Creative Asset Management: What It Is And Why Do You Need It?

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Managing and organizing creative assets can be a daunting task. But in a market that requires you to deliver digital content and marketing material across multiple channels and mediums, it’s not a task you can neglect. 

Not having an efficient system for managing your creative assets can lead to lost time, miscommunication, and wasted costs. Poor digital asset management can lead to up to 37% wasted marketing spend according to a study conducted by Forrester, with an ineffective asset management architecture also making it difficult to measure creative asset creation ROI, limiting your room for growth and scalability. 

That’s why effective creative asset management requires the support of a trusted digital asset management (DAM) tool that serves as a creative asset management system. This platform will allow you to manage your creative brand journey holistically from one centralized location. 

DAM software not only allows you to centralize the management of all your creative assets in one library, but also lets you optimize collaboration, communication, and creative flow during the work-in-progress phase for every type of asset. From videos to websites to social media content, creative asset management helps your brand improve its presence on every front. 

So let’s take a look at how creative asset management can change your creative ecosystem.  

What is creative asset management?

Creative asset management is, simply put, the activities and processes that are needed to manage a library of creative digital assets and the workflows that are needed to create them. 

It’s a role that has become far more important as the landscape of digital content continues to evolve, obliging brands to keep up with the demand for fresh content to stay relevant. 

Fortunately, the benefits of creative asset management software make it a role that can be managed with increased ease. 

The advantages of using creative asset management software during content creation

Effective creative asset management helps businesses access four primary areas of optimization:

Accelerate content creation 

With automated workflows and increased organization, content creation becomes more efficient and effective. Creative teams get to collaborate across departments and leverage the successes of other teams in their own projects. 

Prolong asset lifecycles 

Instead of having creative assets disappear into the ether upon completion, you can extend their lifecycles by increasing their searchability with effective tagging. When assets are discoverable, they can be repurposed and allow you to save on production costs. 

This unilateral asset accessibility lets multiple business units increase their output and workflows. Once a digital asset is created for one business arm, such as the marketing department or brand management team, that asset becomes accessible to every unit in the business. For example, when a new landing page is created, the assets used on it can be repurposed into marketing campaigns, cutting production time and costs exponentially. But it also means that assets used in previous campaigns and marketing material can be recycled into new content through improved searchability. 

Ensure brand consistency 

Your DAM serves as a single source of truth for multiple creative teams with up-to-date version control. With full annotations and markups visible on each iteration of an asset, you chronicle the entire creative journey instead of only saving the final asset. 

Track internal performance

Bringing together your DAM’s holistic view of workflows and asset management with analytics reporting will help you establish which activities your team is currently over or under-investing in. The added insight that effective creative asset management offers can also guide the updating of SLAs that are based on real data. 

Why creative asset management is so important for your business

You can’t maintain brand presence in today’s market without digital content that connects to your audience across multiple channels. Just take Netflix’s approach to the marketing of Wednesday. From billboards and bus stop signs to food trays at fast food restaurants and releasing reanimated body parts in New York, Netflix made sure you knew about their eerie Tim Burton series wherever you were. 

But not every brand has the clout and funding that comes with brand names like Netflix and Tim Burton (oh, yes, he is most definitely a brand in his own right). That means leveraging your creative output for optimal effectiveness and scaling your content for multi-channel use wherever possible. 

Creative asset management allows you to do just that. It optimizes workflows for maximum output, ensures brand consistency across content production, and lets you repurpose existing assets in multi-channel campaigns to save production time wherever possible. 

It’s a process that affects the entire production cycle, optimizing every stage of the workflow. All you need is a platform that allows you to tap into the full potential of your brand’s narrative possibilities. 

globaledit: The creative asset management software that helps you embrace creative ambitions

globaledit is the perfect solution for businesses that want to get organized and improve their workflow. Our creative asset management software will help you keep track of all your files, from images to fonts to videos, so you can work faster and more efficiently.

As a centralized collaboration launchpad, globaledit helps to simplify your creative asset management. We help you maintain a holistic overview of a multi-level marketing strategy that will help you connect your brand to audiences across multiple channels. 

Book a demo to see what we can do for you.