The difficulty of storing and managing digital assets is a pain that many companies are feeling right now and as a result, digital asset management (DAM) systems are a hot technology. But there’s a lot of confusion about what a DAM is and who can benefit from one. While a DAM can be used across the entire company, the department that should be able to prosper the most from a DAM is marketing.
While a DAM can simply work as a repository that allows access to the digital assets as needed, that is only the basic functionality of a DAM. The marketing team is in a key position to use a DAM for what it is intended: not only to store and manage assets but also to share and collaborate with those assets. Here are three common marketing challenges that a DAM can help companies solve:
When your content lives in silos it creates an enormous risk, even for major brands and companies. Type a quick search for any number of brands’ logos, and you’ll find a multitude of results. Oftentimes, even after a company has officially updated its assets, you’ll find recent blogs or campaigns that are still using old assets. If people within the company aren’t even clear on which logo to use, what impact will this have on potential customers?
In the digital age marketers are expected to manage shorter product life cycles while netting higher results. The passion, knowhow and tools are there, but when we manage assets and approvals through email chains instead of a single system that all users can easily access, workflows are interrupted and some projects may never actually get completed, despite the initial priority assigned to them.
It’s clear that a good DAM can help to alleviate many of modern life’s marketing woes, but utilizing your DAM effectively also means updating your strategy. Here are a few ways you can ensure your marketing strategy and DAM are aligning successfully:
Build supply chains of communication which link assets, people, processes and metadata to build and share knowledge. An article can be linked to metadata, infographics, images and text which can be used together or separately depending on the project at hand. Thinking holistically as you build out your DAM strategy will help to tie everything together in a meaningful way, as opposed to simply storing files.
