Today’s marketers live in a landscape that’s faster and far more complex than ever before. Brands operate across physical and digital channels, engaging customers who have new digital habits and shorter attention spans. Outbound campaigns help fuel inbound leads, and the whole organisation needs to focus on supporting the customer journey.
And yet – as always – there’s pressure to do more with less. Marketers need to demonstrate better returns, using metrics to find and prioritise successful initiatives. Assets need to be carefully managed, reworked and reused. And teams need to minimise wasted time, automating workflows and streamlining their processes to produce measurable results.
“29% of marketing professionals say they don’t have enough time to be creative.”
Find out more in Imagen’s 2021 Marketing Tech Report
It’s no wonder that marketers need all the help they can get in quickly realising and executing creative ideas. That’s where marketing fulfilment tools fit into the picture. Designed to accelerate workflows, improve collaboration, and get marketers ahead of the curve, marketing fulfilment is all about delivering, improving and being able to show it.
What is marketing fulfilment software?
Marketing fulfilment is essentially the ability to create, iterate and deliver marketing collateral to the channels where it’s needed. With this in mind, marketing fulfilment software includes tools that focus on organising and automating workflows, and managing the assets that are crucial to delivering omnichannel marketing success.
There’s no one-size-fits-all marketing fulfilment platform in this regard. But tools are typically focused on marketing resource management (MRM) or digital asset management (DAM) capabilities. These help marketers create, store and manage their brand, product and campaign assets – with multiple benefits.
Marketing asset management (and brand asset management) platforms provide a centralised storage space for the assets produced and used by the marketing team. Typically hosted in the cloud, they provide an authoritative store, accessible to central and regional teams, and to the agencies and freelancers they work with. Strong security and precise, user-level access controls help ensure that assets remain safe, and accessible only to those who need to use or work with them.
What is brand asset management?
Discover how brand asset management can protect your brand
Why marketing fulfilment means faster time to market
By organising brand and campaign assets, as well as supporting collaborative working among marketing stakeholders, marketing fulfilment tools accelerate marketing workflows. For example, brand asset management ensures that logos, photos, copy and all other assets can be found quickly by anyone who needs to use them.
This alone accounts for huge efficiency gains. In a recent survey, 19% of marketing professionals admitted that they get bogged down by admin tasks, while 21% of respondents couldn’t always locate their digital assets. Marketers who spend less time looking for assets have more time left to work with them. Team members aren’t tied up serving asset requests, and expensive assets aren’t lost in poor storage systems – saving the cost and delay of recreating them.
Accelerating time to market
Good marketing fulfilment software accelerates time to market by:
● Making it easier to find brand and campaign assets
● Simplifying sharing among stakeholders
● Reducing time lost to missing assets
● Supporting collaborative working
● Automating and streamlining marketing workflows
● Helping teams and external partners hit the ground running
Just as importantly, brand asset management platforms offer native support for version control and approval processes. Marketing teams retain control of assets as they’re developed, iterated and approved, ensuring consistency in branding, and preventing time lost when the wrong assets are used.
Extensive collaborative tools help marketers develop ideas more rapidly. Even in multi-agency arrangements, or when people are working from home, features such as in-line commenting cut down on the time lost to simply organising work. Integration with other martech tools, meanwhile, enables greater support for automation. For example, by automatically propagating new branding, imagery or copy blocks to customer fulfilment platforms.
Brand asset management plays an important role in accelerating the start of any marketing initiative. Instead of rooting around for supporting materials, existing branding, or other starting blocks to work with, teams have previous work at their fingertips. Instead of manually sharing collateral to agency and freelance contributors, individuals can quickly be given role or project-based access to all the relevant files.
Driving improvements and efficiencies
Marketing fulfilment tools also provide key opportunities to analyse and improve marketing processes. For example, search data from a marketing asset management platform can reveal which assets are in most demand within the organisation. End-user download or viewing data helps identify popular collateral, providing valuable insight into which campaigns and activities are landing with the public.
More detailed metrics provide further scope to analyse and refine marketing activities. For example, detailed video viewing data reveals where people stop watching, letting marketers refine their message, presentation or length.
How AI is accelerating fulfilment
As marketers look to technology to help them organise and accelerate, artificial intelligence is the latest frontier in reducing time to market. Already, AI-powered features such as auto-tagging help marketing fulfilment tools deliver fast results. For example, routines that recognise scenes, people or speech in video can add tags, transcripts and other metadata automatically. It’s easier to find assets, and quicker to skip to a key scene. Find out more about Imagen’s AI Services.
Why a DAM is fundamental to fulfilment
For marketers looking to introduce efficiencies, accelerate their campaigns and better fulfil inbound leads, digital asset management is the bedrock of marketing fulfilment. From concept and creation, through iteration, approval and delivery, DAM capabilities ensure proper control and tracking of assets.
A DAM’s robust access control and organisational features underwrite the continuity of marketing collateral as it’s created. Source files and previous work are readily available to reuse, or to serve as a jumping off point for new ideas or campaigns. New assets are easily shared among stakeholders, with version control and commenting preventing common errors – such as agencies working with obsolete files. Inbuilt support for approval and compliance steps prevents work in progress escaping into the wild.
Specialised DAM solutions such as brand asset management are also fundamental to the delivery of marketing materials. Cloud-based platforms help marketers distribute assets globally to regional colleagues, and to delivery partners such as digital agencies or service and logistics teams. Above all, DAMs invigorate marketing processes by removing content chaos, preventing the waste of time and resources that happens when valuable marketing assets can’t be found.
If you’re looking to shift your team up a gear, be sure your marketing fulfilment tools are fit for today’s digital landscape. Imagen Go offers lightning-fast search and browsing, market-leading collaboration features, and a growing suite of AI tools for enhanced content management. While other platforms struggle with universal file support, multiple integrations and omnichannel workflows, Imagen Go provides an organised, complex, cross-connected library, fit to accelerate you into the future.
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