At our Vermont-based company—Sugar Bob’s Finest Kind—our small team must maintain key relationships with retail partners across the country. For a relatively small business, we actually have an outsized number of SKUs to keep track of, from our signature Smoked Maple Syrup to an ever-expanding range of maple-sweetened products (like habanero maple sriracha).

We support our product SKUs with 1000s of digital assets, like product images, lifestyle shots, and branding, which are all critical for marketing campaigns, retail listings, and PR. These assets have to be continually updated for accuracy, readily available for our creative agency partners, and easily deployed in digital campaigns and marketing events.

Originally, our legacy approach to digital asset management made communications with our retailers, creative agencies, and media increasingly chaotic—until recently. This is the story of how we modernized our asset management at Sugar Bob’s, and how the efficiency we’ve gained will benefit us for a long time to come.

Our “system” was no system

Where did we store the 1000s of marketing assets tied to our product lines? In short, all over the place: on Dropbox, Google Drive, computer hard drives, and even across piles of paper stacked up on desks waiting to be scanned. Needless to say, things were getting chaotic. We had to spend a lot of time communicating with external partners and it wasn’t always easy to fulfill their requests for assets. That’s because we had no centralized, single source of truth to ensure that the materials we were sending to partners were actually the correct and most up-to-date assets.

As a growing brand with an expanding customer base (some may say it’s more like a fanbase!), we understood the importance of presenting our brand with consistency and polish across our marketing and PR efforts. Our need to maintain strong relationships with our retailers and avoid embarrassing and time-consuming errors—such as sharing the wrong assets or product information—gave us all the more incentive to modernize our asset management strategy. Change can be intimidating, but the time had clearly come.

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Digital transformation combining DAM and PIM capabilities

With the goal of creating a single source of truth and ensuring easy, fast,  and accurate delivery of digital assets and product information to our external partners and retailers, we explored various options to support our digital transformation. Ultimately, we enlisted the Marketing Delivery platform from Image Relay (a fellow Vermonter, as it turned out) for the technology’s ability to combine digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) within a singular repository.

With our new platform in place, our team immediately began to realize the benefits of replacing our previous chaotic situation with a simple and intuitively designed approach to organizing assets and information. For our small staff, the sudden ability to (confidently) find the latest version of any asset immediately freed up invaluable bandwidth and put more time back into their days. It’s now easy for our team to share secure access to needed marketing assets with retailers, agency partners, and media.

Our single source of digital truth also allows us to create set-and-forget export channels for our retailer partners, customized to their specific requirements. Within these channels, our partners can self-serve assets and product information, and always receive current and accurate materials—including our in-house product headers mapped to match each retailer’s needs. Freeing our employees not only from the previously cumbersome work of collecting those materials, but from any manual process whatsoever, has again unlocked invaluable time and allowed us to instead put resources toward business-growing pursuits.

A recent marketing initiative to create in-store shelf talkers demonstrates our new advantages as a brand. Whereas under our previous system, collecting the necessary digital assets and orchestrating the project would have involved a frustrating hunt for the right files and an untold number of emails, our current system made the process stunningly simple. We provided our designers with custom access to what they needed in our Image Relay Asset Library, and they went to work and delivered a great result. Easy as that. In the same way, our organized and well-populated brand asset library means that we’re now ready to respond much more rapidly whenever media opportunities arrive.

Punching above our weight

As we’ve discovered through this process, there is a tremendous increase in efficiency that comes with strong organization and seamless access to brand information and assets. It has empowered our team to multiply its impact. As a small but growing business, scaling requires that our employees have available bandwidth and the levers at their disposal to make huge achievements with the least effort.

With our current asset management strategy, Sugar Bob’s Finest Kind is able to stand on the same stage as much larger brands and hold our own. My advice for any business of our size that’s limited by disorganized assets is to pursue a digital transformation and the dividends we’ve realized.

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