How Asset Management Helps You Measure ROI

A marketing asset management system, otherwise known as MAM, is designed to help you and your employees create, store, and manage content all in one convenient place. It can be even more useful than a simple shared drive or shared folders on your computer, as it gives you a number of tools for customization so you can have a system that works exactly how you need it to.

No more compromising or working with a confusing system that disrupts workflows.

When your business is running more effectively, you’re looking for a lot of benefits that you might not realize. That includes measures and boosts ROI.A MAM will continuously calculate your return on investment in the most tangible ways. This can give you a new perspective on the assets you’ve been using all along, helping you understand how you’re making and losing money on each of them. In fact, this measuring process is how a MAM helps in determining that ROI.

Our FuseBox One strategy relies on leading solutions that guarantee boosted efficiency. The better use your employees can make of their time, the more productive your company will grow to be as a whole. This is a quality that contributes directly to your ROI, and can get nothing but better over time.

It’s All in the Templates

You might be wondering how your MAM can help with all the assets in your company without it taking out a considerable amount of time to set up and maintain. The answer is templates!

When you start with the basics of asset management (getting organized) begin to notice how a template-based program can give a massive boost to your ROI. When you have a lot of assets online that are difficult to search for or access, you’re actually wasting a lot of time each day. This time wasted increases exponentially with the more employees you have.

That means that several times a day, or even in a single hour, your employees have to stop their work and dedicate time to shifting through the archives of your business for the information they need. Then, if those resources aren’t well managed, they might have gone without updating for some time. In the end, the information they gather isn’t complete. On the other hand, the files may have been unexpectedly corrupted during storage. This can waste even more time, as the employee has to tell a supervisor about the file and then more time to get their question answered.

This is an interruption to their workflow that could be completely avoided when you have a MAM system in place.

Saving time!

With a MAM program, you can save so much time for yourself and your employees. This will increase their effectiveness, which increases their productivity. All of which feeds into your bottom line.

That isn’t the only benefit, though. Asset management systems will collect all of your assets and tools, and compile them into templates. Let’s take a deeper look at how you use these assets in your company all the time. And how automating these processes into an asset management system can help you capitalize on your ROI.

When you implement a MAM into your workplace to help manage assets, you’re not just organizing internal documents. This system will govern all your assets, from your e-newsletter copy to your core logos and branding elements. This doesn’t just make them easier to find, but it can also make them easier to use. But they also cover even more assets like:

• Training Materials
• Employees Materials (like the policies they need to reference)
• Brand Guides
• Website Content
• Cheat Sheets (for login, contacts, and other administrative needs)
• Emails
• Advertisements
• Messages
• Sell Sheets
• And more!

Utilizing These Tools

Not to mention, a MAM isn’t just a passive organization tool. They can help with the creation of new assets as well. Certain assets can be locked into new templates so they can remain consistent across all of your marketing platforms and projects. You don’t have to be worried about the templates becoming a hassle when you have to customize your marketing strategy for different markets. It’s easy to adjust the templates to suit your needs.

Without a marketing asset management system, your marketing staff would have to produce each asset individually each time they want to implement a new strategy. This time-consuming practice can take hours away from tasks that would be a much better use of your company’s invested time. Primarily, this is because you already have the necessary assets to automate your newsletters and marketing functions. When you're busy recreating the same elements, or you lose or damage source files unintentionally, you're losing valuable employee time that could have been avoided with a MAM.

And that’s not even considering that most large-scale marketing campaigns require outside aid to complete. If you don’t have a graphic designer on salary, you’ll spend a lot of time waiting for a qualified contractor or freelancer to get the work you need done. And finding and getting the work back can cause an even bigger efficiency traffic jam.

Crunching the Numbers

MediaBeacon reports that just removing the asset-searching step alone from your marketing team’s plate can save between 2-6 hours per week. That number isn’t just for the average business but per employee. If you have 10 employees, that’s already up to 60 hours per week saved for more meaningful and time-efficient tasks. Per year, implementing a MAM can save you the equivalent of an employee’s salary.

A MAM won’t just help your employees but also helps you understand the cost and benefit of your assets. Over 12 months, you're likely going to archive most of your assets. Over that time, you may also simply lose some of these investments. This is normal, you may choose to save some investments from a project that you end up never using, or a new campaign gets canceled. But you’d like to reduce the amount you lose as much as possible. Say you spend $50,000 a year getting new artwork and designs for your marketing campaigns. If you lose 10% of those assets, you’re losing $5,000.

