It’s estimated that about 20% of a company’s marketing budget is being wasted on marketing materials that become outdated and thrown away*. Combine this with a supply chain that has proven to be complicated, time-consuming, full of manual intervention and you have the perfect storm for lost profit.
A collateral asset management system can help your company avoid these pitfalls by allowing you to:
- Reduce overall waste – produce only what you want when you need it. This will eliminate waste, fulfillment fees and provide greater flexibility when revising collateral.
- Reduce the lifecycle of buying marketing materials – create one central place to order all collateral and you have reduced the number of interactions your company has with vendors.
- Customize marketing materials – many companies are looking to customize marketing materials for their sales reps, distributors, dealers, etc. By giving these users the ability to generate personalized collateral online, it reduces the amount of time it takes them to order the materials, eliminates the need to pay another company to design and program customized collateral, and encourages the user to only order what they need since the materials will be customized for a particular cause.
- Speed up fulfillment time – by placing an order online, the time it takes from order entry to ship date is approximately 24-48 hours. This process is much faster than the traditional way of ordering printed materials, as you can approve an online proof right away, vs. having to wait for your vendor to send it to you.
When determining if an online asset management system is right for you, you want to ask yourself three questions:
- How long does it take to get my marketing materials in my hands or the hands of my customers? A delay in getting marketing pieces in the hands of the person it’s intended for can negatively impact overall sales.
- How much money am I throwing away each year in outdated marketing materials? There’s nothing worse than having to pay for thousands of brochures, pay a monthly fulfillment fee to store them in a warehouse, and then have to throw them out because the information has become outdated.
- How much productivity are my people losing because of the cumbersome ordering process that exists today? Many companies have downsized their marketing department – requiring more work to be done with less staff.
*HOW MUCH IS A MARKETING ASSET MANAGEMENT SOLUTION WORTH TO MY COMPANY?, Point Balance 2012 David Dodd
