The 8 Essential Marketing Assets Every Brand Needs

Digital Marketing

Feb 22

For marketing to be effective, it needs a variety of aligned elements that work together to produce a cohesive brand, vision, message, and strategy. To give your marketing what it needs to succeed, here are the eight essential marketing assets your brand should own, manage, and regularly review.

Both internal stakeholders and external partners will use these elements to execute tasks consistently and correctly, preventing wasted time and money. Though it may seem textbook, we challenge you to surface these foundational assets, if you already have them, or concisely document them and commit to consistent use.

1. Brand Guide

A brand guide is a document that defines the way your brand approaches style, tone, design, content creation, and messaging. It acts as a foundation for your marketing efforts and ensures that your brand is cohesive and consistent and stands apart from other brands.

A brand guide outlines usage for:

Logos
Fonts and colors
Imagery and icons
Voice, tone, and style
Media formatting

Refer to your brand guide often, and plan to review and update it annually to ensure that you are staying true to your core branded elements while keeping up with changing aesthetics and design.

2. Buyers Personas

Buyer personas help you better understand your target audience so you know exactly who you are talking to and what messaging will resonate with them.

Create 1-3 primary buyer personas as well as secondary lists that allow you to understand multiple unique customer segments. Focus on your primary buyer personas in most of your marketing materials and messaging, and use other personas to offer insights into potential new markets and messaging concepts.

Update your buyer personas annually using customer surveys. Ask questions that help you see how customers and their perceptions of your brand, market, products, and services have changed. Once you deeply understand your buyer persona’s motivations and pain points, you’ll be able to craft a great message about your product.

3. Value Proposition & Positioning Statements

If you know who you’re talking to, then you can work on what to say. A value proposition and positioning statement direct the purpose of your brand to your audience. It explains:

What you provide
Who you provide it to
How it helps
What makes it different from competitors

Your value proposition and positioning statement get your marketing team and the rest of your organization on the same page. It aligns your business and marketing goals and shows you how to best communicate with your target audience.

Update your value proposition and positioning statement whenever you make a major marketing pivot or your offering or audience changes or grows.

4. Website Assets

You probably already know a website is an essential marketing asset. But, do you also know that your domain, hosting, site files, and analytics are too?

If you go through website design and optimization, make sure you own and have access to all associated website accounts, files, and data. You don’t want to be at the mercy of a third party. Get access to all of your website assets and have the ability to update each.

A website isn’t something you build and then ignore. Set a monthly and annual maintenance plan, and regularly audit your site to ensure it works and provides accurate messaging aligned with your current brand standards and positioning.

5. Social Media Channels

Social media channels are essential for content distribution and engagement as well as keeping your brand consistent. Even if your brand isn’t active on every social media platform, maintain access to and control all of the social media profiles related to your brand. Also, set up relevant tracking and audiences on each platform, and create guidelines for how you approach social media content creation and community engagement.

Social media management is an ongoing daily or weekly task, but also plan periodic account audits where you review and update your profiles and guidelines directing your social engagement and strategy.

6. CRM & Email

Most marketing efforts are designed to generate and nurture leads. To properly manage leads and measure success, you need a customer relationship manager (CRM) with email capabilities.

A CRM takes a lot of the guesswork out of lead tracking. It allows you to track customer activity and data related to key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can measure your marketing return on investment (ROI). Plus, when it functions as an email marketing tool, a CRM can also be a valuable asset in lead nurturing.

For effective lead generation, utilize CRM data and email capabilities daily or weekly. Use it to segment audiences, send marketing messages, and track results. SpotOn is a platinum HubSpot partner efficient in all that HubSpot offers.

7. Marketing Strategy

These aforementioned marketing assets on their own won’t make your marketing more effective. To put them to work, you need a marketing strategy.

A marketing strategy is a plan that lays out historical marketing and sales data, competitive research, goals, objectives, and KPIs. It is collectively agreed upon by all internal teams aligning with overall sales and business goals, and it serves as a marketing roadmap. It lays out plans for the year to come.

Creating a marketing strategy should be an annual exercise. But, the work doesn’t end there. Revisit your marketing strategy monthly or quarterly to consider if adjustments need to be made based on real-time marketing data and market changes.

8. Team of Experts

Marketing is a big word and is made up of more than these foundational elements. This list could go on and on with other supporting assets, elements, strategies, and tactics you need. But instead of listing all of the many elements that make up marketing, we’re going to end the list by including a team of experts as the final essential marketing asset every brand needs.

A team of one should not be expected to be an expert at everything you need, so it’s important to have access to resources that can provide skilled support when you need it.

We’ve seen many internal structures that work and that fail. Most successful scenarios are when there is at least one internal technical resource and marketing lead who can access and manage all of your assets and manage your marketing needs. Then, add on expertise when you need someone with specific creativity, technical knowledge, and data skills to help you get to the sweet spot of growth.

Build Your Arsenal of Essential Marketing Assets

It may seem textbook but for your marketing to be effective, you need to solidify the basics. This list includes the eight essential marketing assets you need to begin to build bigger, stronger, more impactful marketing for your brand.

If you need help building any of these essential marketing assets or need a team of experts to help execute on what you already have, the team at SpotOn is here to help. Our team can help your brand from research and strategy to content creation and execution and iteration of your marketing plans.

Contact SpotOn to see how we can help you get more out of each one of your marketing assets.

strategy

Robyn Spoto