3 Ways to Prevent Unauthorized Seasonal Updates to Marketing Assets

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Summer is finally here, and the warm weather may have sales and marketing professionals itching to add seasonal updates to their marketing assets. While adding a palm tree to a one-sheeter or bright colors to a brand asset might sound harmless, marketers know that unauthorized updates can have big unintended consequences for their brands.

Brand consistency is essential to any company — and when unauthorized changes are made, it can make it difficult for people to find the right content, cause confusion, and even negatively affect your team’s carefully crafted brand. The last thing you want is for an inconsistent and disorganized brand to affect your relationships with clients and prospects.

Brand inconsistency can also affect your bottom line: A recent survey found that consistent brand accounts for an estimated 23% revenue increase. And yet, 60% of respondents said their materials often don’t conform to brand guidelines.

A marketing asset platform like Ontrack keeps all your up-to-date documents in one place. It can serve as a centralized location where marketing professionals can confidently go to find the current version of any asset, including images, documents, PDFs, audio, and more. This way, you’ll never have to worry about providing a consistent message and brand to your customers.

Here are some basic ways to maintain correct, current files when using Ontrack.

1. Creating a single access point

Imagine spending the time and effort to create a beautiful asset for a marketing campaign. Once you use it, where does it go? Maybe it got lost among your files because it was labeled incorrectly, or it was on the drive of someone who’s left your company. That’s a reality and headache for many marketers — but it doesn’t have to be.

With a marketing asset management platform, you have a centralized place where you can access, update or replace assets. This makes it easy to reuse your assets, saving you and your team valuable time (and money!). It also prevents outside users or vendors from updating or changing assets without your permission. Ontrack allows you to upload all approved assets to its portal, so you’ll never have to waste time creating an asset that already exists or worry about a team member using the wrong asset.

2. Setting user permissions to prevent unauthorized changes

Have a salesperson who’s notorious for plastering beachy images on summer promotional flyers? A marketing asset management platform lets you decide which users should have access and how much access they can receive. You can arrange permissions by role, team, department, and even geographic location. If there’s specific content you want to be publicly available, like brand guidelines or approved logos, you can allow access to some content universally. 

Ontrack makes it possible to customize access for all users to enforce that essential brand consistency. Administrators can make it so users can’t move, change, or delete content, and can’t upload unauthorized files without permission. Ontrack even allows you to customize changes — so users may be allowed to modify certain content features, like dates, times and location, but not be able to modify other features, like photos and colors. This ensures your brand remains consistent. 

3. Tracking asset usage

Are there certain types of marketing assets that salespeople, locations, or the organization prefers using over others? You can get feedback, but that’s never the same as seeing actual tracking of what people are using or ordering. Marketing creates many different types of materials, but they don’t always know which ones to stop creating or offering and which ones to continue. Ontrack gives you visibility into which assets are being used by your organization and which are not. This allows you to focus on the ones people prefer and sunset the ones they don’t use — or dig more into why they don’t use them.

So while having a palm tree on your latest brochure is nice, keeping your marketing assets together and your brand intact is better. Email [email protected] to find out how Ontrack can help ensure brand consistency for you and your company all year long.

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