This is how your valuable content does come into its own

The content you've had created over the years is now worth a lot. You should be careful about that. Yet that expensive content often ends up in a digital shoebox in an imaginary shelving unit. So keep a grip and control over your brand.

Fabric

Imagine this: you go to the bank with 500 thousand euros in your pocket. You want to secure that money. (We admit, if you walk in with 500 thousand euros in your pocket, you probably have a somewhat strange business, but come on, we're just fantasizing.) Then you assume that that pile will be counted neatly for you and kept in a specially secured safe for you. You don't expect your prized possession to be thrown into a shoebox and left to gather dust somewhere in a random and insecure shelving unit with a sticker with your name on it. Right?

Expensive content

So why is content often handled that way anyway? At a lot of companies, the content created over the years is now worth a lot. A good logo and accompanying house style elements that have been long thought out, a personal font, carefully crafted mood images, sleek artwork, beautiful product videos and strong samples of text. You want to store these well, keep them safe and make them easily accessible. But unfortunately, this expensive content often ends up in a digital shoebox in an imaginary shelf. And then just try to keep a grip and control over your brand....

Seven weeks on in smoke

Research shows that marketers spend one hour a week searching for files. Even if there are "only" five people in your marketing department working on content, this quickly adds up to about seven weeks per year that you lose. And that's just talking about the time you lose as an organization searching for content. When you have finally dug up your content from that digital shoebox, it remains to be seen whether your communications are consistent across all channels, whether your brand story is conveyed in the same meticulous way every time, and whether your copyrights and copyright issues are in order.

Discrepancy between requirements and expectations

It is logical that many companies look for a special marketing software package to manage this content. Slightly less logical is that there is often a big discrepancy between the requirements set, what is expected of the system and what it may cost. Sure, a cheap Swedish do-it-yourself cabinet will do when you're just moving in, but before you know it you find yourself on klusidee.nl trying to figure out how to straighten out your crooked cabinet - which holds all those digital shoeboxes of content. At that moment you know how nice a decent closet is, with a good storage system in which you can always find exactly what you are looking for at that moment. That's when you know that sometimes cheap really is expensive, and that it's time to professionalize.

Make a good business case before you choose

Switching marketing software or digital asset management system is not something you do lightly. Therefore, before you choose, it is important to make a good business case. Compare apples to apples and not apples to oranges. Do you have gigabytes or terabytes of content, do you want that content to be easily accessible and easily and securely shared? Do you want your people to spend less time on traffic management and get back to the creative aspects of marketing management? Then look for a serious partner and not a do-it-yourself package or one where you still face unexpected costs later in the process.

Curious?

Want to talk further about what a Digital Asset Management system can do for your organization and how to make its use a success? Feel free to contact us for a free on-site demo. We are happy to think along with you.