You’ve heard it time and time again; effective marketing content is your brand’s most valuable asset. It makes you stand out from the crowd and keeps you relevant in the minds of your customers, driving revenue.

But as most marketing teams know, it’s not always smooth sailing. Consistently delivering the right content at the right time means putting fresh visual assets together, getting them to the right team member, and delivering an engaging story fast.

So how do effective marketing and creative teams manage this? Digital asset libraries. A place to keep, manage, organize and rapidly distribute important digital assets like templates, fonts, logos, components, and documents.

Why should I build a digital asset library?

A typical marketing team’s cloud drive looks like an attic full of clutter that was once valuable, but as channels evolve, the team has to invest more time tracking down assets that have been moved, lost, overwritten, or become outdated. With a digital asset management library, your inventory grows and gains value and your workflows speed up, because of its structure. What does that mean in terms of benefits?

  1. A single source-of-truth for the entire organization, where they can find and use all the assets that are relevant to them, right away. Everything is securely stored and organized by taxonomy, team, file type, and access is controlled. This decreases time lost searching or creating new assets to replace lost ones.
  2. Keep your brand consistent as your teams get the most up-to-date and approved content from one place. From logos to document templates, you can forget about low-quality touchpoints being created.
  3. Faster workflows across teams and better collaboration as teams can work on the same version of the files they want to publish, approve work, and give access to important components needed to finish the job. This eliminates the risk of sending different versions back and forth, overwritten work, and files scattered across channels.
  4. Increase the value of your best content by saving it as templates for your team, repurposing it on the spot or updating it. Making this content accessible saves time, ensures that it evolves into new ideas and more touchpoints to reach your audience without having to reinvent the wheel.

What’s the ROI of a digital asset library? Let’s do some math.

A study by the IDC reported that knowledge workers “spend 16% of their time searching for information”, or a whole workday per week, and they find it less than 50% of the time. At a minimum, creating a dedicated digital asset library saves you $640 a month per employee ($20/hour x 1.5 hours/day x 4 weeks), or roughly $38.000 per year for a team of five, without accounting for the time and budget saved by not having to replace lost content.

How to put it all together

Digital asset management technology comes in all shapes and sizes, but here are a few things you’ll want to have in place when putting an asset library together:

  1. Use the native asset labeling and organization to ensure everyone every folder is tagged and easy to find. Avoids hours of searching for assets in local or cloud drives, and brings clarity to your team about what assets to use.
  2. Use workspace permissions to bring teammates onboard and ensure they have the files they need to get their work done. DAM helps you get the right assets to anyone that needs them, whether it’s internal teams, external agencies, the press. Centrally manage who has access and the degree of freedom they have to access files.
  3. Use team folders to distribute campaign assets, instead of working locally and co-create faster from any location, in real-time.
  4. Co-create in one workspace and distribute your finished work to multiple channels.

Discover how to create, manage and deliver professionally branded content with Xara

Xara is a visual communication tool that helps teams create, centralize, organize, control and distribute their high-value digital files. Make sure your entire team always finds what they need to get work done.

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