Customers’ expectations are rising and marketers are working to meet those expectations with personalized content at a growing number of touchpoints — from social to website to mobile app to drive-through menu, and even to virtual reality experience. It’s that need to maintain a compliant, on-brand experience that is leading more marketers to adopt or upgrade digital asset management systems (DAM).
Here are some of the ways a DAM can aid an organization:
- Better communication between in-house and freelance/contract workers.
- Improved distribution of assets to clients, partners or other outsiders.
- More efficient utilization of existing resources.
- Increased efficiency in the workflow for internal approvals.
- Faster conversion of assets into different sizes, aspect ratios and file types for different marketing applications.
- Higher efficiency on the front end, in the creation of brand assets, and on the back end, in the distribution of those assets to various martech and adtech systems.
- Easier compliance with changing brand standards and licensing terms.
- Improved branding consistency to the customer with an eye toward loyalty and retention.
- Ability to quantify the usage of each individual digital asset, and therefore track ROI on the cost of creation and distribution.
While these are all highly desirable capabilities, your organization may not need all of them. Deciding whether or not your company needs an enterprise-level digital asset management platform requires you to follow the same evaluative steps involved in any software adoption, including conducting a comprehensive self-assessment of your organization’s business needs, staff capabilities, management support and financial resources.
Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.
Use the following questions as a guideline to determine the answers:
If you use martech that features lightweight DAM features — like content marketing software, a digital experience platform or a web content management system — you may not need additional functionality, depending on the sophistication and geographic scope of your marketing operations.
Companies with complex brand standards and legal approvals processes — those that operate in a highly-regulated industry like insurance, for example — will want to ensure the DAM can enable and provide documentation of the necessary signoffs.
Prioritize the available digital asset management features based on your most pressing business needs.
C-suite buy-in and appropriate staffing are crucial to the effectiveness of any digital asset management platform. Increasingly, martech platforms such as DAMS are being managed by the CMO — and not the CTO or CIO. In either case, without the proper skilled human resources in place, the platform can end up becoming an expensive reservoir of untapped data with unfulfilled potential to increase revenue and improve customer experiences with your brand.
Different platform vendors provide different levels of customer service — from self-serve to full-serve — and strategic consulting services. It’s important to have an idea of where you fall on the spectrum before interviewing potential partners. Training is essential. If your organization chooses not to hire internal staff, then consider whether you need to use an add-on or third-party consulting services to effectively use the platform.
Many enterprises work with different partners for email, ecommerce, social media, paid search and display advertising. Investigate which systems the digital asset management vendor integrates with — whether natively or via API — and find out if they offer seamless reporting and/or execution capabilities with external vendors. If a connection can be made only through an API, ensure you have the internal or external resources to develop the necessary integration.
You want to know the specific holes in your current reporting that will be filled by additional functionality and, more importantly, you want to be sure that that extra information will drive better decisions and ultimately more revenue for your business.
Enterprise digital asset management platforms’ pricing can range from a few hundred dollars a year to nearly half a million a year. Examine your feature requirements closely, as modular pricing models mean vendors vary in their inclusion of some features as standard or add-on.
You should set your business goals for the digital asset management platform in advance to be able to benchmark success later on. Without them, justifying the expense of the platform or subsequent marketing campaigns to C-suite executives will be difficult.
Read more on digital asset management
What is digital asset management (DAM?)
Digital asset management platforms: A snapshot
What is it? Anyone who’s struggled to find a file on their computer or shared drive understands the pain of tracking down content. And when you consider the sheer amount of files you need to sort through when many versions are created to resonate with specific audiences, these tasks can feel overwhelming. Digital asset management platforms simplify these tasks by bringing all of your marketing content together.
Why are they important? Marketers are creating engaging content for more channels than ever before, which means the software used to manage these assets is gaining importance. What’s more, the communications between businesses and their customers are increasingly digital. Marketing content today is created in a wide variety of formats and distributed wherever consumers are digitally connected.
Why now? More than half of 1,000 consumers recently surveyed said they’re more likely to make a purchase if brand content is personalized, according to the Adobe Consumer Content Survey. Digital asset management platforms help marketers implement these personalization tactics. They also provide valuable insights into content interaction and the effectiveness of their assets.
Why we care. When those creating and using content aren’t near one another, having a central repository for assets is helpful. Finding the right content for your audience is made simpler when each version is organized in the same location. For these reasons and more, your marketing operations could benefit from adopting a digital asset management system.
About the author
Pamela Parker is Research Director at Third Door Media’s Content Studio, where she produces MarTech Intelligence Reports and other in-depth content for digital marketers in conjunction with Search Engine Land and MarTech. Prior to taking on this role at TDM, she served as Content Manager, Senior Editor and Executive Features Editor. Parker is a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since its beginning. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ and has also worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing. Parker earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
