Keeping your organization’s marketing communications on-brand is a herculean feat. From outside the company, the thought and energy that goes into creating a good brand might not seem like much, but it requires a smart team with special tools that can be broadly spoken about as “digital assets” to get you recognized by the right people.
Reason #1: Save Time and Money
NRG Energy once kept all of its internal and external communications in a “junk drawer.” These often take the form of an overflowing Google Drive folder housing every spreadsheet, graphic, and template a company owns from every single department. What’s worse, these rarely get cleaned because nobody wants to step on anybody’s toes and delete something important by accident. Due to this, we recommend you divest from shared folders in basic platforms meant for personal accounts such as Google Drive, and consider a digital asset management system that packs a punch.
Specific Scenarios
- Your company gets sued and you need to find information that can get you out of hot water, but nobody has any idea where the information is.
- Your marketing team has a video from 10 years ago that would serve perfectly for a presentation you’re going to do next week. The problem is, nobody can find the video.
- Your company deals with complex regulations. On-boarding and off-boarding reps is a challenge that would be made a lot easier with a single spreadsheet that contained all the login information for everybody
Reason #2: Translate Your Assets
The World Bank Group, based in Washington D.C. is a collection of finance organizations that make out loans to impoverished countries. In 2012, it provided approximately $30 billion in loans and assistance to “developing” and transition countries.
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Today, the World Bank uses a digital asset management system to keep things neat across its many branches and programs.
However, before they adopted this system, the World Bank was suffering from a raging communication problem.
The World Bank operates in 188 countries. This is a challenge for internal and external communications, as you can imagine. Not only must information remain uniform, but it must also be translated into dozens, if not hundreds, of languages.
In the old days, it would take 15 – 18 minutes for teams to create a marketing asset. After the inclusion of an organized system, it began to take as little as 30 seconds using single sign-on and active directory integrations.
Reason #3: Cyber Security
Having employees use personal storage systems for company assets can be disastrous. Modern companies have to be on the defensive, especially large organizations.
These are just a few of the examples of threats against your data from internet phantoms:
Ransomware:
This is when hackers hold your company computers, hostage, with no way in except by responding to a message asking for something. Generally, hackers will ask to be paid through Bitcoin.
Phishing:
This attack generally happens through email. A fake email is blasted from a fraudulent website containing links that send the victim to a site loaded with malware. This malware can take many forms, but the common ways it can hurt your company is by stealing passwords, account information, and client lists.
DDOS Attack:
This is the means by which hacktivist groups famously shut down the websites of major companies and even .gov websites. DDOS stands for distributed denial of service. These attacks overwhelm the IT infrastructure by flooding the system with traffic.
Trend tracking—find out which assets are working and which aren’t.
Reason #4: Marketing Integration
Brands that use these systems include Goodwill, Delta, New York Public Library, and The World Bank. One of the reasons so many successful brands use digital asset management systems is because today’s marketing world is wide and sometimes siloed.
All of your creative and email assets might be together on Surveymonkey, but your POS and your internal communications are on Asana. That is why you need a headquarters.
Companies like Slack, Asana, and Marcom provide digital marketers with the means to centralize everything. Ultimately, this means more of your team members can contribute to sales and operations.
Conclusion
Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine and author of The Inevitable, a book about tech trends, says that platforms are factories for services. The tools your platforms provide you can slingshot your company to the top, or weigh your team down to the bottom. It is important to be choosy with the systems you allow into your IT organization.
The most important reasons why you should centralize your digital communication in a single HQ are saving time and money; ability to scale, even internationally; cybersecurity; and ease of use for your marketing team.
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