With marketing departments juggling more demands on their time and resources—and, specifically, more demands for marketing collateral—than ever before, marketing leaders are looking for ways to streamline operations, making their teams more efficient without jeopardizing the brand or its impact.

One of the biggest drains on those limited resources is often asset management, particularly when global marketing leaders are also managing local marketers, whether they’re franchise owners, distributed sales reps, or retail branch leaders.

Alongside the national campaigns, every local marketer has specific needs for print and digital collateral, signage, and swag—all tailored, of course, to their own audiences’ and campaigns’ specifications. Overseeing all of that content creation is a full-time job in and of itself. But leaving it all up to local marketers is likely to lead to reputation-damaging brand inconsistencies and, in some industries, even legal issues.

So, what’s a global marketer to do? The first step is embracing digital asset management.

What Is Digital Asset Management?

Digital asset management refers to implementing a technological solution (often a through-channel marketing automation platform) to centralize the latest approved marketing collateral—both digital and print files—so that anyone who needs them can access and customize them as necessary at any time. A digital asset manager saves valuable time in two big ways:

1. Global leaders don’t have to worry about which reps got the latest version of what — or spend time managing the requests and emails.
2. Local reps don’t have to dig through their inboxes or sift through their files to find the latest version of what they need (which is probably outdated anyway).

Rather, when local reps know exactly where to go to quickly grab whatever collateral they need, they’re empowered to do their jobs without overburdening global leaders.

What Does Digital Asset Management Do for Global and Local Marketing Teams?

Aside from the time savings, digital asset management offers countless benefits for global and local marketing teams.

One is brand consistency. When local marketers can’t find the assets they need and the national team is slow to respond with updated files, they’re likely to take matters into their own hands, recreating the social media images or direct mail postcards they need from scratch, with their best approximations at brand colors and standard messaging. The result: customers start to see inconsistent design and conflicting messaging that decreases their trust in the brand–and with it, their ability to buy.

Another is compliance. For highly regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and alcohol and beverage, a second consequence of this inconsistency is legal. Certain messaging is required by law in order to remain compliant with federal and state standards, and when well-intentioned local marketers rewrite that messaging from memory (or leave it out altogether), they could be putting the brand at legal and financial risk as well.

Though a digital asset manager’s number-one advantage is consistency, the right platform can also make customization a breeze. The majority of local marketing campaigns will need to be tailored to each reps’ unique audience. Addresses, times, offer details, and even regional lingo may need to be updated based on the location of a particular campaign. That’s where modular content, a feature of sophisticated digital asset managers, comes in handy. Modular (or templated) content is content that’s been divided into the smallest possible preapproved “blocks” (text blocks or visuals) that can be remixed into any number of assets for any number of channels. Anyone putting together a local marketing campaign can use these modules to create relevant promotional assets for their own markets, maintaining brand integrity while achieving that all-important personalization.

What Should You Look for in a Digital Asset Manager?

There are any number of digital asset managers available to marketers, and they come in all shapes and sizes, from as simplistic as Google Drive to much more sophisticated offerings. Here are a few things to look for in a digital asset manager that will truly streamline your marketing operations.

• Permissions: Does the platform enable administrators to set permission levels to ensure everyone who needs to access certain assets or templates can—and those that don’t, can’t?
• Modular Content: Does the platform enable controlled customization through modular or templated content?
• Automated Workflows: Are approval workflows automated , allowing marketing teams (or other designated approvers) the ability to set approval workflows at the asset level, keeping your asset(s) on brand and in compliance? And do approvals take place in the app?
• Connected to Printer: Can local marketers order printed collateral, signage, and swag directly from a corporate-approved printing partner through the platform?
• Reporting: Does the platform make it easy to keep track of orders, budgets, and inventory stock in near-real time?

Localized, multichannel marketing is critical for any brand whose presence is spread across multiple regions, but managing all the assets required to create and execute these campaigns is easier said than done. At OneTouchPoint, we pride ourselves on making it easy. We give local marketers control of their campaigns—without jeopardizing brand integrity—through our proprietary digital asset manager, our U.Connect platform.

Learn more about how we work with multi-location brands to create and implement powerful omnichannel marketing campaigns, and when you’re ready, we invite you to contact us or request a quote on your next project. Our experts will provide insight and ideas to deliver phenomenal results at a great price.