Other issues might be stopping you from making the most on your marketing investment like mislabels, corruptions, misuse, accidental deletions, or any other reason why a file might get lost or forgotten. A MAM will help keep those preventable accidents from happening, saving you thousands.

The Value of Your Investment and of a MAM System

You want to make the most out of every dollar you invest into your employees and into your various marketing assets. Making your workplace more organized while automating specific procedures with new automated templates can help you make the most of every investment. With a MAM, you can do both of these things.

But increasing your efficiency isn’t the only benefit you’ll get when investing in a MAM.

Navigate Compliance Policies More Quickly

Poor asset management is often a big time-waster in a business, making sure that you’re fitting compliance laws in all the markets you work in can also be an issue. A lot of eyes and scrutiny must occur to make sure that you aren’t accidentally using an illegal marketing tactic in the wrong country when other countries have less strict regulations.

Knowing Your Regulations

While geographically based regulations maintained by governments are one thing you have to worry about, other aspects may also be limited. Things like the rights on licensed stock photography may have geographic or timeline restrictions that you have to follow, and breaking them can get you a fine or, in the worst case, into legal trouble. On top of that, you may have to make sure that all the images you use on your website or newsletters are within your rights to use, or if they are someone else’s IP. Sometimes we all just grab an image online that fits our needs perfectly—but can you be positive that image was actually royalty-free?

Depending on your company, how much you have to worry about regulations changes as well. Some companies will face increasingly strict guidelines which are highly regulated and need thorough asset approval. As an example, a company in the pharmaceutical industry must be cautious not to break any of the rigid rules about how the brand can be promoted and what kind of messages can be put out to the public. But it’s not pharmaceutical companies that have to be concerned about regulations.

Other regulations you may need to consider include:

• Marketing to Children Many countries are concerned about what directed marketing to children does to their mental health, and so many kinds of advertisements are directed towards children or regulated across the world. For instance, in Sweden, it is prohibited to direct marketing messaging at children under the age of 12. It’s also important to consider the content of these messages, as in some places, like India, they prohibit violent images that may influence children to take cruel actions. 
• False Advertising Regulations Out-right lying about a product or service is banned in most countries but deceptive marketing is also very carefully regulated in most places. This is particularly true in pharmaceuticals because drugs can greatly damage a person’s health if their effects are not clearly articulated. However, any industry hoping to trick people into buying something is subject to false advertising regulations. Be careful, deceptive advertising is also considered to be an advertisement that does not look like or call itself an ad.
• Alcohol There are places where alcohol is outright banned, so make sure you don’t try to advertise alcohol in those countries. In the places where alcohol is not banned, most countries require alcohol companies to be forthright about the dangers of alcohol consumption. But be careful to follow the guidelines for each market.
• Email-opt outs Several countries require there to be an opt-out included in emailing services so that customers may choose to stop receiving emails. The e-mailer must comply and unsubscribe them in a reasonable amount of time. If this sounds silly, in the EU Tiger Airways was fined $110,000 for not unsubscribing their customers from their email list when it was requested. Customer choice should be respected, even when their choice is to leave you behind.

International compliance laws can complicate things even further. If your line of work spans several borders, you must be cautious that your branding isn’t going against any of their laws. This may mean that you have to make several campaigns for a single product if there is no way to meet the standards of each location by making edits to an existing campaign. However, you don’t want to make this extra investment unless you absolutely have to.

Breaking any one of these regulations or compliances can get your company into trouble, and human beings are prone to error. What can you do to stop your company from unintentionally costing the business thousands in fines?

Where a MAM Can Help

You can’t just keep these regulations in mind, you need them in hand while you’re planning out the marketing for your product. Organizing these regulations and making files that can be referenced by the marketing team is made easy with a MAM. At each step of the marketing process, ensure that your international product meets every standard you need to hit.

