It's Time To Clean House: How To Organize Your Brand Assets

Brand assets are the soul of your business. They give each of your campaigns a unique voice, so consistency is key. Only 10% of B2B companies report their brand presentation is consistent. But if you nail this across all channels, you could grow your revenue by 23%.

This is why organizing for marketing is so important. If you don’t have a clear, consistent way to organize your marketing materials, you could find yourself reinventing the wheel for every new campaign. Far better to build on your success and make each campaign better than the one before.

To do that, you need a better way to organize your brand assets. And we don’t just mean your brand assets, but also those of your clients. Taken together, all of these bits and bytes can lead to greater results, or even greater stress.

The choice is yours.

What Are The Habits Of Organized Marketing Teams?

Organized marketing teams have a clear method for finding everything they need. What do we mean by “everything?” Brand assets consist of all the marketing materials you need to grow your business and generate new revenue for your clients. Brand assets include the following:

• Images; whether purchased, leased, or created in-house
• Text files and PDFs; including everything from blog drafts to marketing briefs
• Brand Identity Guides for your team and your clients
• Logo versions (usually included in Brand Identity Guides)
• Campaign reports
• Audio and video files
• And don’t forget about your fonts

Now, take a deep breath, put on some soothing music, and picture your ideal organized marketing team. These teams are calm, clear, and confident even in the face of multiple deadlines. They thrive on new challenges because they’ve taken care of the basics. This is how they organize their brand assets:

• These designers and creatives have found ways to simplify version control. There’s no chance of them sending the wrong version of a document to a vendor or client because they removed all the guesswork. Their digital asset management process makes it easy to determine which files are which.
• Organized marketing teams have created an intuitive folder structure that’s easy to scale as they take on new projects. And just like their folder structure, they’ve also created simple guidelines for naming files. Anyone can learn it in a few minutes, and it makes everyone’s workflow smoother. And that means anyone on their team can find any file they need in seconds instead of hours.
• They’ve extended their system to all their digital assets, and that includes their fonts. Organized marketing teams understand that any time they spend looking for fonts is time lost forever. So, they do everything they can to make font distribution quick and easy. They’ve polished their font management practices so every user can access the fonts they need for every project every time.
• They regularly audit their digital assets. This way, files from new campaigns don’t get mixed up with documents from the previous quarter or last year. Some of these teams have even set up automated workflows to archive certain assets once they’re no longer needed.

But if you look carefully, there’s one thing organized marketing teams lack. They don’t have one person who’s informally responsible for remembering where everything is. That’s because they’ve implemented a folder structure, file naming conventions, and font management best practices that are resilient to employee churn and the stress of new projects.

And it shows. The most organized marketing teams are almost 400% more likely to report success. How do you get results like this?

Organizing For Marketing Means Organizing For Success

The most organized marketing teams understand that organizing their brand assets leads to success. It’s not something they do in their spare time. It’s built into the way they do business.

In fact, it’s hard to succeed at marketing or any creative task without it. It’s like oxygen to a runner. You might think about it occasionally during training. But if you don’t have it during a race, that’s the difference between winning and obscurity.

The key to success?

Start slow.

Begin with your next campaign. Setup folders in advance to receive new digital assets and existing brand assets. This is just one part of creating a consistent process of digital asset management and font management. Just like you can’t be a world-class marathon runner by deciding to run more often, you can’t organize your brand assets just by wishing and hoping. You need to commit to the process every day, like a runner maintaining peak form.

Do a little bit at a time. Start with your next campaign, and as you get comfortable with the process expand your efforts to earlier projects. This can also be a good time to archive old versions of files you no longer need.

Of course, not every agency or marketing team has a full-time employee committed to organizing their marketing materials. That’s another reason to do it bit by bit. Plus, if you only work on a few folders at a time it’s easier to stay focused.

Now that deep breathing and soothing music have brought you inner calm, it’s time for a reality check.

You can’t do this alone.

Like any new project, you can accomplish much more – and more quickly – if you work together. Digital asset management systems and font management tools can help, but any new technology will require buy-in and collaboration to be successful. Once you identify champions for brand asset management in your organization, introduce them to the new process first. Once they see how organizing brand assets can be improve productivity and simplify their workflow, show these quick wins to the rest of your team to demonstrate the value of digital asset management. Then you can repeat the process for more and more team members until everyone is on board with the new system.

And that’s when your real journey begins.

Conclusion

How do you organize your brand assets? It’s not a linear path with a fixed destination. Whatever changes you make today will ripple outward and affect all your future campaigns. But one thing’s for sure. Digital asset management is not a luxury. It’s the foundation of your productivity, the work that makes all your other work possible and enjoyable. Nothing kills innovation faster than having to stop what you’re doing to *prepare* for innovation. The sooner you begin the crawl, walk, run process of organizing your marketing materials, the sooner you can reap the rewards of effective digital asset management.

Need a better way to organize your digital asset collection? Société Générale, one of the largest banks in France, turned to Extensis for help with their collection of over 20,000 images.