Marketing asset management: Your go-to guide

When an organization scales, its library of assets  inevitably scales with it. Marketing teams in particular tend to work with a particularly diverse set of digital asset formats—video, audio, image, text, etc. These teams need an efficient strategy (and complementary software) to keep everything organized and accessible.

Let’s explore marketing asset management (MAM) in more depth to help your cross-functional teams align, streamline operations, and ultimately launch better campaigns.

What are marketing assets?

A marketing asset is any resource marketing teams use to attract, engage, and convert customers. It’s a broad category that includes internally facing resources that guide teams in executing those campaigns.

While any digital assets your marketing team relies on can fit into this category, some specific examples include:

Your assets will obviously vary depending on your industry and marketing strategy. But regardless of type and format, you need a marketing asset management strategy to keep your assets organized and accessible to your cross-functional teams.

What is marketing asset management?

MAM is the systematic organization, tracking, retrieval, sharing, and optimization of marketing assets throughout their lifecycle. When done well, it enables teams to identify the right resources quickly and ensures visibility into important data pertaining to those assets.

For example, how many times has a file been updated? Which team members were involved in these updates? Has the latest version been approved for distribution?

Having answers to questions like these at your fingertips improves efficiency, collaboration, and ultimately brand consistency.

MAM vs. DAM

MAM is often conflated with digital asset management (DAM), but they aren’t one and the same. DAM refers to the storing, organizing, securing, sharing, governing, analyzing, and collaborating of any digital assets—those owned by HR, accounting, management, etc. MAM is tailored to the specific assets marketing teams use. To put it simply, MAM is a subset of DAM that focuses on the unique needs of marketing teams.

Benefits of marketing asset management

We’ve touched on how effective MAM strategy can boost efficiency and save your teams headache, but here’s a more comprehensive breakdown of how it does so.

Streamlined workflows

With a robust MAM strategy, teams stay aligned thanks to centralized asset organization. This eliminates the need for team members to waste time searching for files, freeing up time to actually use those files.

Brand consistency

As marketing teams are well aware, consistency in branding is crucial for establishing a solid and recognizable brand identity. MAM ensures all marketing assets align with brand guidelines, which helps maintain brand consistency across various campaigns, channels, and touchpoints.

Cost reduction

Effective MAM minimizes asset duplication and enables teams to repurpose existing assets. By leveraging and reusing assets, your teams can reduce costs associated with content creation.

For example, say you’re launching a multichannel campaign. Rather than creating new assets for each channel, you can take the images your design team created for your blog and make minor tweaks to make those same images work on social media.

Enhanced partnerships

MAM improves communication and alignment between marketing teams and external partners, agencies, and freelancers, as it enables all collaborating parties to share access to the same assets and project information.

Improved tracking and reporting

A comprehensive MAM strategy (and the right platform to support it) enables organizations to track marketing asset usage, performance, and impact. This data-driven approach helps teams gain insight into asset effectiveness, generate accurate reports for informed decision-making, and optimize future marketing campaigns.

How to organize marketing assets: Tips for managers and teams

We’ve mentioned MAM strategy quite a bit, but how do you actually implement one? Here are some tips to help you organize and manage your marketing assets.

1. Create a standardized file naming system

A consistent file naming convention is essential for asset identification and retrieval. Develop a clear structure that includes relevant information such as campaign name, asset type, version number, and date. For example, you might follow the structure “[campaign name] [asset type] [date/version #],” which could look like, “Mobile Release Promo Video 2023-07-28.” By adhering to a standardized naming system, team members can quickly identify and locate assets without wasting time.

2. Use metadata

MAM software should support metadata, including creation date, file size, keywords, and contributing team members. This makes it significantly easier to navigate your assets and find what you’re looking for.

3. Perform consistent audits

Regularly review and audit your asset library to ensure it remains up to date and clutter-free, identifying outdated or redundant assets and removing them from the repository. This reduces the risk of misalignment on asset versions and use of incorrect materials.

4. Train your team

Every organization is bound to do asset management a little differently, so it’s important to keep your teams on the same page about how your company does it. Invest time in training team members to effectively use and navigate the marketing asset management system you choose. Provide comprehensive onboarding and training sessions to familiarize them with the system’s features, workflows, and best practices.

Choosing the right marketing asset management software

There aren’t too many platforms labeled “MAM software” out there—most tools that serve this purpose are either DAM software or flexible platforms that can be adapted to use cases like MAM. So it’s important to screen for options that offer features marketing teams need, such as:

• Collaboration: While nearly every DAM platform facilitates collaboration, those supporting MAM have features that allow marketing teams to share, review, and collaborate on assets in real time.

• Integration: MAM-focused software should integrate with other marketing tools, such as content management systems (CMS), social media platforms, project management tools, and marketing automation platforms. This streamlines workflows like content publication and ensures access to assets across multiple tools, eliminating the need for manual transfers or duplications.

• Workflow management: Your MAM platform should offer specialized workflows that align with marketing processes, such as campaign planning, marketing calendar creation, asset approval, and asset distribution.

• Flexibility: Choose a versatile solution that is adaptable and low-code, so your marketing team can easily create, identify, and manage shared assets according to your unique workflows.

With the right MAM tools and strategy in place, your teams will stay organized and efficient as they work together to bring impactful campaigns to life.

Airtable offers the flexible structure, collaborative workspaces, and asset-level metadata support that marketing teams need for effective MAM. Choose a plan that meets your organization’s needs get started today.