There are a few strategies you can use to make the most of your MAM:

• Link Your Marketing and Legal Teams A good thing to do, even if you don’t pick up a MAM system, is to get your legal team involved in the marketing process. This should be done at regular intervals. This will help ensure that you’re marketing is staying within the regulations you’re trying to hit. If you catch mistakes early by getting plans and early work analyzed, you won't have costly re-does at the end of a project. A MAM can make the transferring of information between teams more efficient. So, combining the two can be the best investment.
• Make Compliance Easy A MAM can help you organize assets and content. This includes regulatory information that your marketing team needs to know. This can help you hire the right freelancers and help avoid fines for infringements you could have avoided. You can add information to assets that immediately lets employees know what is and isn’t compliant.
• Make A Content Repository If you find your employees often stray to a search engine for images for your company’s blog or newsletters, it may be because your resource for stock or company-provided images is difficult to navigate, outdated, or confusing. Use a MAM to help organize an existing repository so that employees are more likely to use it. Or use one to create a repository so that you can avoid IP or copyright infringement in the future.

Making sure you’re compliant can seem like a hassle. But rather than taking it as a chore, you can integrate compliance management into the asset creation process. This takes the extra laborious work out of making sure you’re compliant.

After all, Lack of compliance can ultimately be damaging or even detrimental to your overall brand. Marketing asset management systems infinitely reduce the risk of going against compliance policies with a built-in rights management process. You can upload compliance information and apply it to specific assets. That way anyone who accesses them knows what regulations they fit. Making it easier to ensure these regulations will be met every time you push out more marketing material.

Cost Savings Naturally Increase Your ROI

Even if you aren’t looking for help in the above aspects of a business, the overall time efficiency that’s accrued when you use a MAM is well worth the investment.

Understanding the Inherent Benefits of a MAM

It’s been stated before, but each day your employees spend so much time looking for assets and shifting through your business databases for information. Any member of your marketing division will be able to list a number of third-party programs and agencies that the department works with on a daily basis just to get the basic tasks done. This means that there’s also a lot of time spent just communicating between different programs and departments that ultimately add to time your employees could be spending doing more cost-effective work.

Files share hands many times en route from one destination to another, which can rack up a hefty cost. Plus, the more times a file is moved, the more chances mistakes can happen. This is where a lot of files get lost, misnamed, corrupted, and forgotten. If this is a constant problem in your business, it may be time to invest in a solution.

Be sure to thoroughly analyze where marketing costs are coming from during the management and transfer processes before taking any action. Understand how much employee time and money you’re investing into a myriad of programs and how you could increase the effectiveness of the dollar. Many programs out there can convince you that they add value to your company when, in the context of your business, they’re dragging down employee productivity.

The Solution is Streamlining

These costs can be largely reduced by investing in a MAM that can perform the functions of all of those third-party agencies combined. This will keep file transfers smooth, quick, and cost-free. When you streamline these processes, you’re making it easier for the marketing team to get their jobs done without the extra hassle of dealing with multiple third-party programs.

While you’re getting invested in MAM, there are even a multitude of automation tool that can set up future campaigns and schedule future mail or social media messages without you having to sign up through any more platforms.

These solutions will also help to increase efficiency. As you make the most effective use of your assets, programs, and employees, you’ll see improvements in your return on investment across the board. This will continue adding more value to your company’s bottom line. Which will ultimately increase your net worth. Serve yourself, your employees, and even the customers better when you increase your efficiency with MAM.

Dynamic systems like these give your marketing team the tools to work smarter and faster, focusing on the money-making projects while leaving the asset repeating and post-scheduling to the advanced automation tool.

Get the Best Returns with Your On-Demand MAM by FuseBox One!

A MAM is a good investment, but a MAM with Fusebox is a great one.

FuseBox offers you a wide variety of services that will help you make the most out of our services. With highly customizable marketing strategies, automated post scheduling and lead nurturing, and automatic follow-up with compliance rules, your asset management system will increase the efficiency of each individual employee anywhere from 25%-75%. By helping your staff focus on the projects where their skills are best put to use, rather than eating up time with asset search, branding setup, art approval, and hours of revisions, you can boost the value of the money spent from your investment.

At Fusebox One, we want to connect you to your world through the use of efficient tools. Our cloud-based system lets you store all assets safely, while on the back-end our process creates branding templates that guarantee consistency and compliance each time. Your marketing team won’t have to spend too many paid working hours on tasks that don’t prove to make good ROI. Help your business pull better numbers.

Sources:

https://www.mediabeacon.com/en/what-is-the-roi-of-digital-asset-management

https://www.northplains.com/how-does-dam-deliver-roi/

https://www.northplains.com/lack-of-compliance-can-cost-your-company-millions/

https://www.zuzaprint.com/mam-roi-white-paper/

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/considered-illegal-marketing-other-countries-73863.html