Sustainable digital asset management
As B2B marketers, you will create a significant number of assets over the years, including blogs, videos and infographics.
It can be easy to fall into the trap of continually creating new assets and discarding old ones but there are ways that you can become more sustainable when it comes to managing your digital assets.
You can apply more environmentally friendly and efficient practices to your business to maximise the lifespan and value of each asset that you produce. We are experiencing an economic downturn on a global scale so it is more crucial than ever to ensure we use resources efficiently.
One solution is to ‘sweat your assets’ by extracting more value from an asset beyond its original intended use. 51% of marketers [1] waste money producing or recreating assets that go unused because their audience don’t know it exists or they can’t find it.
When digital assets are properly catalogued and indexed, it becomes much easier for teams to find and use them, helping to prevent the creation of duplicate assets and also make it easier to repurpose and reuse existing assets.
3 ways you can help prevent e-waste
It is as easy as reuse, repurpose, recycle, even when it comes to your digital assets.
Reuse
When creating brand new content is not feasible due to budget or time constraints, reusing existing assets is a great option. Instead of creating something completely from new why not take an existing asset and use it in a unique way?
You can also use your asset to create several new pieces of content for social media. If you have a podcast, simply break those up into bitesize clips to post online or use images and blog post to create infographics.
You can also think about taking pieces from a long form article and turning them into smaller easier-to-digest pieces of content, for example, a top 10 list or quote images on social media posts.
Repurpose
The key to repurposing existing assets is making sure they are up to date with current trends. This means keeping your visuals fresh, accurate, and applicable to today’s market. You could consider adding new text or graphics that fit the current landscape or updating a video that may have been created a few years ago.
Once you have updated your asset, think about ways it could be used in different platforms or channels such as social media posts, blog articles, emails or website copy. It is also important to consider if an asset could be translated into different formats such as audio files for podcasts or videos for YouTube channels.
Repurposing assets is an effective way to take advantage of the resources you already have, whilst reducing waste. Even repurposing old blogs to make them more relevant to current trends can help prevent waste.
Recycle
Recycle content so that it can remain relevant. For instance, if you see a post performing well and has lots of engagement, you can share previous blogs or videos that relate to its topic, keeping the conversation moving naturally.
Recycling assets involves taking old content that has been previously created and giving it new life by reimagining it in different formats or channels; this helps you save time while also breathing life into content that may have become outdated over time.
Utilising existing customer feedback and stories as content on your landing page is an effective way to maximise the value of those resources. This strategy enables you to efficiently recycle important assets without compromising its impact or relevancy.
The benefits of sweating your assets
Sweating your assets has multiple benefits for businesses. It helps companies be more economical with their resources by preventing e-waste.
Recycling existing content allows businesses to save time, money, and resources while still providing valuable information to their audience.
Sweating your assets is an excellent way to optimise your content marketing strategy. Rather than starting from the beginning every time you need new material, you can repurpose old content into something new and fresh for your customers. This ensures that you always have high-quality content on hand that resonates with your target audience.
Additionally, repurposing existing content allows marketers to maintain consistent branding across all channels while keeping up with the latest trends in their industry.
Not only beneficial for your budget…
- Recycling and repurposing content serves a dual purpose. Not only does it make your company more resourceful, but it is also provides tremendous opportunities for both efficiency and sustainability. By leveraging existing assets for additional use, you are taking initiative to protect the long-term well-being of the environment and most importantly, you are maximising the returns generated from what would otherwise be wasted energy and materials.
- Going green is something that can separate your brand as a leader in eco-friendly tactics. Do not overlook the immense value recycling content has to offer when it comes winning loyal customers looking to support brands with meaningful environmental concerns.
Rather than throwing content away you should be creating sustainable, reusable content with lasting value. Making sustainable and reusable content allows you to get the maximum use out of what you create and unlike throw away content, lasting value can be obtained through cultivating original material tailored specifically to your audience’s needs.
Preventing e-waste should not only be seen as a method of being more economical, it is also a means of becoming more efficient when organising your content and recognising what you could potentially reuse in the future.
