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Creating powerful marketing materials is a key to sculpting your brand’s image to reflect what you intend it to, but doing so is much easier said than done. When you consider the time it takes to manually budget finances, place the orders for the materials, and record/track the shipment information, managing this process while trying to balance other responsibilities can be a heavy workload to take on.
Fortunately, there is a way to simplify this procedure so that your marketing department can take its focus off of completing orders and place it on what it does best: developing fresh, impactful strategies that will elevate your brand. So, what’s the secret weapon to being more effective at acquiring your marketing materials? It comes down to understanding what modern marketing collateral management programs are.
Learning the Basics of Marketing Collateral Management
To understand what this service does for brands, it helps to start by clarifying what marketing collateral actually is; marketing collateral is basically any resource that helps to get the word out about a particular product or service. This typically encompasses printed material (brochures, white papers, company info sheets, etc.), company apparel (uniforms, t-shirts, etc.), and digital assets, such as website content, videos, and photographs.
A marketing collateral management program is a service that allows companies to customize their orders and purchase their promotional assets on-demand through an internal eCommerce platform instead of investing upfront from an external outlet. eCommerce helps speed up and streamline the process by making the collateral acquisition process much more efficient. Also, because these systems make it so straightforward to distribute materials throughout an organization, it’s an ideal solution for companies that operate from numerous locations and that sell through distribution channels.
Analyzing the Benefits
Aside from being able to place your order from anywhere, anytime, there are many benefits to gain from utilizing marketing collateral management programs. Let’s take a look at some of the major perks:
• Better Control Over Your Brand. Marketing collateral management platforms allow you to easily oversee what assets are being sent out and purchased at all times, and they also allow you to control who has access to the system and what they can do. To clarify, if you want to grant certain employees editing privileges over specific items, you’ll be able to set up the system to do just that. Having control over the materials themselves, as well as the ability to administer access to the system based on your discretion, is a solid way to ensure that your eyes stay on top of all the areas of your operation.
• Clear Insight Into Spending. Keeping track of payments, invoices, etc., especially when they are coming from various locations and divisions of your company, can be quite the headache. With an online company store, you can track all spending from a centralized location, allowing you to strategically and easily create and adjust budget plans as needed. On a similar note, because all of the spending will be controlled from the same place and on a tightly-monitored basis with built-in approvals, concerns over unauthorized spending can be erased.
• Fewer Wasted Materials. Because you won’t need to invest in any inventory ahead of time, you won’t end up ordering materials that don’t end up getting used. When you’re unable to order on an as-needed basis, you often end up with leftover marketing materials that become dated, irrelevant (or even obsolete) resulting in wasted money and resources. With a marketing resource management system in place, you can now look out after both your wallet and the Earth.
• More Efficient Use of Time. Time is an incredibly precious resource in the business world, and with the ability to automate the distribution of your marketing collateral, you and your team will have more of it available to focus on perfecting your brand, connecting with clients, and ramping up your current marketing campaign. It’s a win-win all the way around.
• Tighter Management of Dispersing Marketing Materials. By being able to purchase materials and track shipping from a central online location, ensuring that the materials end up at the intended location on time will go much more smoothly, allowing everyone on your team to breathe a little easier.
To sum up, taking advantage of a marketing collateral management program is an excellent way to simplify your marketing resource distribution process, stay in control of your brand’s evolution and company spending, and make the lives of your entire team much easier. The way of the modern business world is to work smarter, not harder, and a reputable asset management system should allow you to do just that.
