Quick Answer: A marketing asset is anything that attracts leads and builds trust on its own, without you trading more time for it. That includes your website, blog content, case studies, videos, lead magnets, and your CRM. If you don't own assets like these, you're the asset, which means your revenue is capped by your own hours in the day.
Why does your company need to be building marketing assets? It's a question we often get asked by new clients.
You're the asset if you have to put in the time, money, and effort to generate leads yourself. That's fine in your startup phase, when you're fresh and eager to tackle every part of the business. But it doesn't scale.
What happens when you want to double your revenue? You'd have to double the hours you work in a day. Marketing assets are how you grow revenue without doing that.
In this article, I'll explain the benefits of assets in greater detail and the type of marketing assets you need to grow your brand and customer base.
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Marketing assets are the tools and resources you use to attract leads, build relationships, and make sales. Marketing assets include social media accounts, white papers, blog content, case studies, videos, published articles, industry reports, brochures, online ads, data, ebooks, digital campaigns, your CRM, and CMS.
You want to treat your marketing assets like employees, except they never need time off. They work while you sleep, but that doesn't mean you should build them once, and that's it. Each asset needs to be assigned a KPI. Then you need to routinely check in to see how your marketing assets are performing.
Marketing assets can be divided into internal and external assets.
Internal marketing assets are company assets or processes that are strictly for internal use by team members. You'd have your typical marketing collateral like business cards (check out free business card template here), letterheads, sell sheets, interactive brochures, support procedures, etc. It could be a management guide or a client onboarding process. These are the standard operating procedures or gold standards for how you do business.
For example, you could have an asset specifically designed to educate and inform your sales team about the benefits of your products or services so they can better assist potential customers.
These are the marketing assets your brand uses to attract potential customers. For example, your company's marketing asset material could encompass a lead magnet, landing page, ultimate guide, report, blog article, marketing campaign, whatever.
These assets target your customer's pain points. They solve a problem and establish you as a credible source, an authority they can trust to help them get a result. It gets prospects to raise their hands and indicate interest in your company's services or products.
More importantly, assets drive action, and if you've set up your analytics, you can track exactly where that opt-in or sale originated.
Apart from the obvious (which is they free up your time) marketing assets build trust. Most potential customers don't trust you. They've been duped by brand after brand looking to make a quick sale, so they're naturally skeptical.
Your assets position you as an authority, someone they can trust to educate, entertain, and put their best interests first. That's powerful. A good asset makes the sales process so much easier because you're not overcoming objections all of the time.
You're giving your prospect free advice you'd normally charge for, helping them get results before using your product or service. Now that's a powerful strategy for scaling your business.
Whether you're managing the marketing for a large corporation or you're a startup, you need to be building assets. Marketers will tell you that marketing assets are no different from financial assets.
If you nurture and monitor these assets closely, making vital changes when necessary, they will deliver massive returns for your company. These are just a few assets you want to think about adding to your marketing mix.
Like it or not, social media marketing is here to stay, and your clients are active on it right this very minute. So you need to make a concerted effort to build your social media assets.
But don't just jump on any social media network. Be strategic about it.
Are your customers actively engaging on the networks you're targeting? If you don't know, you need to be speaking with your existing customer base and investing time and energy in market research. It's a great way to identify which social media channels your customers love to hang out on.
For example, as a business-to-business (B2B) brand, we know our customers are active on social sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. So those are three social media channels our team needs to invest our marketing efforts in.
But it's not just about showing up. You need to create content your potential customers want to engage with, and it needs to be channel appropriate.
So whatever social media channel you choose, make sure you're creating valuable and relevant content.
Also, using AI shorts maker can significantly enhance your video content creation, enabling you to produce engaging and high-quality shorts effortlessly for platforms like YouTube and TikTok. This tool is a game-changer for marketers looking to quickly adapt and share trending content.
PLUS, don't forget to focus on building relationships. Your social media audience values relationships.
Your company's website is one of your greatest digital marketing assets. If anything, it's one of the first marketing assets you need to build because it will drive your inbound strategy. We wrote a blog about that here.
