What are the benefits of Digital Asset Management?
The benefits of Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions are that they enable organizations to manage assets from a central point. Manually managing an organization’s visual and creative assets can take a massive amount of time and resources. Spending valuable time searching for particular images, for example, and recreating those that can’t be found is hugely inefficient and costly. What’s more, a lack of adequate controls around who can access and modify those assets can put a brand’s consistency at risk. And, with no way of monitoring how assets are being used - and by whom - it’s impossible to know just how well they’re performing and the return on investment they’re delivering.
To solve these challenges, let’s take each of the above issues in turn and look at the five Key Benefits of Digital Asset Management to help overcome them.
1. Saving time
Diving through files and folders in search of a single asset is extremely frustrating, not to mention inefficient. According to McKinsey, employees can spend up to a fifth of their time just looking for internal information. This is a time drain, not only on the employee in question but on their colleagues, whose workflows will be interrupted until that asset is found.
But with everything stored in one place and optimized for quick search, a DAM solution makes it substantially easier to find assets. File types are grouped together so it’s possible to locate and share specific assets within a matter of minutes, freeing up valuable time for more important tasks. More advanced DAM solutions can even automatically tag images for faster filtering and search.
2. Reducing costs
When you consider the rate at which new assets are created in order to meet the demands of an organization’s marketing effort, it’s perhaps unsurprising that some of this content can be misplaced. Recreating lost assets can be expensive, as well as time-consuming.
Once an asset is stored in a DAM system, though, it’s secure. That asset will can be quickly and easily retrieved whenever it’s needed. And, with every asset safely stored in one place, it’s far easier to revive and re-purpose previously successful content.
3. Maintaining control
It can be easy for a brand to lose control of its assets once they’ve been distributed. This can impact a number of factors, including workflow efficiency, brand consistency, and even issues such as the confidentiality of IP.
A DAM solution offers granular control over who has access to an organization’s assets. Governance tools enable administrators to grant different privileges to different users, restricting editing, download or approval rights to certain users or roles, while granting greater permission to others.
4. Delivering quality and consistency
Consistent messaging is vital in any marketing campaign. An outdated logo or the wrong copy in execution can have a detrimental effect on an overall campaign’s effectiveness. For an organization working with several different agencies or partners across different marketing channels, there’s a real risk of this happening. It’s critical for product information, too. When researching a product, shoppers that come across outdated or inaccurate assets might be less inclined to make a purchase.
A DAM solution can avoid these risks. A single inventory, containing only the latest brand-approved assets and content, accompanied by explicit guidance on how and where those assets can be used, means brands need never worry that their messaging and product information is anything less than consistent and accurate.
5. Measuring performance
Finally, it would seem there’s little sense in spending vast amounts of time and money creating a marketing campaign, its composite assets, and the product content they’re designed to promote if there’s no way of measuring their effectiveness. Once a campaign is in the wild, it’s essential to track its performance and measure how well it resonates with its intended audience.
A good DAM solution will include or can be integrated with, analytics tools, allowing brands to track where their content is being used, and by whom, which enables them to measure how that content has performed. By knowing what works, and what doesn’t, a brand can then adapt its strategy and optimize its assets to the greatest effect, ultimately leading to a greater return on investment.
As a central resource for the storage, management, and distribution of approved, on-brand digital marketing and product content, a DAM solution will address many of the challenges faced by brands today, allowing them to run efficient, consistent, and effective marketing campaigns while maintaining control of the total brand experience.
