Digital asset management platforms: What are they good for?

DAM can play a vital role in your marketing organization, unifying online and offline marketing channels and leading to more efficient marketing resource allocation.

Any good marketing team is awash marketing collateral, blog copy, images, audio files and videos. In fact, the glut of materials produced these days has made digital asset management platforms a particularly important piece of martech for enterprise (and SMB) stacks.

That’s because digital asset management can play a vital role in your marketing organization, unifying online and offline marketing channels and leading to more efficient marketing resource allocation.

As our report, Enterprise Digital Asset Management Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide, shows, the specific benefits of using a digital asset management platform include – but are not limited to – the following:

• Improved communication between in-house and freelance/contract workers. Some of the DAM vendors profiled in this report offer specially designed interfaces for external creatives to submit their content and collaborate on needed changes and required versioning. Content in the creation/approval process remains accessible only to those involved at this stage, rather than being made available for deployment before it’s ready.

• Improved distribution of assets to clients, partners or other outsiders. Some of the DAM vendors profiled allow users to create “portals” customized for viewing and downloading by outside entities.

• More efficient utilization of existing resources. Appended metadata and search capabilities enable marketers to more easily find the right image or other asset for a campaign, without spending tedious hours flipping from image to image or watching video after video. This also saves time and resources that are often spent recreating something similar to an existing asset, because it couldn’t be found or the user wasn’t aware of its existence.

• Increased efficiency in the workflow for internal approvals. Many DAM providers offer — either as part of core functionality or as an add-on — workflow or project management tools, which allow for smoother collaboration and transparent movement of an asset through an approval process.

• Speed the conversion of assets into different sizes, aspect ratios and file types for different marketing applications. Though a file is uploaded to the DAM system in a particular format, many systems allow for automatic or manual cropping or editing within the system, as well as the conversion of the asset to different sizes or file formats as they’re downloaded or distributed for use.

• Improved 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 ad tech systems. Many DAMs integrate with content creation software, like Adobe’s Creative Cloud, and also connect (either through native connectors or APIs) to systems that distribute content directly to the customer, such as ad servers, marketing automation platforms or website content management systems.

• Easier compliance with changing brand standards and licensing terms. DAMs allow for an expiration date to be set on assets, so they are no longer used after the licensing term for a particular asset expires. For example, if a contract with a particular celebrity spokesperson is not renewed, a DAM can take those assets out of circulation so they’re not used beyond the expiry date.

• Ease of presenting a more consistent brand face to the customer with an eye toward loyalty and retention. DAMs make it easier to enforce brand standards and distribute content so every customer interaction reinforces the brand values marketers intend to convey. This is one of the key advantages of a DAM at a time where the number of devices and media outlets is larger than ever, making it more difficult to maintain consistency among the assets designed for consumption in various places.

• Ability to quantify the usage of each individual digital asset, and therefore track ROI on the cost of creation and distribution. DAMs enable marketers to track the distribution and efficacy of marketing assets, which allows them to invest more in the most cost-effective content creation and distribution methods. Some systems are able to automatically track this data, while others simply provide the data that allow marketers to make these calculations themselves.