Don't Neglect a Critical Marketing Piece: Visual Management

If Pinterest and Instagram have taught us anything, it is the power of visual images. Their explosive popularity among all demographics demonstrates just how true is the old adage - "a picture is worth a thousand words." If visual management is not a high priority in your marketing strategy, it should be. Those who treat this critical piece as secondary to their written content may find their branding efforts lagging behind those who have recognized the importance of using consistent images of the highest quality.

In a Marketing Daily Commentary post, Stephen Shepherd says, "... in today’s frenetic world, images can convey a brand message in an instant and engage consumers in a visual, memorable way."

The visual management question that needs to be considered, however, is this-

Is the brand message being communicated through your images consistent with your desired branding? 

• Are your images of consistent quality, regardless of which of your locations or products that they are representing? 
• Does your marketing team have convenient and logical access to your image library, so they can find the best images for each marketing application?
• Do you have separate copies of your images in resolutions optimized for print and digital applications?
• Is your visual library well-organized and up to date?
• When new individuals join your marketing team do you have a naming convention for your visual assets that makes it easy for them to locate what they need?
• Are your visual assets secure from internal loss continual online backup?
• Do all members of your team have the access they need to digital files, regardless of their location?

The answers to these questions can have a big impact on both the effectiveness of your branding message and the efficiency of your marketing team.

Using a single professional source for your image creation for all locations is vital to maintaining consistency of presentation and quality in your visual assets. Having a Cloud visual asset library that is optimized for efficient and logical access can further improve your corporate visual management.

Contact us to find out how we can improve the delivery of your branding message through our image creation services and our unique visual management application.

3 Top Reasons Companies Outsource Visual Asset Management

If you already have a marketing department and other administrative staff, why would you outsource the visual asset management piece instead of just delegating it to existing staff?

In our experience working with organizations that range from assisted living facilities to large hospitality chains, we tend to see three main issues related to keeping visual asset management (the organizing and cataloging of photos, videos and graphics) in-house: Time, priority and turnover.

1. Time. Creating and maintaining a database and naming convention for the thousands of digital photos, videos and graphic images a corporate entity collects and uses through their various marketing mediums is an extremely time-consuming task. At the same time, if their is not a logical naming convention or the database is not kept current, locating the required visual assets for a project can be time consuming and frustrating. When companies outsource visual asset management, they remove the time burden from their employees and also gain the assurance of the visual asset library being kept up to date with a consistent and logical naming convention for the files.
2. Priority. Because the process can be tedious and time consuming, maintenance of a companies visual asset library is often a low priority on the list of your marketing director or other administrative staff assigned to this task. Just like the filing that piles up on their desk waiting for them to reach the end of their to-do list, the organization of digital data often gets put off or done hastily without proper thought and attention. Companies who outsource visual asset management to VAMS know that we give top priority to our customers. Their visual asset libraries will also be up to date and well organized.
3. Turnover. Marketing directors and marketing support staff aren't likely to stay with your company for the full length of their career. They may leaving may be their own choice or it may be the choice of management. In either case, someone new will need to come in and takeover their position and duties. It is often in this transition that issues related to an in-house visual asset library come to the surface. The organizational system created by the former individual may not be relatable to the new staff member and may not be well-documented enough for them to use efficiently or responsibly. If the turnover in staff is related to a merger or acquisition, the staff may actually be dealing with the double the problem and the unwelcome task of trying to combine two different systems into one. In addition, these important assets are protected from the nonsensical actions of disgruntled employees, which has been very costly in some circumstances.

When companies outsource visual asset management to VAMS, they free up their staff to spend their time on more important priorities. In addition, the company gains consistency in their database naming conventions and accurate up-to-date labeling of all their visual assets. The cloud-based library can be securely accessed by authorized personnel from any location and is always backed up for added security. It just makes sense to turn it over to those who have the resources to make your digital assets a top a priority.

