your content strategy. Here’s how!

Marketing organizations today are in constant competition to deliver the absolute best customer experience possible. But in a mad dash to achieve excellence, many businesses fall short. They are focused more on speed for the sake of speed, rather than ensuring their teams, assets, and processes can move more nimbly — and therefore more quickly when their customers need it most.

When a t-shirt is no longer wearable, is your instinct to throw it away or to turn it into a dust cloth? When you cook bacon, do you toss the grease or save it for your favorite chili recipe? Repurposing is a smart and effective way to get more use out of your resources while preventing waste.

More and more organizations are reaping the benefits of content repurposing. For example, a graphic for a slide deck can be repurposed for a social media post. A clip from one video can become b-roll for another. This savvy approach to content creation and repurposing not only helps your team extract more value from content but also supports a consistent message and brand style across multiple channels and campaigns.

A digital asset management (DAM) system plays a crucial role in an organization’s ability to reuse and repurpose content. A DAM system facilitates secure storage, searchable metadata, file conversions, and easy sharing for your digital assets, whether those assets are final content deliverables or individual pieces.

Managing your brand to deliver great customer experiences is no easy task. You need efficient content distribution, effective marketing automation, on point social media, relationship management, and so much more. A digital asset management (DAM) system helps teams create, organize, publish, and analyze content in today’s complicated marketing environment. It is the central content hub from which you can deliver top-notch customer experiences.

In about 15 years social media has gone from an entirely new concept to an integral part of everyday life. Now, any marketing mix that doesn’t include social media is unusual. With nearly 80% of Americans possessing a profile on a social networking platform, marketing through social media is one of the best ways to reach members of your target audience — no matter who they are. Plus, almost all prominent social platforms have paid advertising options that brands can leverage to increase exposure to relevant audiences. If you want to reach potential customers and key stakeholders, you need to be using social media.

But that doesn’t mean that social media marketing is easy, or even altogether straightforward! You and your team have probably struggled with how to create the right kind of content to engage the right people, and how to best measure success online. Don’t worry, you’re not alone — social media is a difficult and confusing tool for many marketing teams. A great step toward demystifying social media marketing is to streamline your social media workflow.

Sandra De Biasi is the project manager of digital assets and graphics at Varian, a Fortune 500 company and provider of radiation oncology treatment software and hardware.

At Varian, she manages their digital asset management system, which has played an integral role in managing the company’s brand assets during their recent corporate rebrand. Here’s her exciting story about how monitoring content analytics in their DAM system helped secure their valuable brand assets.

Nearly half of Americans use digital voice assistants, according to the Pew Research Center. This new channel presents opportunities and challenges for brands, one of which is delivering audio content straight into the home or office via voice command.