Marketers are savvy people. They’ve become even more so over the past decade with the advent of the Internet and the way it’s revolutionized the industry of reaching target audiences and persuading them to act.
One thing that most marketers still need to catch up on, though, is how to best manage a company’s growing inventory of marketing collateral in the most cost-effective way.
Unfortunately, even with the power of the Internet, costs can get out of hand. There are ways, though, to mitigate this for marketers who want to balance their budgets and still maintain a strong, consistent brand, and that comes with marketing inventory management.
How Costs Add Up
Costs can add up quickly as you go about the process of creating, printing, storing, and distributing marketing materials to your team, especially if you have a diverse office structure with several locations or a sales force of twenty or more field members.
Costs associated with creating and using a wide variety of marketing materials include:
• Creating the materials themselves
• Going back and forth with the printer
• Quality control
• Customization
• Inaccurate materials
• Having your materials printed
• Shipping
• Storing materials
• Distributing materials to your employees
It is estimated that for every $1 spent on creating printed marketing materials, a company winds up spending $6 to $14 on all these other activities that are associated with these materials. This adds up to real budget dollars being spent.
Managing Costs by Managing Your Inventory
By using a market asset management system, you can work to cut down those extraneous costs and better manage your marketing collateral budget.
One way to immediately cut costs is to reform how you communicate with your printer. Time equals money, and unfortunately, communicating back and forth with your printer takes both. With a marketing asset management system, you can talk to the printer in an effective and timely way that doesn’t take a tremendous amount of time.
Another way to cut costs is to cut down on over-ordering material. This usually happens because marketers want to avoid being short on materials when they’re needed – no one wants to run out – but there isn’t a great way to keep track of inventory.
Fortunately, a marketing asset management system can help a marketing professional keep track of inventory as it enters and leaves the warehouse. You can use the system to update yourself on what supply you have, where it’s going, and when you need to order more so that you don’t run out and don’t over-order your materials. The market asset management system allows marketing professionals to set inventory thresholds on all collateral while receiving alerts on inventory status to avoid the absence of inventory with key marketing tools. These alerts are managed through email inventory notifications to improve select users.
Additionally, a system offers:
• Process automation
• An interactive storefront
• UPS and FedEx integration
• 24-hour access
• Document storage
• Customized reporting
• Customized integration
• And more
Finally, using material inefficiently can hurt your bottom line. This is usually the case when it’s hard to keep track of who is using what material and how quickly they’re consuming pieces.
With an online marketing asset management system, you can reduce these costs by seeing who is using the pieces and more effectively control the flow of material out of your shop.
Find the Marketing Asset Management System Right for You
DMS offers a marketing asset management system called DigiFLO that can help you dramatically reduce the cost of managing your marketing collateral by giving you a powerful online platform from which you can control your operations.
Contact DMS today to learn more about using DigiFLO to help you save money and better your budget.