BLOG

Last week I wrote a post about Asset Based Marketing, an idea requiring a content marketing strategy with an equally important design focus. While the article received a lot of attention, I wanted to take a few minutes to define the essential elements necessary to have your content become an asset to your marketing efforts.

Collaboration
I can’t stress enough the importance of a collaborative effort between content producers and your design team. Unless your content is visually appealing, it won’t be digested. If you publish without the assistance of professional design, you run the risk of presenting unappealing or unprofessional products. Copywriters and graphic designers each bring specific focus to a project. With both working in the planning AND execution phase, you will get an end result able to attract customers and prospects.

Body of Work
One piece of collateral may be able to stand on its own as a good piece of content. If it’s standing alone with nothing else to support it, you can’t classify it as an asset for your business. One of the principle truths of content marketing is it takes time to build your strategy. Published content, a social media presence, or SEO activity all require concentrated effort before they start adding benefit to an organisation.

Consistency
When building an asset for your company, consistency in your content is one of the most important elements of asset based marketing you can adopt. You can apply it in many different areas: frequency of publishing, adherence to your style guide, execution of your message. Once you start producing inconsistent content – in quality or substance – you corrupt your own asset.

Persistence
To realise maximum benefit in your asset based marketing program, you must be prepared to take a long-term approach. So many people abandon their Twitter or Facebook accounts after a month or two because they don’t achieve the benefit they expected. Blogs sit idle. News feeds stagnate. Newsletters dwindle in frequency. Scheduled case studies never materialise. Each activity will develop in its own time, but a collective effort with continual attention paid to each channel will produce results. Asset based marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

Longevity: The Big Takeaway
An important distinction of a marketing asset is a long shelf life. Business has resigned itself to big spending on marketing and advertising with no guarantee anything tangible will come of it. Once an advert has run or the event is over, the only thing left is goodwill and, hopefully, brand awareness. Asset based marketing produces products with evergreen qualities. Blogs, white papers, podcasts, websites, and case studies all have the ability to continue to draw prospects into your company weeks, months and even years after you first publish them.

It’s no secret implementing a content marketing strategy requires careful planning. By adopting essential elements of asset based marketing, your efforts will result in long-term assets for your company.

What do you consider essential in your asset based marketing?

Subscribe here to have new posts from the Global Copywriting Blog delivered by email.

Related posts:

• Asset Based Marketing: Where Content Meets Design[*]The Website Conundrum: Design vs. Content[*]Why Print Still Matters

*Image courtesy of John Althouse Cohen at www.flickr.com