In this guest post, Collaboro CEO Warwick Boulter (main photo), offers his easy tips to ensure you’re getting the best from your marketing, advertising and creative assets…

An explosion in digital production techniques, media channels and agency partnerships means the marketing industry has become increasingly fragmented and chaotic, making managing your brand’s digital assets seem almost impossible.

Marketing professionals need to plan, budget and prepare, not only for proactive marketing spend, but also reactive marketing opportunities, jumping in on conversations with their audience in real-time when they’re happening.

So how do you empower your team and marketing partners to be more agile? How do you get the best value from your ever-increasing pool of marketing, advertising and creative content?

Storing those assets on the cloud is part of the answer. Adobe’s, Microsoft’s and SAP’s new Open Data Initiative highlights the move by organisations to centralise all of their customer data on one platform. It only makes sense to do the same with your media assets.

The agility, scale and neutrality of a cloud approach is crucial to helping you achieve efficient brand asset management, which is a key focal point for marketing leaders today. Here are our top three tips that’ll ensure you can get the right messages into the market faster than the competition.

Keep your independence

Be the custodian of your content. It makes sense that to safeguard your brand’s assets against instability and change, it’s important to keep them independent of suppliers. That way, you can have complete, untethered control of your creative assets.  No matter when, where or by whom they were created.

Over time there is no question that your marketing partners, teams and suppliers will change. And that’s a good thing. The abundance of specialist agencies and project-based partnerships means brands can leverage a hand-selected team of experts as and when required. Empowering them to be agile and efficient is key to success in an ever more fragmented marketing landscape.

Forward-thinking organisations see their content asset pool as exactly that – valuable brand assets which should be owned and controlled by only them.

Make collaboration, control and change pain-free

The barriers to entry in the supply chain in today’s marketing landscape are zero. Which means people and agencies can specialise. Really talented people are drilling down to what they are great at and opening small companies.

Which is exciting. It means you can have the very best creative team in the city, working alongside the very best social media specialists, alongside the coolest film director, alongside the best PR agency, alongside freelance editors and digital specialists.

There is no chance, however, that these people all work at the same place on or in the same time zone. But they still all need access to your pool of creative assets.

A cloud-based interface for your content pool is the answer. Some suppliers might be working on your competitor’s business, or moving on with passwords stored in their phone. So you need to store your content on one platform that enables easy, clear collaboration across a range of suppliers, yet has trackable footprints, watermarks, or confirmation protocols, so there is accountability and clarity of use.

Plus, you need the ability to grant or revoke access in a moment. You should be able to open the gate to your pool for new suppliers immediately, so they can create value from day one, while you keep control of the content created. You can only do this on the cloud.

Sophisticated search capabilities is a must-have

You should be able to locate a particular creative asset with speed and ease, no matter how far down the haystack it is hidden.

Look for a solution with some serious search functionality – one that uses key search terms that make sense for your business’ filing system, and that uses the latest tech such as AI to aid tagging and organisation in a truly sophisticated way.

The system you depend on to do this needs to be secure, with a robust archive storage system that’ll keep files damage-free indefinitely. With the lifespan of an external hard drive averaging three to five, this is not an appropriate long-term data storage solution – yet it’s the device of choice for most businesses large and small.

Instead, if you collate, store and manage your brand’s content on a cloud platform, that eliminates concerns about data storage.

Further, industry-leading brands are actively seeking out a service-based solution, one which can collate, tag, upload and take care of their content for them, ultimately helping them to regain control of their content library.

And when you’re in control, your team can get your messages into market faster, make your existing content work harder and protect your brand against the industry fragmentation that we see happening all around us.