Your Essential Guide to Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems for Business
Why Digital Asset Management Matters
The web content your company will be forced to manage will grow exponentially with the rise of content distribution channels. A Venture Beat article from 2012 points out that a digital native workforce is the future, and millennials will not tolerate working for companies that fails to deliver digital tools and assets in a frictionless environment.
That means that you’ll need to find, organize, use, and repurpose content rapidly to keep up with the demand and keep costs down. Yet you don’t even have the financial resources — or the time — to keep up on your own. Digital asset management systems (DAMs) can do the work for you at a fraction of what you’d pay to handle such work in-house.
With a digital asset management system, you can make better use of your content across departments and teams as well as create a consistent brand image — an important ingredient in a growing business’s success. Your marketing team will be able to tell at a glance what works, leverage that advantage, and leapfrog beyond the competition with better control over your company’s digital assets.
More IT involvement frees other departments to achieve more: When your IT department enables and manages a cloud-based DAM, your marketing and other teams can convert and store files more quickly, with less bandwidth and less time spent. They’ll get the content into the hands of consumers and can move on to their next challenge without manual requests and clunky workflows to slow them down.
Composite intellectual property comes under your control: With a DAM system, you’re in control of your intellectual property (IP). The photos, videos, fonts, design files, multimedia, and other assets that you’ve built up so carefully to establish and maintain your brand identity will stay safely under your control, says marketing expert Jason Arena in his August 25, 2017 article for CMSWire.com. Furthermore, your rights to use that property will remain in your hands, since a DAM system will neatly organize and attach all the IP data and usage rights via meta tags to the files and you can create user permissions for who can access certain files. Any type of documentation, too, will be more uniform and easier to train new people on with the comprehensive management that a DAM system can provide. Your legal team, too, will be able to respond more quickly to requests to approve marketing, recruiting, and other content.
Put your digital property to better use: With the automation available with such a system, you won’t put out content that clashes with previous content. Your company colors, logo, and format will remain the same across all channels. Your corporate image, therefore, is safe. Furthermore, through a digital management system’s ability to recognize images and logos, your teams can quickly access these key components of marketing and recruiting campaigns to attract qualified customers and quality employees.
APIs automate your digital management for even more efficiency: If you integrate an API (application programming interface) into your digital asset management program, it can help you transfer images, videos, and other digital assets by synchronizing the tagging process with a custom interface that automates the process. In some cases, it will also open up access to others who can use that content.
A/B content testing helps your marketing team discover more effective campaigns: With a digital asset management program in place, marketing teams can better leverage different types of content to deliver and test two messages against one another. This way they can look at the results that were obtained over a period of time and compare one campaign against another to see which one performed better.
Find a Digital Asset Management System That Will Grow with Your Business
Asset Growth
Before you consult with a digital asset management system provider, think about your needs. Which kinds of digital assets do you have? How do you want these assets to be organized? How do you plan to grow your inventory? What are the user types and permissions those user types will need? For instance, you may have several videos of your product at work, but haven’t recorded any webinars or online learning assets. When you look at a digital asset management provider, you need to take into consideration both your current inventory and your future plans to come up with a management strategy that will best allow you to control your digital assets as you grow your business.
Team Growth
As more assets are created over time, only a select few will deliver consistent, reliable value. Your team needs the ability to communicate effectively on the value of assets, and a DAM improves visibility into the value of your assets. Employees don’t want to use assets that don’t drive results; implementing a best practices DAM style will give them access to assets with proven value. This type of set up will go a long way toward employee satisfaction and team building. Plus it will end up providing more value and saving money.
Industry Leadership & Regional Impact
DAM’s adoption crosses industry lines as the proliferation of assets grows in response to the upward growth of social media for business. The DAM Market Size & Forecast Report 2014–2025 claims that customer-driven delivery models are creating a demand for content on products and brands that can no longer be ignored. Using a DAM system effectively for sales teams will push the brands who use them ahead of their competition.
The report points to market domination from North American companies, but outsourcing and emerging technologies in the Asia Pacific region are opening up the market to DAM solutions there as well.
Final Thoughts
Learning how to manage digital assets as a company grows using a digital asset management system that’s scalable, manageable, and affordable will create success across different departments and deliver ROI in the form of higher productivity and lower costs. Rather than multiple departments creating their own content repositories in their own storage systems (aka stuck in a silo), the content will exist in a central repository.
Team members will be able to access the system and use streamlined file search and retrieval features. The savings in recreating lost or misplaced assets alone will deliver ROI, but the returns on long-term productivity are the true drivers of DAM technology adoption.
If you’re thinking of implementing a DAM solution for your company, regardless of the size of your team, contact us today for a consultation on the best DAM systems out there or a customized solution for your exact needs.