The entire purpose of my company’s website is to capture high-value leads.
Almost every web page includes a call-to-action. It could be a link to opt-in to my email newsletter or download a piece of content like worksheets, how-to guides, or infographics. It could also be a redirect to a sales page or some other related article that my readers would be interested in checking out.
Having an established website and using cookies allows us to track where leads originate. Did this customer come from social media, a podcast, Amazon, an affiliate link, or one of my campaign ads?
For more perspective, G2 experts have emphasized the value of data visualization tools that can play a key role in making digital marketing assets more engaging and easier to understand.
This gives us invaluable insight into our customers and the management of our assets.
So make sure you include digital marketing in your marketing strategy and invest in a lead-generating website. It's money well spent.
Every business process needs to be mapped out. Your team needs to know what to do at every stage of a campaign, customer service, sales process, team management, employee onboarding, and much more. These processes make scaling your business and delivering a consistent experience simple.
And consistency is key to customer retention. If they never know what to expect, you'll dramatically reduce your customer lifetime value. Creating your systems doesn't need to be hard. We go into detail on how to build a world-class business system here.
Just know that your system needs to include:
Remember, systems are valuable to you, the owner, your management team and employees, customers, and investors. It's IP they're willing to spend millions of dollars on to own.
It's estimated that in 2026 U.S. adults spend 60% of their daily screen time watching video content, so it's essential that you leverage video content to disseminate your company's message.
But you can also use video creatively. It can be used for more than just marketing campaigns. For example, we use video to:
But I've also seen companies create video brochures, which I think look super slick.
Best of all, you don’t need a high-tech camera or lighting and sound system. Not initially. All you need is your phone. It's better to have video content that isn't super polished than to wait around until you have the budget for video equipment.
So if you want to be seen as an authority in your industry, you need to add video content to your list of marketing materials.
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Cornerstone content is any piece of content that you use to build your brand authority and get prospects to self-identify. It could be a checklist, how-to guide, template, framework, report, or ebook. It's a free asset that prospects will barter their contact details for to acquire.
White papers, reports, case studies, free trials (software), and ebooks are some of the most popular cornerstone content your company can have.
For Lean Marketing, our cornerstone content is our founder Allan Dib's bestselling book, The 1-Page Marketing Plan and the 1PMP framework. Every company needs to include cornerstone content as a major part of its marketing strategy. It's an asset that will bring in leads year after year. It's also a great way to get featured in magazines, on podcasts, blogs, whatever.
Read this blog to learn more about how to create cornerstone content.
Every company needs to invest in content marketing and every website needs a blog. It's just one of those marketing assets you need. But writing articles for the sake of creating content is a waste of your time.
Your blog posts need to be search engine optimized (SEO) and human-friendly. So many companies get this wrong. As much as you want to write for search engines, people will be reading your articles at the end of the day. If it's poorly written and keyword-stuffed, your target audience will bounce.
As a marketing asset, your content should bring the desired results: improved visibility, higher rankings for relevant keywords, better user engagement, new leads, conversions, etc. To check the effectiveness of blog posts and find any existing optimization issues, you should run a regular SEO content audit, which helps identify the best-performing articles and those that need to be updated.
There's a newer layer to this too. People are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews their questions directly instead of clicking through search results. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is about writing your content so those tools can actually pull a clear answer out of it, direct answers near the top, questions phrased the way people actually ask them, FAQ sections that stand on their own. It's not a replacement for SEO, it's the same discipline pointed at a newer set of readers.
I've written blogs that still bring in new leads months or years after they're published (including this one). Sure, I've had to optimize and update them slightly, but apart from that, I've invested very little time and energy into these key posts.
We go into detail about how to craft articles that rank, but here's a quick summary.
Your blog post needs to include:
It also needs to be relevant, deliver value, create interest, and help the reader get a result. And again, consistency is key. Your brand needs to be posting new blogs at least once a month.
If you need help optimizing your blog, check out Page Optimizer Pro. I’ve used this tool to optimize many of my blog articles and they rank as a result. You’ll get a report that looks a little something like this.
