Trade marketing is an important part of the marketing strategy of organizations planning to maximize sales and differentiate their products and services at point of sale. It is, therefore, a marketing discipline that guides the development of relationships between manufacturers or service providers and sales channels, by understanding the needs between brands / products, points of sale and customers.
In the information age, the use of technologies for managing trade marketing operations, such as field staff management at point-of-sale, inventory control, and promoter training, is critical to any business. Recently there has been a new need arising from new waves of innovation and digital platforms that has brought a lot of complexity and some challenges. It is the need to manage digital assets that circulate throughout the trade marketing chain by the various players inside and outside the companies. It's the ability to get companies' up-to-date and approved digital content to the end of the chain through a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform.
The design of this model has some important benefits for trade marketing:
Strengthening Brand Equity is perhaps the main benefit of digital asset management, it means maintaining brand strength (equity) across all channels and sales points, physical or online, since ALL digital assets distributed across the channels follow the same pattern in a consistent manner and maintain the same quality and version. A digital asset management platform ensures that content created to support your Brand Equity is distributed across all digital channels and physical outlets.
Money saving are obtained in a number of ways, for example, a digital asset management platform dramatically reduces the search time for a specific digital asset over file storage platforms; also reduces the maintenance time of this asset; easy storage and search (which depending on the platform you can use search methods using artificial intelligence, chatbots or voice-search. It also reduces the volume of lost and unused assets by making searches easier and reducing space in the cloud storage environment. Finally it reduces the head count used to maintain and operate the asset management process that, in many companies, occurs manually, with email access profile approval management, and other requests.
Reduction of legal disputes that often occur when a brand associates with celebrities through image rights and copyright agreements that, in most cases, may have restrictions on their use in certain markets (locations), channels, and even devices. A digital asset management platform manages restrictions on the use of digital assets that have certain restrictions and facilitates the proper use and legal distribution of approved assets by eliminating legal disputes resulting from misuse of unauthorized assets.
Performance improvement in organic search is another very important benefit especially for the marketing team. A good digital asset management platform enables the manager to create taxonomy and metadata for company assets, thereby assisting in tagging digital content across the company's various channels by satisfactorily improving the organic search performance of such assets. It also helps the manager to create more optimized versions of assets (lighter files) that facilitate loading and improve SEO score.
Information Security and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is nowaday the main problem that companies have in the distribution of their digital assets since the trade marketing chain can be quite complex and can bring numerous external players accessing content within repositories and putting the security of company information at risk. The companies trade marketing strategy includes various players such as content creation agencies, media outlets and content distribution (in various on and offline channels), marketplaces platform (where the brand has digital stores), e-commerce platforms from their own or from vendors, physical stores of ON and OFF-TRADE (bars, restaurants, supermarkets, stores), nonetheless, all of them have the need to convey their most up-to-date and approved assets by all means. The risk is HOW can the company distribute and manage access across this layer to internal asset repositories without exposing information security? A digital asset management platform helps define and restrict player access (internal or external) to any content and distribute them to any player securely and without compromising security or creating vulnerabilities in the company's internal environments (network, servers). Besides that it stores only the users' essential data for platform operation, not including sensitive data such as color, race, gender or personal data that can identify the user (such as phone, address, social security number, etc.). required for operation such as NAME and EMAIL.
The first step is to unveil the need to use expert digital asset management platforms and create internal processes to facilitate all digital content distribution throughout the trade marketing chain. This will also bring other intangible benefits to the IT team such as reduced license usage, portability, scalability and storage cost.
The second step is a culture change that temporary solutions such as CMS or Sharepoint or other file storage platforms do not replicate the depth of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform. The technical effort required to turn them into a DAM would be substantial. There would also be a large list of features that would not be leveraged when compared to a specialist digital asset management platform that was developed specifically for this purpose.
Now that you understand the benefits of digital asset management for Trade Marketing, discover Yapoli:
We are an intelligent platform that optimizes the management and distribution of digital files for the industry in a safe, practical, fast and measurable manner.
Havaianas case of Digital Asset Management (DAM) for Trade Marketing
How Yapoli, a platform that connects management and governance of digital materials, supports Havaianas in the management and distribution of digital assets by eradicating the consumption and distribution of outdated materials, out of compliance and out of effect.