Why digital marketing assets are essential to your brand

You’re a marketer for a growing brand—promoting and selling products in an exciting, yet crowded, online market.

Not only have you got to contest with your competitors, but there’s so much content online that you’re also competing for your customer’s attention. That’s why your digital marketing assets are important essential in helping you build brand awareness, attract prospects, and generate sales for your business. With the right type of assets, you’ll have a better chance of standing out and making money 🤑.

As a digital asset management (DAM) tool, we know how many assets you're juggling on a daily basis. We also know how you can keep them organised so you can make the most of them—time and time again. 

In this post, we'll take a close look at the different types of digital marketing assets. You'll find some tips on creating your own assets. And we'll show you how Dash can keep them organised. 🙌

What’s a digital marketing asset?

A digital marketing asset, also known as a ‘digital asset’, is a digital file that you use to promote and sell products as part of your marketing campaigns. Think lifestyle images, product videos, podcasts, variations of your brand’s logo, ad graphics—the list goes on.

These digital assets are valuable because they have the potential to bring in money for your brand. If you use them to launch successful campaigns, you’ll quickly see what ROI and value they bring. 🤑

The different types of marketing assets

Digital marketing assets come in all different shapes, sizes and file types. Here are some of the most important types of digital assets for your ecommerce marketing campaigns. We’ll use some examples from ecommerce brands to bring these assets to life. ✨

Product and lifestyle images

Customers can’t feel, taste or touch your products online. So product and lifestyle shots have to be the next best thing. In fact, 75% of online shoppers say product photos influence their buying decisions. So it’s no wonder these digital assets are so valuable to your brand.

To put it simply: a product shot is a way for you to highlight the look of your product against a staged or natural background. A lifestyle shot is a way to showcase your product in the context of your audience’s day-to-day life. Here are two examples from one of our ecommerce customers, COAT Paints. 

On the left, you can see a simple shot of one of COAT’s paint pots against a plain background. On the right is a lifestyle image highlighting a different colour on the wall of someone’s living room.  

These images work best as JPGs, PNGs or WEBP because that’s what most online platforms prefer. Take a read of our article that compares different image types for more info. And, make sure you’re checking the dimension requirements for each of your platforms. 

Video content

Another biggie for ecommerce brands are video assets. Especially since 90% of marketers say that video content has helped them increase leads.

Videos can be used across all social channels, as well as email marketing, YouTube, advertising channels and your website. They can help bring your products to life and offer prospective customers a deeper dive into your brand’s story. Here are some examples of the different types of video assets:

• Product demos
• Short-form video ads
• Customer testimonials and user-generated content
• Long-form explainer videos
• Webinars and live videos
• Meet the team videos
• Behind-the-scenes clips

This video asset from hunni, for example, opens up when you land on their homepage. It’s a short video from the brand’s founder, Leslie. She explains how their products can help you with the most common skin problems. And you can even take a short questionnaire to find your perfect solution. 

💡 Most online platforms, like your website, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, prefer MP4 video formats. You can take read our post about video asset management to learn more about this type of digital content.

Ecommerce advertising assets 

Digital assets play a huge role in helping your ecommerce advertising campaigns succeed. Eye-catching visuals and unique creatives will help you stand out against your competitors. You might use some existing product shots and add some text over the top. Or you might get your designer to mock up some new ad creatives for your specific channels. Here’s an example from Boy Smells, an online fragrance brand. 

For this meta ad, Boy Smells have taken a product image of their pocket fragrances and super-imposed it over the top of some of the most popular tourist destinations. Pretty fun, right? 

Brand assets

Brand assets are the visuals and docs unique to your brand—they play a vital part in how your brand is perceived online. Without any branding on your digital channels, it’ll be hard for prospects to know who you are. Here are some brand asset examples.

• Your brand logo (along with all its different variations)
• Brand guidelines which often come in the form of a PDF
• Fonts and colour palettes specific to your brand
• Brand-approved templates and marketing materials

Here’s a selection of brand assets from skincare brand, disco. On their product page, you can see their logo, brand fonts, colour palette and a selection of illustrations that highlight the product’s benefits. 

It’s important these assets are kept up to date so that your colleagues and external partners are using the most up-to-date brand materials. An old logo or random colour palette can be jarring to your customers, which might damage your brand integrity. Take a read of our post about brand asset management for a deeper dive. 

Design assets

For many marketing campaigns, you’ll also need graphics and branded design elements to make your visual content stand out. Whether you’re using an in-house designer, working with a freelancer or you’re doing it all by yourself in Canva—you’ll need one of more of these design assets.

• Graphics
• Iconography
• Illustrations
• Textures and backgrounds
• Product packaging design

Cat Person use some beautiful illustrations on their product packaging and across their website. These have become part of the brand’s identity and help them stand out amongst their competitors. 

🤓 Read more about design assets and how to organise them.

