Marketing asset management software: Choosing the best option

Neither comes easy.

If you’re one of those marketers who has been searching for martech tools, you’re not alone. According to a Optimizely CMP/Sirkin study, investment in marketing tools increased 11% in 2020 alone.

But before you can appreciate marketing asset management software (MAM), we have to go back in time a little bit. To 1994.

Why Marketing Asset Management Software?

Imagine this, you’re a marketer in a small firm somewhere in Philly, and you’re in charge of managing media assets. These marketing files include:

• Photos
• Videos
• Recordings

Your day job will comprise of long periods of the storage, retrieval, manipulation, and distribution of hundreds of these assets.

From a distance, this looks like quite an easy job. That’s until you consider the time you will spend rummaging through hundreds of cassette tapes looking for a particular marketing video.

When you’re not doing that, you will be taking the bus home on a Monday morning for a diskette you forgot or getting hell from the bosses for a misplaced marketing tape you can’t find.

That’s where MAM software comes in.

What Exactly Is Marketing Asset Management Software?

The good news is that today you don’t have to spend your day manually sharing marketing assets or worrying about losing a lead generation video or a film.

That’s quite a good start, given that 60% of marketers say they suffer from work stress at least three days each week.

And it’s all thanks to one marketing automation technology: Marketing Asset Management Software.

MAM software leverages metadata taxonomies to group, search, and distribute your creative files across your marketing department. Some of the services MAM will bring to your marketing strategy include:

• Central storage for all your marketing assets (blogs, stock photos, videos, etc.)
• Streamlining marketing content storage, retrieval, and access
• Automating both external (to freelancers and cloud storage) and internal content distribution
• Automating media file access through biosecurity such as facial recognition
• Version control to keep track of changing versions of the same date file
• File previews to allow you to sample large images and videos briefly

And that’s not all. Beyond improving your bottom line, effective MAM software will go a long way in helping secure your media content and intellectual property through rights management.

But Which Software Is Right for Me?

The problem with MAM software is that there are “millions” of options out there. 

This translates into more chances for making mistakes and choosing one ends up feeling like a game of Russian roulette. Before you know it, evaluating the right software platform becomes an issue.

Fortunately, this trial and error can end today. You are in the right place at the right time, and this blog will help you choose the best MAM solution for your marketing team.

First, you will have to condense the thousands of asset management firms out there into a list of about seven or eight. A great list will probably include the following:

• Optimizely CMP
• Wrike
• Monday
• Asana
• Workfront
• Sprinklr
• Box
• Bynder

We’re here to help you understand the ins and outs of your best options.

1. Optimizely CMP: Your One-Stop-Shop

In terms of marketing asset management, Optimizely CMP brings all the moving parts of your content strategy (including different file types, file formats, sources, and destinations) to one dashboard.

Why is this single dashboard so crucial? According to a Optimizely CMP/Sirkin study, 77% of marketers say that visibility is critical to marketing.

And it doesn’t end there. Optimizely CMP also goes a tad farther in project management and creative workflow management. The engineers there must have realized that marketing asset management doesn’t exist in isolation

For your content creation process, Optimizely CMP also offers:

• Creative workflow templates
• Marketing media editorial calendars
• Project workflow automation

From here, you can leverage its extensive range of features, including:

• Advanced search: using metadata taxonomy, your team can search, find and rapidly disseminate media assets from your media library.
• Brand consistency: from providing a single source of truth for brand guidelines and showing changes in real-time, Optimizely CMP allows your marketing and sales teams to stay on the same page regarding brand image, voice, and tone, hence improving customer experience.
• Bring all your assets under one roof: tired of your whitepapers, videos, rich media, and recordings being all over the place? By centralizing all your marketing assets, Optimizely CMP bringing them all within your reach through a single dashboard.
• Creative workflow: build your creative workflows one step at a time with editorial templates, time tracking, and productivity tracking on the backdrop of excellent file-sharing capabilities.
• File sharing and conversion: sharing files using emails and having to zip and unzip them throughout the process is annoying for everyone. Optimizely CMP allows you to share files across teams without having to convert them into different formats manually.
• Versioning: Optimizely CMP‘s MAM solution allows you to track media files throughout their different version updates, also known as version control. You can track a video’s optimization journey from its first editing, reuse, and repurposing to its fifth version from your dashboard and make universal updates across the board.
• Content repurposing: 85% of internet users enjoy video content. However, making videos is both expensive and time-consuming. By leveraging content repurposing, Optimizely CMP‘s marketing templates enable your teams to transform creative files from Photoshop into reusable marketing templates with minimal effort.

2. Wrike: Simplicity At A Price

This MAS solution is a SaaS that offers moderate functionality in your marketing asset management system.

Wrike only offers marketing asset management through API integrations with other digital marketing asset systems such as Media Vallet.

You can deploy it from any platform except for a mobile app, and with monthly pricing of $9.80 per month, your team gets:

• Integration: Wrike enables your MAM system to seamlessly integrate with other content management tools such as Media Vallet.
• Collaboration across creative teams: Wrike’s messaging and planning tools make cohesion and cooperation easier.
• Project management: leveraging agile methodologies and tools such as Gaant charts, Wrike makes your execution and supervision of projects more efficient.
• Advanced search: Wrike offers an advanced search option for searching and sorting media files.

