Business marketers create a lot of great content over time. This asset pool contains valuable information for audience members, such as prospects, customers, referral sources, etc.
Marketing (and sales) asset types can include
- Product pages
- Service pages
- Blog posts
- Case studies
- PDFs
- Videos
- Audio
- Slide decks
- Graphics
- GPTs
- Maps
Within each type, there are subtypes. Vidyard has identified nine types of video. PDFs can range from brochures to white papers.
Our definition of a digital marketing asset is anything with a public or private URL that can educate, empower, engage, or entertain a prospect.
Ideally, each asset either promotes your brand or leads to some action by the person who consumes the content.
However, a lot of excellent content that’s produced over the years is buried and forgotten.
It’s scattered across different platforms such as WordPress, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vidyard, Google Drive, OneDrive, and local drives.
No one ever took the time to assemble a list of their company’s marketing assets. Asset organization was not considered as part of a marketing strategy.
Common Issues
When marketing content is not correctly cataloged and managed, there are several problems.
- Employees spend a lot of time searching for content
- People re-create content that already exists
- Salespeople email outdated versions of PDFs
- Salespeople aren’t even aware certain educational or empowering content exists
- Marketers don’t have complete visibility to underperforming website content, some of which can be rewritten or re-optimized, so it ranks higher in online searches
Because of this, your organization is missing opportunities to increase awareness of its products or services and accelerate sales cycles.
There are many operational inefficiencies.
Sales & marketing assets like slide presentations are often stored on shared cloud drives.
Some companies that use Google Workspace store so many files on Google Drive that Google had to rescind a five million file limit. A small subset of these can be separately inventoried as marketing assets.
Once your marketing content is fully inventoried, you can make it easily discoverable by anyone in your organization through search.
Marketers will have easier access to content that can be repurposed and distributed across different channels.
After you take the time to inventory all your business’s content assets, you will likely find many hidden gems.
Inventorying Your Marketing Assets
How can you inventory your assets?
You could use spreadsheets. We prefer the power of a CRM system.
In CRM, a business’s digital assets can be managed like sales opportunities are managed in CRM or physical inventory is managed in an ERP system.
Your CRM is configured with a marketing asset table with custom fields for tracking asset attributes.
These attributes can be metadata values, such as
- Asset Name
- Asset URL
- Description
- Category
- Author
- Publish Date
They can also be business-oriented values like
- Topic
- Target Persona
- Pain Points to Address
- Strategic Goals
- SEO Goals
Anyone within your organization with access to these CRM assets can quickly find records relevant to a particular selling situation, for example.
Assets can be shared via email or social media channels within the CRM system.
As with sales opportunities and stocks, not all content marketing assets will be winners, but if they’re correctly cataloged and managed, they’re more likely to contribute to revenue opportunities.
