Where creativity meets reality: Optimizing marketing asset management for faster campaign delivery

Marketers can come up with ambitious, creative campaigns, but they also need content to power them.

In our experience, that’s where creativity meets reality. Great marketing ideas come thick and fast, but execution slows down because content assets live in too many places across the corporate ecosystem, or require developer intervention to be accessed and used. At the same time, campaigns and content need to be launched across multiple channels and touchpoints quickly and efficiently, in different languages and locales, and cater to a spectrum of audience preferences and market pressures.

For most companies, the scope of that challenge necessitates a growing volume of marketing assets, which have to live across different tools, including digital asset managers (DAMs) and content management systems (CMSes). In that environment, simply locating the right image or video for a campaign can eat up hours of marketers’ time; that slog slows content workflows, fragments experiences, and hurts engagement. 

The irony is marketing teams don’t typically lack assets, they lack visibility.

So let's get into the marketing asset management challenge. We’re going to explore the key issues that brands face when managing their marketing assets, and how finding the right marketing asset management software can make that job easier, at scale.

What is marketing asset management?

Marketing asset management is a reference to the people, tools, and workflows involved in the organization, storage, use, and distribution of marketing content assets. 

Let’s explain what we mean by marketing assets. A marketing asset is any digital asset that a marketing department uses to contribute to a content experience, be that a webpage, app, email, in-store display, and so on. That covers images, text, videos, audio files, logos, documents, even the fonts that companies use for their logos. 

The marketing asset management process is ultimately about giving marketers two important things: visibility of the assets within their ecosystem, and the means by which to use those assets in the digital experiences they create. 

The easier it is for marketers to achieve that level of visibility and governance, and the more efficient and effective their content workflows, the more aligned their content experiences are.

Why does marketing asset management matter?

It’s easy to think about marketing as a customer-focused discipline, and marketers as both creative, tech-savvy operators, singularly focused on market trends and customer tastes. 

Good marketers are those things, of course, but they know how to translate their skill into reality. That means they’re also logistics experts who know how to find and use every asset that goes into every piece of content or every campaign that they launch. 

“Find and use” is doing some heavy lifting there; it maps onto the “visibility and governance” point we made earlier. It’s a quick way of saying that marketers need to be able to navigate various asset libraries and digital files, set security and access levels for those assets, assign categories to them, arrange reviews and approvals, schedule publication dates, collaborate with writers, editors, and designers, translate and localize for specific audiences, personalize, and so on. 

Juggling those asset management tasks in companies with a small content footprint is challenging. Doing that at scale, across channels and touchpoints, in a global content operations context can be a huge lift — fraught with potential bottlenecks, delays, and technical difficulties. 

That’s where marketing asset management becomes really valuable. Here’s how it helps.

Version control

The content publication workflow typically connects with multiple teams, workflows, and tools. In that environment, it’s easy to lose track of the current version of a given piece of content. Proper marketing asset management should strengthen version control, and help minimize the potential for duplication, errors involving incorrect assets, and lost progress as content is handed off between the various stages of publication and distribution.

It might sound simple, but versioning is one of the first points at which processes break down. That’s because file-based storage so easily undermines team confidence in what’s considered “final.” A centralized content hub changes that because everyone instantly sees the same source file.   

Brand voice

Your content is your brand’s voice, so it needs to speak clearly and consistently to customers, and deliver the same message and experience across every channel and touchpoint. In that environment, poor asset management can make it more difficult for marketers (and content teams) to maintain that brand consistency and end up with assets that don’t align with their voice and messaging or that contradict information in different parts of their ecosystem. 

Maintaining your voice at scale is even more challenging. When assets are reused across multiple campaigns, or translated for different markets, even subtle inconsistencies, like the tone of marketing copy or the use of outdated visuals, can be jarring for customers, hurt engagement, and even erode trust. Research reflects that challenge: over 80% of executives report struggling to maintain brand consistency at a global scale. 

Developer dependencies

If marketers need developer support to make changes to content, that dependency can create bottlenecks for publication workflows, bog down campaign launches, or even result in inaccurate content being taken down. A frequent marketing ops complaint is something along the lines of “We can’t move fast because our dev queue is full.”

That’s not a purely technology issue, it’s an autonomy issue. The goal of asset management is to minimize those dependencies, empowering marketers to work autonomously without losing governance, streamline the content optimization process, and reduce time to market.

