Understanding Your Business Marketing Assets
Marketing assets include anything used by an organisation to promote its products, services, or brand. But which assets are right for your business?
Marketing is a beast. Taming it is half the battle that most businesses either fail to understand or simply do not approach as a strategic point for growth success. With the endless tools, platforms, socials, digital, traditional and common modes of advertising your business ever-changing, it has prioritised the need to get your marketing assets in order before you can even consider what marketing and sales route to take.
What are Marketing Assets?
Marketing assets include anything used by an organisation to promote its products, services, or brand. Emails, brochures, datasheets, presentations, sales letters, blog articles, website content, videos, and images are some of the most popular assets available to external customers.
These are the tools of the marketing trade - assets that help explain and educate an audience into learning more about the product or service it promotes.
Key Marketing Asset
Before we can consider the best assets for any business, we must understand a key point in these modern times. Your number one marketing and sales asset is your product or service, of course, but from a single standpoint of what we use to promote said product or service, your first and most important asset is your company website.
With an avalanche of customers now searching online, your website is your business function to showcase what you do and how you do it. It hosts the end URL for landing page promotions, it collects your lead nurturing data, it invites clients to connect and contact you and it helps educate your audience about the business brand without the need for a phone call.
Your website is precious, make it a priority in your strategy.
Modern Marketing Assets
Besides your website, there is a healthy plethora of marketing material we can identify as usable and measurable to help grow any business. These are what I suggest you focus on first:
Video marketing provides a visual complement to written content in a highly shareable format that generates traffic and maximizes search on video search engines such as YouTube. Video is also a great way to drive traffic to other content or areas of your site, generate leads and guide the ideal persona through the contemplative journey.
Video doesn’t have to be high-end or high-cost to earn viewers. In the human-centric marketing of today, more trust and authority can be gained by being authentic and sharing information in a straightforward manner.
Infographics are a great visual way to tell a story and show impact. Infographics are versatile in that they can be used across many channels – print material, social media and the website, for example. This example of an infographic was used originally in an annual report.
Social media is a channel that facilitates frequent engagement with your audience. It’s also a platform where your customers and supporters become influencers by advocating for the brand.
Social media is a tool for both broadcasting information and listening to your audience. It can also provide endless data about your ideal prospects, and serve as a customer service platform as well.
Email nurtures your relationship with leads to help them become customers or supporters. Emails should be tailored to each persona and/or phase of the buyer’s journey.
Ebooks provide in-depth information on a topic of interest to your ideal prospect, customer or supporter, usually one they’ve read about on a relevant page of the website or perhaps in an informative email.
The content is educational, not sales. It’s focused on solving a problem or meeting a need that you know the site visitor has. Ebooks offer the opportunity to converts visitors to leads when people download the ebook by filling out a form.
An ebook can be a downloadable version of the content on a pillar page, offering the reader a more portable option to consume the content.
Case studies show how your organization has solved problems for your ideal customers in the past. Case studies usually include the metrics or measures of success you know are important to them, and a description of the processes or journey that led to successful outcomes.
The Future
Of course, the demand for bigger and better marketing assets will change over time. Merchandise will still have a say with a return to live events, whilst your brand identity and reputation is an asset you will always need to monitor as a given strategy.
For now, concentrate on the above, then include in your advertising and promotion schedule and watch your business grow.