Marketing Assets and Marketing Channels: The Critical Difference

Marketing assets and marketing channels have separate purposes—and you need both to succeed. Here’s why.

Marketing assets and marketing channels are inextricably linked. Further, you need both.

Yet they are entirely different in ways that matter vitally to your marketing success.

Marketing Assets Defined

In FrogDog parlance, a marketing asset is something static to which your marketing channels drive your target audience. Assets give people something they want—and something you want them to have as you draw them through your marketing funnel into your sales funnel.

Assets include articles and white papers, research reports, websites and landing pages, webinars, charts and graphs and infographics, podcasts and videos, slideshows, tools and widgets, and more.

In some cases, assets serve as carrots—a white paper someone wants that gets him or her to give you contact information, for example. Yet many assets come essentially “free;” companies use most marketing assets to share information, encourage people to buy or call now, or to showcase their expertise and know-how.

Marketing Channels Defined

Marketing channels are the rivers that float people toward your marketing assets.

Without an asset, a channel doesn’t have anywhere to take someone. Yet without channels, no one will ever see the assets you’ve spent so much time and money to build.

So what count as channels? Channels include e-mail, social media, advertising, flyers, posters, billboards, direct mail—and so forth. Social media posts guide people to your website, advertisements promote your webinars, e-mail marketing promotes your articles. And so on.

Mistaking Assets and Channels: A Common Pitfall

If you just build it, they won’t come.

Build that website. Good work. Having that done—though it’s always a work in progress, don’t forget—is just step one. Now you need to build and nurture the channels you need to drive traffic to it.

Good for you on having that corporate LinkedIn page. Yet if you don’t create great information to post on it, no one will choose to follow it. And if the content you build doesn’t take the fans you’ve cultivated to one of your company’s owned assets, you’re wasting your time.

A big marketing folly is to assume an asset is a channel, and vice versa—and then to assume that having one of the two is all you need to achieve marketing success.

Building the Marketing Continuum

Not sure what you have, whether it all works together like it should, or where to get started building what you need?

You’re not alone. Contact the FrogDog team. We can help.