Maintaining Image Consistency for Multi-Site Facilities

One of the biggest challenges facing marketing directors which work for corporations that have multi-site facilities is maintaining image consistency for their brand. The issue is generally dealt with in one or two ways. One is simply do your best to give consistent direction to the photographers being used at each site, and the other, is to use more generic photos from one site to try focus on consistency more than on portraying reality. Neither of these solutions are ideal.

Even with consistent direction provided to each photographer or videographer, every professional will interpret that direction a bit differently. Image creation is an art form and the artist behind the lens will make a significant difference in how images are shot, as will the equipment being used by each media specialist. There may be a few situations where a corporation's multi-site facilities remain visually consistent from one location to the next, but that is generally not the case. So using the same marketing images to represent all locations can be out of the question in many situations. Walking into a facility and finding it not as pictured in the marketing media can immediately put a customer or an investor in a negative mindset.

At VAMS, we dealt with all these scenarios in the past. The difficulty in maintaining consistency for multi-site clients was part of what inspired our existence. The only way to truly maintain the consistency in your images from one site to the next is to hire the same media specialist to oversee all the shoots. That's why we specialize in creating image libraries for multi-site facilities across the United States and Canada.

Not all media companies are setup with this concept in mind. Most utilize different media specialists at different locations and try to marry the shots as best they can. The photographer at the Toronto shoot has no idea what the photographer at the Miami shoot is focusing on and vice-versa. With a media company that provides all their image creation in-house, you can be assured that the image creation and quality will remain uniform from every site. The image consistency that is applied to your marketing materials will assist in maintaining a consistent, high quality brand image.

We've worked with assisted living facilities, the hospitality industry and several other corporations dealing with the issue of maintaining image consistency for multi-site facilities. Our streamlined process allows us to always maintain the image consistency they need for brand marketing, while also operating on a much more efficient basis than can be expected from multiple contractors handling each location.

If you'd like to hear just how we can provide that same consistency for your image library, contact us for more information

How Do I Organize My Images So That I Can Find Them? Great Question!

Organization equals efficiency and efficiency equals cost savings. One of the most frequent questions we receive from marketing managers is - "How do I organize my images so that I can find what I need when I need it?"

It's a common problem. You have in your mind's eye the exact type of image that will fit perfectly in a particular spot in your new brochure or the blog post you're creating, but you end up wasting an unbelievable amount of time scanning through images trying to find it. Anyone who deals with marketing and promotional layouts of any kind has dealt with this frustrating scenario. As a photographer with literally millions of images, so have I. But not anymore!

I decided we needed to commit the time to developing a system to organize my images so that we could always find just the image we wanted in a very short amount of time. And, yes, it took a large investment of our own time to come up with an organizational system that fits with most any search scenario, but we did it. No more wasting time scanning through dozens or hundreds of photography images. A few quick entries into our database search and the search is narrowed down to a limited few that match what we're looking for.

Just like most companies, I’m not the only one who needs access to those images. Creating a system that would make sense to others and be readily accessible to others was also key. We also wanted it to be user friendly for new employees to keep training time down to a minimum. Efficient, easy and accessible – those were our three main criteria for the project. We’re excited to say that we achieved all three!

As our clients continued to ask the question – “How can I organize my images?” – we quickly realized that our catalog for photos would work for them as well. So, we began offering our visual asset management system as a service to our clients. Their images are securely stored on the Cloud for easy access from any location. The images are each carefully cataloged according to our exclusive organization system. Then the client is provided the secure access codes and easy to follow directions for searching their custom visual library.

Could you develop an organized and searchable visual library yourself? Of course you could, so, could many of our clients. Why don’t they? Time! We’ve already invested the time and research into creating what we believe is the very best virtual asset management system there is. Why start from scratch?

We enjoy hearing the enthusiasm in the voices of marketing managers as they first begin accessing and utilizing the system. It makes their jobs so much easier!

If you’d like to hear how our services can benefit your organization, contact us. We’d be happy to tell you about this great system we developed to organize my images. I know it could work for you too!