Marketing teams are usually tasked with creating sales collateral that helps move prospects along the funnel and helps sales teams win deals against competitors.

From brochures & case studies to ROI calculators, sales collateral takes time, effort, and budget. The most frustrating part about it? Without clarity on sales teams’ needs, they probably won’t use half the collateral you generate! So what are you doing wrong?

It’s not enough to just make content. You have to make content that’s directly applicable to the salespeople’s needs and find ways to easily get that content into their hands.

Here are 5 steps to getting sales teams to use your collateral:

• Collaborate on sales collateral ideas
• Make finding collateral easy and intuitive
• Categorize your collateral in a meaningful way
• Use metadata to add keywords and tags
• Integrate with their existing tools

1. Collaborate on sales collateral ideas

This may seem like an obvious one, but you’d be surprised by how many teams skip this step. The easiest way to get sales using your collateral is to ask them what they want and need. Specifically, you need to know what their leads are asking for, and what they don’t already have.

Whether it’s quarterly, monthly, or weekly, schedule regular meetings with the sales team to touch base and get updates on what’s needed. This way, you can prioritize projects and have a steady flow of collateral that will actually help with sales enablement.

Using software to collaborate will allow both revenue-generating and marketing teams to clearly understand what’s needed, and when it can be completed. A digital asset management (DAM) system facilitates an easy, intuitive collaborative process.

2. Make finding collateral easy and intuitive

It is essential to provide salespeople with a reliable source of information. This source should be accurate and up-to-date to ensure potential customers are not receiving outdated information.

It’s not enough to keep all your collateral organized on hard drives or other hard-to-reach locations – if the process to get the collateral is too complicated, salespeople will likely choose to use old versions of brochures that they already have saved to their desktops.

Adding all your sales collateral into a DAM solution or content hub can streamline sales processes. It also allows you to organize and manage your sales enablement materials to ultimately drive better sales results.

3. Categorize your collateral in a meaningful way

Once all your collateral is in a central library, you want to make sure it’s as easy as possible for your sales team to find the resource they need. While getting your collateral in the library is important, if your sales team is spending hours hunting, it’s only a matter of time before they give up altogether.

To make the process easier, you need to add intuitive categories that make logical sense to your sales team. Should you categorize it by stages in the buyer journey? What about by collateral type? The choice is ultimately up to you and your sales team, but a smart category structure is necessary to get sales finding and using your sales collateral.

A DAM system facilitates a structured library that makes sense for your organization. Teams can quickly find and use the approved assets they need.

4. Use metadata to add keywords and tags

If your sales team is looking for a specific piece of content, intuitive search capabilities can be very useful. Searching should go so much further than just the title of the document. Who is really going to remember the title of your brochure as “Summer_2023_MVBrchr_V3”?

This is where metadata comes in. Make it easier for your sales team to find and use their preferred content. Include relevant keywords and tags in each piece of collateral.

You can choose a system with more advanced search options like filtering by date, file type, and photographer. Digital asset management platforms often have AI-powered metadata and enhanced search capabilities. This can make it easier to store and find sales collateral. By leveraging these features, you can improve the discoverability of your content and boost your team’s productivity.

5. Integrate with their existing tools

While we can do everything to get our sales collateral into a DAM system or other repository and can tag and categorize all day long, let’s face it, it can be a pain to actually go and get the collateral from a separate system.

From logging in to downloading PDFs & PPTs to your own files, the system can be long and dreary. Integrating your asset library with systems already in use is the most important step in getting your sales team to use your collateral.

Giving salespeople direct access to these tools will reduce any resistance they may have to use your corporate-approved materials and requires minimal changes to their behavior.

Digital Asset Management systems (DAMs) can be integrated with productivity solutions, like Office 365. This integration allows salespeople to insert videos, documents, and photos without leaving the platform. It can also allow them to easily draft media-rich presentations and send product information over their email expediting the sales cycle.

Bringing sales and marketing teams together, throughout the creative process and the content lifecycle, is essential for creating relevant sales collateral. But ensuring easy access to approved materials is crucial to ensuring sales teams actually use the right assets!

Implementing a digital asset management platform can help to break down siloes between revenue and marketing teams. Building better content creation processes, and accessibility can ultimately lead to more opportunities and sales.

With the recent acceleration in the number of companies shifting to eCommerce, several organizations have already invested time and effort into their big transition. Many of them, however, are unfamiliar with how to do it well and so we’ve put together some guidelines to follow throughout the process. Ground zero is ensuring your eCommerce site is packed with high-quality, accurate product imagery, but that’s not all.

