Scaling your content marketing on a budget

Today’s content marketers face the ongoing challenge of having to do more with less as organizations seek to promote themselves across multiple channels. When that organization is in a high growth stage and scaling its reach, marketing teams with limited budgets can be quickly overwhelmed by content demands. In order to continue delivering value and scale content creation, they must find ways to do more with less by enhancing the value of their existing assets and personnel.

The secret of doing more with less

For a content marketing team on a budget, few technology solutions deliver more value than digital asset management (DAM) software. With its ability to organize and distribute assets, DAM serves as the connective glue between people, processes, and content. By taking better control over their assets, marketing departments can eliminate the inefficiencies, mistakes, and confusion that make it difficult to scale production.

Even small teams can effectively leverage DAM tools to streamline the way they work to meet content demands that would normally call for far greater resources. Three DAM benefits are particularly valuable in this respect:

• Repurposing content
• Completing projects faster
• Enhancing collaboration

Repurpose, reuse, recycle

Content marketing teams working with limited resources usually can’t afford to start every project from scratch. While it would be great to be able to generate entirely new assets for every campaign, few teams have the time or capacity to do so without falling woefully behind schedule. That means they need to maximize the value of every asset at their disposal, even if it means reusing them multiple times across multiple channels.

Of course, simply rehashing the same image or video clip in every piece of content isn’t a great idea. You might be able to get away with it once or twice, but sooner or later that content is going to start looking very repetitive and generic. The key to reusing assets well is to repurpose them in creative and different ways. Altering colors, recropping, and compositing different elements in new and interesting ways can breathe new life into existing content.

The challenge with recycling and reimagining assets, however, is keeping track of how they’ve been used and changed over time. Digital asset management software makes it much easier for content marketing teams to organize various versions and iterations of content. Creating this connectivity to existing content is essential for leveraging it effectively.

As an example of how having ready access to asset archives can provide creative teams with tremendous flexibility, consider the St. Patrick’s Day campaign Guinness ran in 2020. The first wave of lockdowns due to the COVID-19 outbreak were just beginning to sweep across the world at that time and the company wanted to put out an ad that was sensitive to that moment of fear and uncertainty. Although it wasn’t able to shoot new footage for a commercial, Guinness was able to put together a compelling ad relying exclusively on old footage it had available in its archives. The project was turned around very quickly and aired in time for St. Patrick’s Day of 2020, showcasing the importance of being connected to content.

Faster is better

Speed and efficiency are essential for small content marketing teams if they’re going to scale production without increasing their budgets. What they don’t have time to do is spend hour after hour searching for the right asset in Google Drive or SharePoint. Folder structures can quickly become unwieldy in many file management solutions, and there are often instances where people are working on assets stored on their local computer instead of uploading them to a shared resource. This leads to assets getting lost in the shuffle and people spending unnecessary time recreating things from scratch just because they can’t find them.

Digital asset management platforms create a single source of truth for all content and provide powerful search capabilities to help contributors find exactly what they need. Thanks to metadata like tags and keywords, many of which are assigned to uploaded files automatically, finding the right asset takes hardly any time at all. Even better, the search results make it easy to see how many versions of those assets have been created, edited, and reused to help ensure that people are using the correct ones.

Managing collaboration more efficiently

Small content teams with limited internal resources frequently work with external agencies or freelancers to execute on a variety of campaigns. Working with outside collaborators, however, can create headaches without a simple and secure way to share assets and finalized content. Files transferred via FTP or email can be hard to manage since additional steps are required to place them wherever they need to be stored. When someone forgets to add an attachment or uses an expired link, projects can fall behind schedule. Third-party transfer sites offer some level of convenience, but they often present additional security risks.

Digital asset management platforms can streamline the collaboration process by making it easy to share content with external contributors. Canto, for instance, provides upload links and portals that allow people to upload material directly to the asset library quickly and securely. Outside collaborators can be added or removed from a user group to simplify who has access to content.

These tools empower even the smallest content marketing teams to coordinate projects much broader in scope than they could otherwise handle internally. By running their entire production process through a DAM platform, they can maintain visibility over work being done and make sure content is approved promptly to meet strategic deadlines.

Expand your content marketing capacity with Canto

Canto provides creative marketing teams with the tools to effectively scale content creation without massively increasing their operating budget. That’s because Canto allows marketers to get more value out of their existing assets, work more efficiently, and eliminate barriers to collaboration. By consolidating assets into a single source of truth and making it easier to locate, share, and utilize them, Canto turns each member of the content marketing team into a hub of creativity and productivity.
To learn more about how Canto can help your content marketing team punch above its weight class, sign up for a free trial today.