Now you just need to add in the missing keywords. It’s that easy.
You want to think of your email list as an asset that gets more valuable over time. If you do it right, your audience comes to know you, like you, and trust you more over time...and some of them will want to do business with you.
But to build this marketing asset, you need to create trust, provide value, and most importantly, give more than you take. Because as soon as someone feels like all you do is take, they'll opt-out or ignore you.
So let’s put yourself in their shoes.
After a bit of searching in Google or AI, someone arrives on your website and sees something they need. Maybe it's a checklist, framework, how-to guide, free trial, whatever.
They know this could be the solution to their problem, BUT they've been down this road before. In the past, they've signed up for freebies only to be bombarded by endless promotions.
They're hesitant, cautious, and skeptical about opening up their inbox to you.
So be different.
As they begin to read your email, they're looking for the same red flags as before. But you know better. Instead of hitting them with a hard sell, you offer them value, entertainment, opinion, and education.
Remember, you want to build an asset rather than destroy trust. And, of course, when the time is right for them, you'll be the person they trust to take the relationship further and potentially become your client.
If you'd like to learn more about building an email asset, check out this article. It goes into detail on how to nurture your list via email, including a template based on our high-performing nurture sequence that you can steal.
Consistency.
I've mentioned this before, and I'll mention it again. Every marketing asset you create needs to be consistent in the type of images you use, the tone of voice, messaging style, font, colors, etc. Getting this right requires management, or more importantly, a brand style guide.
A good brand style guide will include your logo and how to use it. For example, how much white space to leave around the logo, when to use a plain white logo and when to use the full-color version.
It'll also detail your company's visual direction, the images that are appropriate for your brand and look/feel you want to convey in your marketing campaigns.
It'll list your brand font, as well as the font size and color for headlines, subheadings, headers, hyperlinks, bold text, body copy.
Here's an example of a brand style guide that you can use when building your own brand.
Without a marketing strategy, you just have tactics (ads, social media posts, landing pages). Essentially, you have a campaign without any goal or direction. And randomly investing in marketing without a roadmap is a recipe for disaster or a chance to blow a ton of money.
Now, if you don't want to do that, you need a plan.
Think of your marketing strategy as the foundation for everything you do in business. It outlines:
This plan is crucial to the success of your marketing. If you need a fillable template, get it below:
Just tell us where to send yours below.
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If you're looking to get into coaching or build your personal brand, you need an ebook. Practically every mentor or consultant our team has interacted with with has written an ebook.
An ebook the ultimate business card. It serves as an introduction to who you are, what you do, and why you're the right choice.
Allan has sold over 500,000 copies of his ebook for The 1-Page Marketing Plan. And through it, he's been invited to speak at conferences all over the world, been interviewed on podcasts and radio shows, and landed many clients, all while growing our email list by thousands every month.
Having read his book, they’re already familiar with our team's methodology and Allan's background. He's established credibility upfront and built trust.
Most clients come to Allan asking to be coached. We don't have to go out hunting for them, and that's a far better way to do business.
Allan shares tips on how to write your book here.
Internal assets are for your team only, things like training manuals and onboarding processes. External assets are built to attract customers, like lead magnets, landing pages, and blog content.
Your website. It's what captures and directs leads from every other asset you build, so it needs to exist before the rest of your marketing has anywhere to send people.
Track it against a specific KPI, opt-ins, conversions, or leads generated, and review it regularly. An asset that isn't measured can't tell you whether it's paying off.
Remember, it's not just about creating marketing assets. The management of these assets is equally important. Just like your employees, you need to track their performance. Are they doing what you need them to do? And the only way to be sure is to know your data.
There was a time that we discovered that our biggest constraint wasn't lead generation It was conversion. So our team went through every email, web page, and our entire sales process and made optimizations.
We wouldn't have known what to prioritize without a clear view of the data (and an iron-tight infrastructure that would allow for it).
Start building your social presence. Invest in SEO, AEO and digital marketing. And good luck as you build your marketing assets.
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