Scaling

Business growth changes content requirements, expanding publication requirements and the various content management challenges that entails. In this environment, poorly managed asset libraries undermine growth goals, putting pressure on content workflows and fracturing experiences as teams attempt to scale. Asset management should remove that friction, helping brand teams stay in control of content without adding complexity or effort to content workflows.

What does good marketing asset management look like?

We’ve set out the key pain points and opportunities of asset management, but what does good asset management look like in action, as part of an organization’s day-to-day content operations? And how does the right marketing asset management system make life easier?

We don’t need to look far for the answers to those questions, because the Contentful digital experience platform (DXP) helps organizations around the world manage their marketing assets across vast digital ecosystems, covering multiple brands, channels, languages, and touchpoints. 

Here’s how we do it.

Single source of truth

Contentful is a unified content hub that serves as the single source of truth for all digital brand assets within an ecosystem. That means your marketers don’t have to slog through disconnected libraries or piles of folders of marketing materials to find what they need, or jump between different CMSes. All content lives in one place, secured with role-based permissions, and accessible for every authorized user. For many organizations, streamlining assets into a single source can be game-changing, in some cases, reducing content workflows from weeks to days. 

Structured content models

In Contentful, digital content is structured and stored in its smallest component parts: headers, text, images, bios, and so on. Those modular components can be used to build new content structures for new campaigns and experiences on any channel, with no risk of incompatibility. Structuring means that new assets don’t need to be created from scratch, which preserves brand voice and consistency, increases the value of digital assets at every stage of the content lifecycle, and speeds up content creation significantly. 

Content experiments

Asset management is also a question of which content to use — and marketers can work that out by running experiments. The structured modularity that Contentful Personalization enables, for example, enables marketers to set up and run A/B tests themselves from the comfort of the UI, to quickly determine which content is going to resonate with their customers. It’s an optimization asset that’s much more difficult to build into the marketing workflow in traditional CMS setups. 

Integrated workflows

Contentful enables marketers to connect and collaborate with designers, copywriters, and developers in real time, across workflows, from within the platform. Built-in governance tools let admins define role-based permissions for assets, create tasks, track reviews and approvals, and schedule the publication of single pieces or batches of content across time zones and channels.

Metadata and image tagging

Contentful’s structured content model includes metadata and image tagging features, making it easy to boost the search visibility of digital assets, and to find, organize, and repurpose content. AI-powered metadata tagging streamlines the process further, helping marketing teams auto-generate tags for thousands of assets. 

API-first extensibility

Contentful empowers brands to build exactly the marketing stacks they desire by leveraging application programming (API)-first architecture. In that composable environment, marketers can integrate their preferred asset management tools: digital asset managers (DAM) and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, personalization engines, translation tools, and so on, and can swap out or replace those integrations when something better or more cost-effective comes along. 

Omnichannel marketing

The API-first approach also enables true omnichannel marketing, with assets seamlessly distributed across websites, mobile apps, social media, email campaigns, digital displays, and any other channel the brand uses. Omnichannel means that marketers only ever need to manage one version of a digital asset, and reduces the risk of duplication or formatting problems, which ultimately streamlines content creation and campaign launches. 

AI automation

Contentful’s native AI Actions feature automates an array of core digital asset management processes, including the previously mentioned metadata tagging, image tagging, SEO, translation, localization, and personalization. Marketers can also automate sections of their review and approval processes to stay on top of quality control and compliance throughout the content lifecycle. 

Wrapping up

In Contentful, “reality” isn’t an obstacle for marketing creativity, it’s a starting point. Our platform gives brands the flexibility to manage digital assets at scale by streamlining and simplifying marketing workflows, and expanding what your marketers can practically do with content. 

That flexibility means your team can adopt more efficient management practices, and move faster to turn visibility and governance of assets into the campaigns and strategies that define your brand and delight your customers. 

The best marketing teams treat their content stack like a living ecosystem that they maintain, and so they don’t see asset management as operational hygiene but as a means to creative freedom and workflow efficiency. In other words, once you’ve got your visibility and governance right, everything gets easier. 

You can explore Contentful’s asset management advantages yourself: read more about building and integrating a marketing stack, browse our Marketplace for apps and plugins, or get in touch with our sales team for a platform demo. 

Take a tour

Chat with our team

Your experiences should wow, not wait. Let's talk.

Inspiration for your inbox

Subscribe and stay up-to-date on best practices for delivering modern digital experiences.