Digital marketing agencies create and deliver marketing assets. But what are they exactly?
This article describes the types of marketing assets a business needs to grow its brand and customer base. It explains why marketing assets are important.
How does a Content Marketing Agency work?
A content marketing agency provides content services to a variety of businesses to improve their online presence to increase brand awareness and generate leads.
Successful content marketing depends on a variety of factors. To determine what assets are most effective for a specific business, a target audience, company mission, and marketing strategy help.
A target audience is a specific group of people at which a product, service or brand is aimed.
A company mission statement is the explanation of a business's reason to exist. It describes their purpose and intention.
A marketing strategy is an action plan designed to promote and sell a product or service.
What are marketing assets?
Marketing assets are
“Tools and resources a business organization uses to attract leads, build relationships, educate people about and promote its products, services or brand and make sales.”
These assets can be physical or digital. Each asset needs to be assigned a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and checked routinely to see how the assets are performing based on the business objectives.
Main Types of Marketing Assets
Marketing teams use different marketing assets for different audiences for a variety of purposes. Marketing assets can be divided into internal and external assets.
Internal marketing assets
Internal marketing assets are company assets or processes that are strictly for internal use by team members. They teach company employees about new products, services, or initiatives within the company and help them explain and sell the customer products and services to customers.
Examples of internal marketing assets are:
Business cards
sell sheets
interactive brochures
Support procedures
Management guides
client onboarding processes
Operating procedures.
External marketing assets
These are the marketing assets your brand uses to attract potential customers. They focus on potential customers and clients. Market research and specific marketing efforts are needed to align the assets with audience needs and consumer behaviour.
These assets follow the customer's pain points, solve their problems, and establish the business as a credible source and trusted authority.
Such assets help to indicate interest in a company's services or products and drive action from prospects, potential customers, and customers.
Examples of external marketing assets are:
Company websites
Landing pages
Industry reports
Blog articles
Email marketing
Marketing campaigns.
External marketing assets can be divided into two:
Inbound marketing focuses on specific, potential customers researching products, currently shopping for a product or service, researching products, and planning to make a purchase.
Outbound marketing focuses on any potential customers, in and outside the market of a business product or service.
Importance Of Marketing Assets
Why does a company need to build marketing assets? And how can a marketing asset help your team to sell products or services more often?
Marketing assets free up business time.
Marketing assets can build trust. Creating assets positions your business as authority people can trust to educate, entertain, and put their best interests first.
A good asset makes the sales process easier. It gives potential customers free advice and helps them get results before using your product or service.
The marketing asset life cycle
Marketing assets go through several stages of development, including:
Creation. This stage includes brainstorming, making concept decisions, creating drafts, and editing a marketing asset.
Approval. This stage includes the approval of the assets by the management and client.
Distribution. After approval, assets are distributed through appropriate marketing channels (mail, email, social media).
Management. The last stage includes the secured storage and maintenance of assets, so users can access the assets at any time.
Consequently, content creation takes a lot of time and effort.
Which Marketing Assets to choose?
There are many content marketing strategies available. Before you start to create any marketing asset, you need to know which content marketing services are the best fit for your company, which content marketing efforts are needed, which are optional and what marketing budget is available for them.
1 Marketing strategy plan
Any content marketing creation starts with research. After researching the target audience and company mission statement, it is time to create a solid content strategy to market your products, services, and brand.
Moreover, you need a content plan. This does not only include creative content creation but also a content marketing plan and content marketing campaign.
Without a marketing strategy, you just have tactics (ads, social media posts, landing pages). You have a campaign without any direction or goal.
This plan is crucial to the success of your marketing efforts. The marketing strategy plan is the foundation of everything a business does:
target audience
messaging
media channels
resources
relationship building
how to deliver a great customer experience
how to increase the customer's lifetime value
referrals
Basic marketing assets
As a business-to-business (B2B) brand, you further need to create the following marketing assets:
2 Digital marketing- Website and Landing pages
A company website is the first marketing asset you need to build. It is the online portfolio of a business and is needed to capture leads and let potential customers get to know your brand, products, and services. You should create specific landing pages with each web page including a call-to-action.
Add a link to opt-in to a newsletter
Download content (brochure, infographic, worksheets, or how-to-guides)
Redirect to a sales page or related article.
3 Social Media Marketing
Customers are active on social media sites. Find out which social media channel your target audience is, and create a brand-specific social media channel, and specific content for your potential customers.
For businesses, the preferred social media channels are:
LinkedIn: create text-based posts.
YouTube, TikTok: create videos.
Instagram: create visual content.
Create valuable and relevant content that is appropriate for each channel.
4 Training manuals
Each business process needs a road map or business system. A business system consists of all the stages a business owner, management team, employees, customers, and investors, need to know about.
These business processes make scaling a business and delivering a consistent customer experience easier. It needs to include helpful images, written examples, business tools, employee responsibilities and demo videos.
Employee onboarding.
Team management.
Marketing campaign.
Customer service.
Sales process.
5 Videos
People consume lots of videos. Therefore, it is necessary to create video content for any B2B Company. Videos can be used in varied ways:
Marketing campaign video with the key company message, company culture and values
Product explanations
Respond to prospects over email
Introduce new products and services on my website
Share social media tips
Answer FAQ questions of customers
Work with people on a sale or for tech support
Video brochures
6 Cornerstone content
Every company needs to include cornerstone content as part of its marketing strategy. Cornerstone content is any piece of free content to build your brand authority and get prospects. Web visitors, prospects and customers need to enter their contact details to receive the free asset.
eBook
White paper
Case studies
Free trial software
Checklist
How-to-guide
Industry Report
Template
Framework
Infographic
7 Content marketing (SEO blog posts)
Every company needs to invest in content marketing and every website needs a blog. Blog posts need to be search engine optimized (SEO) and human friendly.
Content needs to be optimized and updated on a regular base. It also needs to be relevant, interesting, deliver value, and help the reader get results.
Blog posts
Infographics
Images
Data
Opt-in form
Downloadable material (case study, step-by-step guide, worksheet)
8 Email campaigns (Lead nurturing)
A business also needs to create an email list and start to use email campaigns. With this marketing asset, customers learn about your brand and build trust over time.
Offer them value, entertain them, give your opinion, educate them and last of all sell them. But be sure, before you sell, first deliver lots of valuable content.
9 Brand Guide (Logo, style guide, messaging)
Each marketing asset needs to be consistent. So, a company needs a brand guide.
A brand style guide needs to include:
Logo and how to use it
Look & Feel of the brand
Icons
Type of Images
Fonts and font sizes
Colour palette
Instructions for headlines, subheadings, headers, hyperlinks, bold text, and copy.
Tone of voice
Messaging style
10 eBook
Creating a digital book is helpful in many ways:
It builds a personal brand.
It explains a business method, product, or service
It serves as a business card.
It gets new clients.
It establishes credibility and trust
It creates an engaged email list
it helps to speak at conferences, podcasts, and radio shows.
it explains your business as the right choice.
Alternative marketing assets
Moreover, any business can use the following alternative marketing assets:
Published articles
Magazines (Event magazines, corporate magazines, customer magazines, member magazines)
Online advertisements
Brand stories and branded content
How-to Guides
Product catalogues
Company Presentations & Proposals
Product descriptions
Podcasts
Now it is time to start creating great content for your business. Make sure each piece of content or marketing asset is valuable for your target audience.
Need help creating your marketing assets? Contact us.
