October 24, 2016 by Cooper Whitescarver
Marketing has evolved significantly during the past 15 years, and it encompasses more than ever before. Social media, packaging, brand experience, content generation, consistency and information are all under the umbrella of marketing now. Managing these channels while moving quickly to outpace competition, going to market quicker, and creating a consistent and quality experience can be a tricky proposition.
So how can you do it? Via a Digital Asset Management system (DAM).
You know the importance of digital. It allows for faster processes, improved tracking and all new insight that never existed previously. DAM solutions take on all these challenges and more.
Let's dive in, demystify DAM and focus on five ways you can use it to increase your speed to market.
Automation is your best friend when it comes to speed to market. However, simply increasing speed to market isn’t the only thing that it takes to beat out competition; it needs to be done with next-level quality. You can use DAM to help ensure work is vetted at each step by the appropriate stakeholders for your organization.
While digital workflows between various organizations can be similar, they almost always differentiate in some ways. Digital asset management allows for custom, powerful workflows to be constructed, allowing for quicker flow of data between cross-functional teams.
Within these workflows, you can use DAM to control who sees what and when they see it. This not only pertains to colleagues seeing assets when appropriate, but also when content can be released for public consumption.
The enterprise is no longer about working solo and calling it a day. It’s now all about collaboration and accountability among colleagues. So, consider empowering collaboration by making DAM the single repository for all work created (in progress and done).
Use DAM to preview assets, discuss and provide feedback right within the system. This approach means no more fishing through your email inbox for the latest asset or feedback — you always know you have the latest and right version when you need it.
Picture DAM at the center of all of the other systems you use —the “source of truth” where your work in progress and completed work lives and breathes. By integrating other systems into the DAM, data can pass back and forth, providing agility and valuable metrics to increase analytical intelligence.
DAM can tie into web content management systems, social networks, PIM, video solutions and more, allowing quick deployment of assets. That means your content reaches the customer faster.
Digital Asset Management Systems help enable you to present the right content, to the right users, at the right time. By retaining, tracking and reiterating existing assets, you can deploy more quickly. Employ DAM to see the campaigns you've used an asset in previously and which assets haven't been used yet.
Utilizing the same assets across multiple campaigns and providing access to assets to employees across the organization is key to increased speed to market and maintaining consistency in the messaging.
Relying on guesswork to decide which campaigns are working isn’t a long-term path to success. Instead, consider using DAM to help identify ROI for a campaign or an asset, have visibility into terms users are employing when searching for assets, see download counts for assets, and more.
Data is generated any time an asset exists. It doesn’t matter whether that asset is interacted with or not, the data associated with it provides insight into its value. A solid DAM tracks this data and has a strong analytics suite that allows your team to dig in and get valuable information. By integrating multiple systems into the DAM, your analytics potential grows even greater.
It's important to not only think of DAM as a marketing only solution. The most successful companies deploy DAM solutions in one department or branch and then expand its use across the entire enterprise.
So there you have it. Increase your speed to market by ensuring content can quickly move through approval workflows, setting up systems that allow for easy collaboration, building integrations between systems, being able to find and repurpose content, and analyzing the data. An increase in speed to market means quicker iteration, beating the competition, and increasing your ROI through agility.