Wrike is a pretty decent MAM system that would have been even better with a metadata management option.

3. Monday.com: A HR Team’s Favorite

Monday is another entry in the long list of usable content management systems. 

Monday, in general, has always been favored by HR teams. Nonetheless, a few businesses outside this scope use their services.

For monthly pricing of $10 a month, Monday will offer the following features:

• Asset categorization: are all your marketing assets (images, videos, audios, etc.) piled up in a single folder? Well, Monday’s asset categorization will put your house in order and create segments for each brand asset.
• Asset library: Monday also offers a cloud-based asset library that your marketing team can access anywhere and anytime.
• Reporting and analytics: Monday wraps up its list of strengths with effective analytics and reporting capability that will give you 360-degree visibility over your business.

4. Asana: Your Go-to For Customization

Like many other project management software options, Asana offers marketing asset management services through integrations with other software.

Asana tries to compensate for its lack of an inbuilt MAM platform with workflow management and project automation.

With Asana, your marketing team gets:

• Real-time notifications: with Asana, everybody gets the memo. Its real-time notification system synchronizes cross-team communication hence enhancing productivity.
• Reports and analytics: Asana uses quality metrics and performance indicators to aid your marketing teams with informed decision-making.
• Workflow Management: Asana offers decent workflow management since that’s its area of specialty.

5. Trello: Simplicity In One Single Dashboard

Ever heard the saying “simplicity is the greatest sophistication”? That statement is the only way to describe Trello’s foray into marketing asset management software.

Their simplicity is something that many love. However, the moment the need to repurpose marketing content and other advanced features rises, issues may arise.

Due to its limited number of features, a discussion about Trello as a marketing management tool shouldn’t take that long. These features include:

• Reporting/analytics: Trello offers a solid analytics platform that delivers key metrics about your marketing campaign to you in real-time.
• Advanced Search: Trello leverages metadata taxonomy to sort and search different media files. As a result, this feature enables rapid cloud storage and retrieval.
• Workflow Management: having issues with your creative workflows? Trello may offer a fix. It offers calendars templates and automation to bring your marketing team back to marketing life.

Trello is an excellent tool from the context of simplicity.

6. Box: Cloud Storage Simplified

Box stands out of this list for one reason; this software solution is centered entirely around data storage.

From a starting price of $10 a month, Box offers:

• Asset categorization: Box will segment your marketing materials into different memory portions. You can have a social media file, a brand logo file, and a video file, depending on the files your marketing department uses.
• Segmentation: Box can make the process of searching and sorting easier. Look at it this way. You get to search for marketing content in a portion of the memory instead of the whole memory.
• Asset library: since Box is less of a marketing asset management solution and more of a cloud storage option, it offers an asset library by default. You and your marketing team can access this library from anywhere and anytime so long as you have a stable internet connection.

Box’s “data storage at a price” model may remind companies that embrace it of free services like DropBox.

7. Workfront: An Integration Solution

Workfront is a marketing asset management platform specializing in work management, project management, and online proofing.

Sadly, its range of features as a MAM vendor largely depends on integrations with other MAM platforms.

Through its integrations, Workfront offers:

• File sharing: as a single source of truth, Workfront will go a long way in helping you pass media files externally and internally within your marketing organization.
• File conversion: Workfront will take away the hassle of converting media files from one format to another before transferring them across marketing teams.

In conclusion, Workfront’s MAM is pretty bare bones. This conclusion is expected since Workfront doesn’t specialize in MAM in the first place.

8. Bynder: Your Intuitive MAM solution

Bynder is a SaaS solution that promises to revolutionize your company’s relationship with its marketing assets.

This platform is a favorite for mid-market companies that want the full benefits of a MAM vendor without having to pay billions like established multinationals.

Among its wide range of services and an enterprise quote, Bynder offers

• Creative workflows: Bynder’s set of creative workflow tools enable your team to organize marketing content from its inception to its distribution.
• Video brand studio: Bynder’s inbuilt studio makes it easier for your team to create, adapt, manage and distribute video assets.
• File sharing: Bynder takes the hassle out of sharing files and controlling access for both internal and external parties in your marketing teams.

Bynder is a great tool; its only shortcoming is its limited deployment. Bynder only deploys on android and iOS. As a result, it’s not available on Desktop Mac and Desktop Microsoft Windows.

What’s The Best Marketing Asset Management Software?

Well, it depends.

Your decision will come down to your budget, business needs, and preferences. However, in our biased opinion, we would go with Optimizely CMP.

Why?

Optimizely CMP is the best alternative for one reason: it’s an umbrella. With marketers using upwards of 12 tools, adding one more siloed system to your stack is an unnecessary headache.

You may have noticed that the other competitors offer project management with MAM as an afterthought or specialize in MAM with project management as an afterthought.

Optimizely CMP offers both.