Here, we’ll outline the seven best practices for managing your eCommerce images:

1. Only use high-quality images,
2. Use singular images of the product,
3. Make sure your images are accurate,
4. Show multiple angles and illustrations,
5. Use a white background,
6. Incorporate lifestyle imagery, and
7. Optimize for mobile.

These practices will help to build brand loyalty, boost sales and drive revenue. Let us discuss each step in more detail below.

1. Only Use High-Quality Images

Online shoppers want to see the most detail possible, but they also want the images to load fast. When choosing your image resolution, consider the page speed—if it’s three seconds or more the bounce rate dramatically increases. It’s been recommended that anything above 800kb is pushing the limit, and you’ll likely lose visitors. A good rule of thumb is to aim for the smallest file size that still provides optimal image size and resolution.

The optimal page size depends on the kind of site you have, and typically, eCommerce platforms have product photo size restrictions. According to Verdure Digital, here are the restrictions on the most popular eCommerce platforms:

• Shopify: Image sizes of 1024×1024 are recommended but can support up to 2048×2048.
• Wix: Two formats are recommended. 200×200 for gallery images, and 400×400 for product pages. Photos require an image ratio of 4:3.
• Magento: Three image sizes are supported. A 50×50 thumbnail for purchasing charts, thumbnail galleries, etc.; 370×370 for listings on new product sections and category and search results pages; 1000×1000 for zoom images.
• LightSpeed: Maximum image size of 512×512. Images above this size are automatically reduced.

2. Use Singular Images of The Product

Online shoppers want to see detailed images of the stand-alone product without being distracted by other items. Ensure you include singular images of each product individually before introducing lifestyle photos incorporating multiple items.

While you want to show products in context, it’s also important to have standalone images of the key product so visitors can analyze whether it meets their needs. This can also prevent confusion about whether something is sold as a single item or a set (for example, a swimsuit top and bottom, sold as separates).

3. Ensure Your Images are Accurate

To ensure that you’re accurately depicting your products to customers, it’s recommended to do the primary photoshoot indoors with professional lighting that won’t impact the true colors of the product. Avoid doing too much post-production work or applying filters to the photos. Customers want a “what you see is what you get” approach to online shopping, which builds consumer confidence.

4. Show Multiple Angles and Illustrations

A benefit of shopping in-store is being able to see the product from all perspectives and angles to ensure you’re getting what you want. When you move to eCommerce, you want to give customers the same confidence as if they were in the store, which is why the photos you choose to demonstrate your product are so important.

BlueBoard suggests using at least four different product photos, although each platform allows different numbers of images. They also recommend to use a combination of the following product images on your site:

• Main image
• Detail shots
• Features and benefits
• The scale of product, and more

You can read about each in more detail in their post here.

5. Use a White Background

While it can be tempting to use product imagery as an opportunity to represent your brand, it’s essential to use a neutral background to ensure you’re appropriately demonstrating your product. You’d be surprised at how much background colors can impact the perceived color of a product.

Using a white background minimizes distractions and ensures your product’s colors pop. Plus, many websites require white backgrounds.

6. Incorporate Lifestyle Imagery

Along with your product-only main imagery, incorporate lifestyle images of people using your products. This helps to create a narrative around the product, and brand, which in turn can better increase understanding of your target market and encourage customers to imagine themselves in your products. For example, if you sell something like skis, you can use lifestyle imagery to demonstrate if the product is meant for leisure or extreme sports.

7. Optimize for Mobile

It’s been reported that nearly half of consumers shop more on their mobile devices than they do in person. With that knowledge, make sure that customers on your eCommerce mobile site are seeing optimized images.

Ensure to account for different screen sizes when creating your mobile platform as sometimes photos can be too small/large or disoriented from webversion to mobile, not to mention that customers need to be able to see the products clearly and ideally zoom in or out on their screen.

Apply What You (Now) Know

In today’s environment, it’s not enough to just have an eCommerce site – you need to provide a digital experience. Ensuring your eCommerce images are in tip-top shape to optimize visitor experience and increase purchase confidence is the first-step in having a successful eCommerce improvement.

Once your images are in good shape, there are other media types that can help you sell your products online even better. In certain instances, 3D models may be super helpful to depict product information and context. Video content can also help give a more in-depth look at your products and the user experience—building on the product narrative we previously mentioned.

Give Your eCommerce Images a Safe Home

High-quality product images and engaging content are essential for you to build brand trust and drive purchase-ready behavior online. Digital asset management (DAM) enables you to better manage and distribute product and brand material for online customer touchpoints like eCommerce and social media. Using a DAM like MediaValet, you can leverage AI for asset tagging and discovery to organize and search for product visuals using SKUs, product IDs, colors, and custom metadata.

