For businesses looking to cut down on costs, one of the most logical areas to optimize is your marketing collateral. It is very common for the process of preparing, filing, updating and storing marketing assets to become outdated and under managed. Most of the process may be costing you more than it needs to.
The Cost of Obsolete Marketing Collateral
Obsolete marketing materials should never be distributed as they can be misleading with information no longer correct. It also gives off an unprofessional impression which can lead to the loss of customers or deter future customers from wanting to work with you. With outdated materials not being used, they are likely being stored and that storage is yet another cost. Why pay to house things you no longer use?
Why Has Collateral Become Obsolete?
Part of cutting costs for marketing materials is being able to update and repurpose old collateral. Now this can’t be done for every piece of material, but for a majority of it, it can. Making sure that collateral is constantly updated and reused if possible will save you money in the long run.
How Do you Fulfill Marketing Material Requests?
Another area of the process you will want to investigate to save money is how marketing material requests are filled. There are many personnel that require the use of marketing collateral, that’s why you have it in the first place, but to get it, they have to send in a request. Once the request is received, is another employee responsible for filling that request, a task that may take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes?
Consider how many requests are made each day. How much of your employee’s time is spent per day, processing and filling requests? How much are you then paying that employee to process requests all day? These are the real costs of not having a marketing asset management software in place to streamline processes. These costs may be hidden from your financial reports, but don’t fool yourself, it’s hurting your profit and without a true cost, it’s hard to set pricing or know the needed revenue to hit a return on investment.
How a Marketing Asset Management System Can Save You Money
One way to get around these issues, is to establish a marketing asset management system and set up a marketing portal. This would allow you to keep living files of all your marketing materials in one central place for all to access. It would also allow you to automate the filing requests, cutting that task right out of some of your employee’s daily responsibilities. If these areas are properly managed they could end up saving you more than you think in the long run.
To learn more about Velocity’s online marketing management platform and how we can store promotional products in our fulfillment warehouse please give us a call: 888-372-3487 or contact us via our online form.