Why you should improve your asset library this year?
It’s much more than a good habit
Reading time: 2,5 mins
by Gergő Bárándi
What is it?
Asset library is a digital warehouse built to help brands and marketers to store, organize, and share safely their digital media intellectual property between stakeholders. You may store here logos, icons, color swatches, product photos, brand photos, ad images, videos, pdfs, docs, literally every kind of digital asset you fancy.
In case you have a strong digital presence (totally recommended in 2022.:D), you’ll need an asset library.
Packing in the sock drawer
Imagine you living in the same flat for years and having a drawer for your socks. After years the time has come and you’ll move somewhere else, so you open that drawer to empty it and a total mess looking back at you. You may ignore this friendly chaos on regular weekdays since finding similar looking socks is a part of your wakey proccess but now it’s time to change this bad habit, isn’t it?
Me and my client came trough this process months ago while doing a rebranding project. He had graphic assets on 3 or 4 different notebooks, we found 6 pendrives, and also a storage HDD with only 17 (!) pngs on it. He had 6 graphic designers in the past 5 years, so all of the produced assets were in different folder structures, with some of them also had passwords on it, and the name structure of the files was also a horrible maze run. Sounds a bit toxic, right?
You can easily avoid this situation when you manage your assets in a cloud storage where everyone can easily access it and you create your own structure. So what should you do to build a proper asset library?
Build structure
Creatives use asset libraries like budget travelers their backpackers: every single pocket has its own function and there are simple rules what to pack where to access everything easily.
A centralized and well functioning asset library is a crucial part of your digital strategy since these are highly integrated part of marketing organizations. In marketing organizations people sometimes come and go, so it’s also very important to help newcomers to adapt easily to your library structure making the onboarding proccess easier. To create a structure may takes some time and discipline but it will be a massive timesaver later. I recommend you to keep digital stuff (e.g. logos, organic content, ads, campaign assets, product photos etc.) separeted and also create sub-folders (e.g. seasonality, promotion templates, lifestyle stocks etc.) which can refine files more.
Why is this important?
For first this is a pretty good investment. You may want to spare time and nervs when working on your marketing and your team also will be thankful if you keep everything organised.
Also a good idea to have an asset library when people who you work with living in different places in the world, like you work with a social media manager from Belgium and a ppc specialist from the UK but you and your graphic designer producing marketing assets in the US. With a cloud storage everyone can access every file in real time, so you don’t need to send emails and wetransfer links.
Tags and archive
Was it an email? I’ve shared it via google drive. Ok but what was the file name? Idk.
This was a regular conversation from an agency’s office where I used to work. Later the environment changed and we started to use a cloud for files but until that this was the way when we were looking for files. Pretty lame, hm?
Most of the asset library softwares are able to tag your files with custom labels you wish for like date, creator, keywords, project name, campaign season, etc. With this feature you will be able to find your assets quickly. If you spend less time with searching assets you will have more time to do real work.
Safety
Cloud based asset libraries are highly secure storages, so you can keep your important digital intellectual property safe. You can control usage rights, accesses to different levels of the folders and you’ll be also able to track which materials has been used, how and when.
2022 – more and more assets required
In a previous article I gave some insights what to expect in 2022 when it comes to digital advertising. Two of the key points were staying relevant and let algorithms work so if you fancy supporting these, you may produce more and more creative assets for content and ads. And we are back to the previous point, where you may understood why is it important to save time when browsing for an important asset.
New year – get on good habits
Also a good thing to consider to take a late new year’s resolution and organize your assets to help your team’ and external specialists’ work. In case you need help to build a proper asset library, feel free to contact me.