Take it a step further with a PIM integration

Do you already have an existing PIM? A DAM can tie right in and add to the benefits that you know and love. Learn more about MediaValet’s integration with PIM here.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.

The travel industry took one of the biggest hits of any business sector during the COVID-19 pandemic as the world was almost completely shut down. To put it into perspective, “in March 2020, U.S. air passenger travel decreased by 90%, and in April 2020, U.S. hotel occupancy was at just 25%” (Deloitte): a shocking fall from grace for an industry that had been steadily growing for a number of years.

Now, after the perspective on traveling has been drastically changed, tourism marketers are faced with the challenge of bouncing back and enticing people to get out and explore the world. While the good news is that people are, mostly, ready to travel again, the hard part is that the marketing environment has changed—probably forever. The expectations of travelers, how they book their trips, and how they physically travel has shifted—meaning travel and tourism marketing campaigns and strategies need to shift as well.

In this post, we share the 4 most important marketing trends to watch for in 2022, as the travel industry makes its long-awaited, substantial comeback.

Top 4 Tourism Marketing Trends in 2022

While there are many emerging marketing trends in this complex, “post-pandemic” world, there are four, in particular, that stand out:

1. Shifted Expectations

One thing that the pandemic drilled into everyone’s minds is that anything can get canceled—anytime. Even your big vacation plans, and with the new “anything can happen” mentality, travelers don’t want to be locked into their purchases. Flexible cancellation policies will be the new norm, and marketers need to be aware of travelers’ hesitancy and even anxiety. In fact, “50% of travelers consider flexible cancellation policies as a top factor in their 2022 travel decisions” (Evolve). Offering low-stress, free cancellation, and excellent customer service in dealing with changes or canceled plans will go a long way in 2022 and beyond.

2. Video Marketing and Live Streaming

Video marketing has blown up in the last few years, and that growth isn’t expected to slow down any time soon. In addition to video production, many brands have tapped into the power of live streaming to show off the visitor experience. Live video costs less to produce, and it offers a more authentic way to show off a hotel, destination, or experience compared to a polished, edited video project. Expect to see both edited video marketing and live streaming more and more, as big brands like Airbnb have already seen success in incorporating it into their marketing campaigns.

3. Mobile is Still Growing, Thanks to the Pandemic

According to a survey by Statista, “70 percent of responding internet users worldwide were using their smartphones or mobile phones more as a direct result of the coronavirus outbreak.” Basically, people are more glued to their phones than ever before. And lucky for the travel industry, it’s been reported that nearly half of the smartphone users in the U.S. are completely comfortable researching, planning, and booking their travel plans entirely on a mobile device (Google).

What does this mean for marketers? That the mobile experience for your brand must be stellar. So much of your audience is researching your brand on their smartphone. Invest in the best mobile experience you can offer. Whether that’s improving the direct booking website or developing an app for your brand, it matters—a lot—how travelers can interact with you via their mobile device.

4. Virtual Reality

Virtual reality and tourism marketing make complete sense, and it’s a tool that’s been growing in popularity for a few years. Why not be able to give potential buyers a virtual experience to represent your destination? With VR you can fully immerse them in your experience or destination, helping to entice them to book IRL. VR is going to become a big part of the marketing strategies of many prominent travel and hospitality brands.

These four marketing trends to watch for in 2022 prove that the need to create and distribute digital content is not slowing down. In fact, it’s speeding up. To ensure that your brand is getting ROI on all the digital assets being produced for marketing campaigns, virtual reality tools, app development, and more, you may need help from a professional digital asset management (DAM) partner.

What Exactly is a DAM?

A digital asset management (DAM) system helps tourism marketers manage, organize, share, and distribute digital assets all from within one central library. It improves productivity and increases the ROI of content and creative programs. Additionally, it helps tourism and travel brands improve their creative production process and efficiently manage and launch campaigns.

Investing in a cloud-based DAM can benefit your brand in several significant ways. Some examples include:

1. Access for remote teams: With the DAM, your marketing team can work collaboratively and efficiently, from anywhere.
2. Less time searching for assets: Kick-start your creative campaigns, stay on track, and launch on time by always knowing where your digital assets are located.
3. Tailored library access: Give partners and contractors access to the DAM for only the assets they need, helping projects flow more smoothly.
4. Improved brand consistency: Having one single source of truth for all your on-brand digital assets helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page, with only approved assets being used in high-stakes marketing campaigns—and everywhere else.

Ready to Get Started?

Getting a DAM in place is a smart move as you prepare to create more and more digital content. Not only does it help speed up projects and improve workflow, but it also ensures you are getting ROI on the valuable brand assets that are being created. To see more specifically how a DAM works for tourism marketers, check out a DAM demo.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.