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Decluttering is big business. From television shows to businesses who will come to your house and help you get rid of the everyday detritus – it seems we’re all obsessed with clearing the decks and living a simpler, more minimalistic life.

One question remains unanswered for Marketers though – if we’re so keen to do this in our personal lives, why is our marketing collateral often so chaotic?

What issues does disorganised content create?

Disorganised marketing assets, content and collateral can waste your team’s time, prevent you focusing on the activity that drives return on investment and overall, negatively impact your marketing campaigns.

Without organisation, your content risks being duplicative, outdated and muddled.

All your content should have a clear purpose. That might be awareness, engagement or demand – and you should have a good mix of content to address all these objectives, from snackable content like infographics to long-form pieces like reports or whitepapers.

But if you don’t have a clear grasp of what you’ve already published, how do you identify your content’s white space? How can you have a content strategy when you don’t know what content you have – and what you’re lacking?

The problems caused by marketing collateral clutter

Not having clarity over your marketing collateral creates a host of problems.

You waste time looking for assets you just know exist somewhere in your system.

You waste money recreating existing assets when your searches fail to turn them up.

People outside the Marketing team go off-piste and create their own versions of existing collateral.

This can lead to all kinds of problems – content is often off-brand or unprofessional in other ways. It’s unlikely to have been created by an expert team who can bring professionalism to things like typesetting and design. It’s not written by people with copywriting as a core skill.

We mentioned waste; one of the biggest timewasters is the reinventing of the wheel that goes on when people ‘go rogue’ and recreate existing materials because they can’t locate the originals.

Version control is just one of the problems here – colleagues using outdated information; documents being worked on by numerous people simultaneously. Without Marketing team oversight and rigour, your collateral quickly goes rogue.

This practice can also create serious compliance risks. How can you keep track of content, ensuring that your correct and current disclaimers, disclosures and corporate descriptions are included, when collateral is created outside the Marketing team?

And that’s all before we consider the impact on your brand. As with compliance, colleagues outside the Marketing team don’t have in-depth understanding of your brand standards.

Off-brand materials weaken your brand identity and market presence, as well as costing money when they need re-designing or printing. All of which can delay your entry to the market or impact your ongoing ability to promote your products and services.

5 steps to declutter your marketing collateral

The problems you create when you don’t have organised marketing collateral are clear, then.
So – what’s the solution? Here are our 5 steps to more streamlined marketing materials:

1. Content audit. Conduct a thorough audit of all your marketing materials. This should cover all your materials – thought leadership reports, whitepapers and so on; web pages; one-pagers and product sell sheets; case studies, brochureware – whether digital or hard copy. It’s likely these are stored across numerous systems and platforms, so it might take you some time and effort to unearth them all.
2. Gap analysis, by funnel stage and by content type. Where are you lacking collateral? Do you have lots of demand-stage pieces, but no more in-depth reputational pieces? Lots of infographics but fewer reports?
3. Build a content strategy to fill your gaps. Prioritise content creation based on the voids you’ve identified.
4. Find the best storage solution for your collateral. Centralising your digital assets in one easily-accessible place makes it simple for people to find them and prevents the unauthorised re-creation of content. Once you’ve gone through the pain of the audit, don’t risk slipping back into disorganised ways by failing to maintain the order you’ve created.
5. Make use of technology to enable ownership while managing oversight. Online platforms put on-brand marketing assets and templates at your fingertips, allowing content to be tailored while putting guardrails around your branding.

Make use of digital asset management and ditch the collateral chaos

As we mentioned in point 4 above, when you’ve audited your content and identified where your future content creation efforts should focus, don’t let things slip! As we probably all recognise from our home life, it can be too easy to drift back into poor habits, with stacks of paperwork and the detritus of life overtaking your shiny minimalism.

A good digital asset management (DAM) platform can be your saviour here. Storing all your assets in one place makes existing content easy to find – no reinventing the wheel or unauthorised content creation.

If you enable your stakeholders – including those without design or copywriting expertise – to access and edit, within strict parameters, collateral, it ensures that they can create the content they need without the risk of off-brand or non-compliant materials.

You’ll save money, as your in-house teams can make minor edits to content themselves, without needing to involve external design agencies.

Speed-to-market is increased, with new materials ready to publish faster. Your suppliers can be integrated into the best DAMs, smoothing the delivery process and reducing your admin workload, smoothing the collateral journey from ideation to production.

Investing in the right digital asset management tools pays dividends in time, money and, less tangibly, brand and reputation.

BrandEnable is a highly secure platform for creating, approving, storing and accessing marketing materials, brand assets and templates. BrandEnable allows you to keep your newly-audited collateral in a structured, easily accessed (but permission-enabled) platform – enabling you to balance control with the ability to delegate content creation.

Decluttering your marketing collateral isn’t complex – but equally, it isn’t always easy to do. Knowing where to start is half the battle, and hopefully our tips have helped with that. Once you’ve created order out of chaos, maintaining that discipline is the next challenge – and this is where digital asset management can be the difference between success and failure.

You can find out more here about BrandEnable and how it can help you maintain order in your marketing materials.
For more information or to book a no-obligation demo, please contact us.