The Benefits of Asset Management for Scaling SaaS Businesses
Producing hundreds of creative assets every month is no joke. With SaaS moving at lightning speed, creative teams have design requests coming out of their ears.
But even if businesses have mastered the art of scalable design and are cranking out social media graphics, videos, presentations, and brochures in record time, there’s still a snag that can prevent them from achieving their marketing goals—
Managing a rapidly-growing catalog of assets.
There’s an expression that says “Good order is the foundation of all things”. In this post, we’re lifting the lid on asset management—what it is, how it benefits all teams (not just creatives), and why it’s vital for all scaling SaaS businesses.
What is creative asset management?
At its core, creative asset management makes it possible for brands to create, store, manage and distribute all digital assets from a centralized location. While this helps companies to overcome the obvious challenge of storing thousands of pieces of collateral, creative asset management actually serves SaaS businesses on many levels (which brings us swiftly to our next next section…)
How does creative asset management help SaaS businesses?
Maintaining brand consistency
Making sure that brand consistency is maintained when you use multiple resources to produce creative (in-house teams, agencies, freelancers) is tricky, even with the most comprehensive set of brand guidelines to hand. Creative asset management helps brands maintain consistency across all marketing channels—website to social media, print, email, events, e-commerce, the list goes on.
Considering that businesses experience up to a 23% increase in revenue through cohesive and recognizable brand identities, consistent branding across all assets isn’t a nice-to-have, but rather a must-have for scaling SaaS brands.
Increasing findability and reach
Creative assets can only yield results if they are actually being used. Contrary to popular belief, SaaS businesses rarely need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to creating effective marketing campaigns. However, what we often see happening is that assets are produced for specific campaigns, and get used for a very short period of time until they take up residence in the local drive of someone in the marketing team’s computer, never to be seen again. This is a perfect example of a wasted opportunity to expand reach and extend marketing efforts or repurpose campaigns for future use because collateral is disposable.
With creative asset management, all assets are searchable and can be accessed by wider teams (if required) thanks to naming conventions, tags, and linking media to specific projects, types, themes and clients. It also means that when you’re working with external creative teams (e.g. traditional agencies or freelancers), you maintain access to assets that would typically be passed back and forth in Google-drive files or Dropbox links that expire over time.
Maintaining security and brand guardianship
With that being said—you might not want everyone and their mother having access to all of your creative assets. With creative asset management, you can control permissions to ensure that team members can only use the assets that are relevant to their team or function, and access can easily be revoked when team members leave the organization. Creative asset management also gives businesses the reassurance of knowing that the assets in their library have gone through the approval process (as predefined workflows can be streamlined) and are up-to-date.
Enabling templating and repurposing existing content
81% of businesses use graphic design in various formats. Content asset management helps brands produce high-quality collateral at speed. So much time can be wasted creating assets from scratch when existing creative could easily be re-used. Similarly, design teams can get bogged down in manual work, such as localizing existing assets for multiple languages or split-test campaigns. By having master templates for each type of creative asset that’s needed across the organization, creative efficiency can easily be achieved.
What creative asset management options are available?
Creative asset management solutions come in different forms – with most offering a cloud-based application or platform (DAM) with features for asset storage, file sharing, publishing, and content workflows. Other models offer the same kind of features and functionality of a DAM, but with expertise underpinning the management of creative assets (in case you haven’t already guessed, that’s what the gang here at Perpetual do with our SmarterCreative framework!)
Creative asset management is all about cutting guesswork. When all collateral is centralized, it makes files easier to find and share, but even more than that, it provides clarity as to what’s working and what isn’t. Organization helps scaling businesses to make strategic decisions. When assets are properly managed, and accessible, you can determine perceived quality of each of them, which gives clear insight into where time should be spent.
Our approach to asset management involves getting a full understanding of the perceived quality of a business’ creative assets. This includes tracking how long each asset takes to create, as well as estimating monthly volume to ensure that design resources are being assigned to the most appropriate campaigns or projects. From there, it’s a case of making sure that your collateral is working as hard as possible. Oh, and did we mention that our team also designs and produces all of the creative assets that your business needs to sustain rapid growth?
Learn more about SmarterCreative’s unique creative asset management solution. Just tell us what your biggest creative challenges are in this form and we’ll be in touch asap!
