One of the most common challenges with digital asset management is setting up an asset portal that’s the right fit for your organisational needs. Every organisation has different processes for dealing with asset creation, approval workflows, and asset management and delivery. Every organisation is organised somewhat differently, with different structures, groups of stakeholders, and teams and business units that interact with asset creation and management processes in different ways.
How do you find a solution for your asset portal that meets the specific needs of your organisation? And what’s the best way to adapt that solution in ways that help generate more value for your organisation and business without embarking on a re-platforming exercise? Let’s dive in and explore some of these questions in depth.
What is an asset portal or digital asset management solution?
Most larger businesses have some form of ‘asset portal’ or digital asset management solution to share assets between different parts of the organisation. There can often be many or multiple solutions in place. Depending on the organisation the asset portal or ‘brand portal’ will have originated with the marketing organisation as a solution to distribute key brand assets such as logos, fonts, and brand photography as well as marketing assets such as product imagery, product videos, marketing campaign assets, or other guidance to stakeholders across the business.
Your asset portal may be used to distribute many types of assets and marketing material, some digital, but may commonly also support and be used for print/offline assets as well. For obvious reasons, brand/asset portals are often closely linked to/integrated with an organisation’s digital asset management solution.
Working extensively with asset portals and digital asset management, in particular solutions built with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets and Sites. AEM Assets has an out-of-the-box brand portal solution that many organisation’s are able to leverage with good results, however we’ve worked with a variety of organisations to build tightly integrated brand/asset portals that augment and extend AEM Assets to meet specific needs to provide more functionality to better support sales and marketing teams.
AEM Assets Brand Portal – What comes out of the box?
The out-of-the-box AEM Assets brand portal is developing with each release of AEM (check out the latest here on What’s new in the latest release) and gives some great basic features. The AEM Brand Portal works straight away with very little configuration and allow you to get an asset portal up and running with next to no effort.
If you already have your brand and marketing assets migrated across or stored in AEM Assets, the out-of-the-box brand portal lets you open up and make those assets available to your different teams, stakeholders, or third parties by setting up the portal, configuring some of the user rights, and asset availability, and telling your organisation where to find the latest marketing material.
Some of the key functionality that is supported by the standard AEM Brand Portal include some of the following use cases:
- Basic user profile and management
- Asset preview, properties and download
- Asset search and basic filtering
- Folder and collection management
- Asset distribution – allowing partner to upload assets
These features solve many and possibly most needs for a lot of organisations, but when an organisation is looking for more advanced functionality, or is looking for its asset portal to serve multiple teams or business units with different requirements or competing priorities, the out-of-the-box functionality may not be enough. As soon as you get a little more ambitious and want to start to customise your brand portal:
- More extensive branding customisation
- UI look & feel customisation
- Advanced search & filtering
- Advanced asset tagging & categorisation
- Download tracking & reporting
- Asset analytics & performance tracking
- Direct customer document sharing & tracking
Where do you take it from there? Sales playbooks and beyond
Already happy with your asset and brand portals? Are teams singing your praises with the ease and efficiency with which you create, manage, and deliver your digital assets? That’s great, but do you take your solution to the next level?
As we’ve discussed in this article previously, many organisations suffer from misalignment between their marketing and sales teams. One common area where this shows up is that marketing assets are not readily available to sales teams to help support their sales activities – and vice versa. Sales collateral can be a valuable resource to marketing teams who are looking to stay aligned with the key messages and differentiators that the sales organisation find are performing best. Sales enablement and collateral may be a key place to look next when looking to develop your asset management solution.
If you have AEM Assets and are struggling with how to get the most out of your brand and marketing portal, we’re here to help! Drop us a line! We can discuss some of the most successful solutions we’ve been able to put in place for organisations looking to get the most out of their brand and marketing asset portals.
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