Social media assets

Social media assets are the visuals that underpin all your social media content. Every channel requires a slightly different approach to content. Let’s have a closer look at each channel and the types of assets you’ll need.

• Short-form video for TikTok, Instagram Reels and Facebook
• User-generated content and influencer marketing content for Instagram and TikTok
• Lifestyle imagery for Pinterest
• Infographics and gifs for Twitter
• Graphics for LinkedIn carousels
• Audio clips from webinars and podcasts 

This list is not exhaustive. And bear in mind every channel will require specific asset dimensions. Instagram alone has different size requirements for square, landscape and portrait images. 😭 Just take a look at all the different social asset Misfits Health use on their Instagram page. 

Each piece of content—logo, product images, UGC, behind-the-scenes content and product videos—all would have been resized and optimised for Instagram. But don’t worry—Dash solves this problem really easily with social media presets. Scoot down to the end of this post to learn how DAM helps you organise and deploy your assets.

Website assets

If you run an online store, you’ll have lots of assets that you’re regularly creating and updating on your site. Similarly, if you list products on marketplaces and resellers websites you’ll need to keep them updated with your latest product shots and branding.

Here are some typical website assets.

• Product images and 360º product images
• Hero and discount banners
• Seasonal banners to promote events like Black Friday and Christmas
• Video demos of your product in action
• Stock images for blog articles 
• Audio files from podcasts 

Here’s a look at the drinks brand, Dalston’s, homepage. There are three different assets that immediately jump out: the brand’s logo, a graphic banner offering free shipping and the hero banner that features a product shot. 

Email marketing assets

For ecommerce brands, email is a great way of nurturing potential customers down the funnel and into a place where they’re ready to buy. It’s also a way to reconvert past customers using incentives and special discounts. Some email marketing assets include:

• Header images
• Graphics
• Product photos
• Your logo
• Social icons that link to your channels 

Here’s an email from Old Pal, featuring several digital assets to highlight their product and brand identity. 

How do you create your own digital assets?

Creating marketing assets requires time and resources. For many businesses that don’t have in-house designers or photographers, it’s often up to the marketing team to source and produce visual content. Even if you hire people to help you create assets, you’ll need to consider the channels and platforms you need that digital content for—and you’ll need to brief accordingly.

Luckily we’ve got a bunch of resources to help you get started. 😇

Creating assets for social media posts

• Learn how to create Facebook ad graphics
• Get inspired by some top ecommerce brands on Instagram
• See what types of content works well on TikTok
• Incorporate user-generated content into your marketing mix
• Download our free ad graphics templates for Canva

Visual content for your online store

• Optimise your images for Shopify
• Learn tips on creating DIY product photography

Working with external partners

• A guide on briefing photographers
• Tips on working with micro-influencers

The best way to organise your digital marketing assets

Okay so you need lot of digital marketing assets to market your brand. It almost feels a bit overwhelming, doesn’t it? 😅 If you’re already creating lots of this content, you’re having to save, search, share and organise loads of files—every day.

If you’re currently storing your digital assets in tools like Google Drive, Dropbox or (even worse) your desktop, you know how confusing and chaotic it gets to find them again. What’s the point of creating a gorgeous marketing graphic if it's hidden away in your folders where no-one else can use it?

That’s why you need a dedicated marketing asset management tool for searching, organising and deploying your digital assets. In other words, you need our digital asset management software—Dash!

Here are some ways Dash can help you organise your digital marketing assets.

• Search and find assets, fast: Use keywords, tags and fields to find your latest product shots, fast. Dash can actually scan the contents of the image, so you don’t need to remember any file names to find what you need. As an example, let’s look for a cactus plant in Planto’s Dash. This is a houseplant brand we created to demo some of Dash’s best features.🌵
  

• Deploy assets to your Shopify store: If you sell on Shopify, you can use Dash to send product and lifestyle shots directly to your product pages. Our integration is super-quick to set up and means you don’t have to go back and forth between different platforms. You’ll also be able to adjust your images to meet Shopify’s image requirements.
  
• Crop and resize images for social media: Every social channel has different requirements. So not only are you creating assets, you’ve got to duplicate them in different sizes too. Annoying, right? In Dash you can select one asset and download it in multiple different sizes and formats. Here’s a PNG image in Planto— I can use the preset social media dimensions to resize it for Instagram, and I can convert it to a JPG.

You can also create your own custom dimensions and save them for other people to use. 📏

Share assets with your partners: Freelancers and agencies need access to your brand assets. PR and media teams need access to your product photos. You can set up public portals for each of your external partners and give them access to the assets they need. They’ll be able to browse, search and download assets without a login. But they won’t be able to edit or delete anything. Check out fwip’s customer story to see how they use portals to share content with their stockists around Europe. 🌍

These are just a handful of ways Dash helps you organise your digital assets. Make sure to read our in-depth guide about digital asset management to learn about our full list of features.

And when you’re ready to take the plunge, jump right in with a free trial, no strings attached. ✨