Managing Your Digital Content With DAM

As the digital world continues to barrage marketing teams with more data, enterprise-level organizations need to adapt and devise solutions to their digital content management systems. With digital media revenue expected to reach $292 million in the US alone in 2021, organizations need to understand how to implement and audit their digital media infrastructure.

Digital content management systems let organizations use the digital revolution to their advantage. They do this by automating tasks and connecting digital assets within a multichannel distribution platform.

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system categorizes, archives, and sorts digital assets under one, company-wide umbrella. Additionally, it helps marketers make informed decisions about distributing those assets to their target audiences and use them to reach broader markets.

With such an enterprise-level DAM, you can quickly and efficiently modify your marketing and advertising campaigns to target audiences worldwide in any language on any channel.

If you’re thinking about implementing a content management strategy for your organization, consider censhare. The solution removes any complexity stifling your workflows and promotes a seamless connection between multiple systems. This enables your staff with the tools they need to create and transform content that suits your target audiences.

What is Digital Media?

Digital media is transmitted as digital data, unlike traditional media such as print. A simple way to conceptualize this difference is that now humans and computers need to understand our media consumption and codify it in a way that marketers are able to control in one place.

Digital media transmits signals using satellites and binary numbers - 0s and 1s. It then translates this code into audio, video, graphics, text, and more. This makes it possible for your customers to consume your content in a consistent, omnichannel fashion, whether they’re interacting with your website, mobile app, or sales collateral.

But don’t fear. The machines aren’t taking over, and there are many benefits to this shift. For example, with more digital media outlets, scaling and expanding your business becomes more manageable with a DAM. You have more channels to distribute your advertising with consistent quality, and you can reach broader markets.

To put it simply, humans can’t manually meet the demands of digitized marketing. We need to automate tasks to fulfill consumer needs and free up time for creative problem-solving. That’s where digital media comes in. And that’s why having a DAM is essential to any organization with goals of creating a seamless user experience with brand consistency.

What is a DAM?

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution can include any technology that manages your digital media. The platform can then streamline, catalog, and communicate metadata across your entire organization, which keeps your omnichannel marketing campaigns running smoothly.

But there’s more to DAM than just these administrative and organizational benefits – especially as you add use cases over time.

How DAM Streamlines the Creative Process

Digital Asset Management not only streamlines a business’s internal workflows, it also facilitates the creative process along the way.

The platform ingests your files into an archive that makes it easy for anyone on your team or approved outside collaborators to locate. It also makes it easier for software to automate advertising and marketing tasks. This happens when you can manage digital files through their metadata.

As we mention earlier, Digital Asset Management is more than a web content management system. It can also automate tasks such as email marketing and decrease the time to market for all your content.

Evolution of Asset Value

Enterprise solutions help you accomplish smart, automated workflows by understanding the who, what, when, and why of your assets through the associated metadata. The platform will then make intuitive decisions about your digital assets that personalize your marketing content and target specific buyers.

When it comes to DAM, you need a solution that analyzes metadata and places your assets in the correct location so you can combine, personalize, and scale your advertising and marketing campaigns. You can’t do this manually. You need an effective content management software integration.

Where Does DAM Fit in the MarTech Stack?

When approaching your Digital Asset Management solution, avoid thinking of it as existing in another standalone system. The point of a DAM is to connect to multiple channels. Implementing an effective DAM is a two-part process that connects creation and ingestion with sharing and distribution channels.

For example, DAM should connect all of your photos and graphics, animations, banner ads, catalogs, and brochures with your marketing channels such as web, social media, TV, print, and mobile. To do this, your system:

• Imports assets
• Assigns meta-tags to assets
• Catalogs assets
• Versions assets
• Converts assets
• Realizes assets
• Archives assets
• Removes or deletes assets

It should do this in a manner that aligns with your marketing strategy and keeps your target markets in mind. For example:

• If you sell tangible products, your DAM solution should connect your product catalog information (think product information management or PIM for short).
• If you’re a media company, your DAM should connect your digital rights information.
• If you’re a creative agency, it should connect your creative project management or marketing resource management.

8 Tips for a Solid Enterprise DAM

You can implement an enterprise DAM solution whether you’re a 50-person organization or a global organization with 20,000 employees.

Here are 8 tips to forming an enterprise-level DAM solution:

1. Implement solid governance that places tough decisions in the hands of those at the top of your organization.
2. Create a clear direction and purpose for your employees on why and how to use the DAM.
3. Approach DAM as a platform, not as a product.
4. Understand that DAM is not a one-time solution or a band-aid to a current problem. It should aide your long-term vision and enterprise goals.
5. Maintain a north star vision for your DAM by having an onboarding plan. Everyone should understand what an asset is and the platform’s purpose within your organization.
6. Utilize DAM beyond the creative and marketing departments.
7. Align data across the DAM and other systems.
8. Focus on interconnectivity with other sources to create a multichannel distribution platform.

How Do You Build a Successful DAM?

When implementing your DAM, consider your end goals. How do you make your DAM an operational system of record (OSR) and a single source of truth (SSOT)?

Completeness: Your enterprise solution needs to be the single source of truth. Universal content management means you have a clearly defined, enterprise-wide asset management structure.

Accuracy: Your DAM needs to be error-free, adequately taxonomized, and fully compliant at all levels. This is particularly crucial for organizations that sell products such as pharmaceuticals.

Current: Effective DAM solutions archive assets and honor rights. It also uses the latest and most active versions of assets to make the most out of marketing and advertising campaigns.

Engaging: This is perhaps the most critical component of an effective DAM platform. It engages its users. Organization leaders can’t mandate adoption. Users adopt solutions when they find they’re better off using the solution than not using it.

Helpful: A DAM helps individuals working within an organization when it is convenient, intuitive, and accessible. Using a DAM should cut down your staff’s workload, not add to it.

Digital Asset Management FAQs

Here are a few questions you should ask yourself if you’re trying to decide whether your DAM solution manages your digital content correctly. Thinking through these considerations will help you continuously improve your DAM and integrate it better into your company infrastructure.

Is our DAM an OSR or SSOT?

Does your DAM provide a single location for all of your digital assets, or is it fragmented and incomplete? Examine whether you have a clear direction for your DAM.

How strong is adoption per audience?

Monitor adoption over time with your core and creative teams. Measure the end users’ sentiment by getting qualitative feedback. If end users aren’t embracing the DAM, it’s not a problem with your teams. It’s likely a problem with the system and its governance.

People use systems that help them do their job more efficiently. If your team is not embracing the DAM as a solution, it’s unlikely that the platform is making their job easier.

Are there clear deficiencies in our content management system?

If you discover deficiencies within your DAM platform, ask yourself what apparent deficiencies are present. These deficiencies can be, for example, delayed time to market due to slow approval processes or manual quality checks which are prone to human error. How can you implement a solution to these problems?

Where should we focus next?

Ask yourself whether you’re taking advantage of automated workflows and headless CMS. For example, censhare’s platform automates content creation and management components for you, so you don’t have to stress.

Conclusion: Managing Your Digital Content With DAM

Managing your digital content with a DAM can free up your time and help you to create a consistent brand experience. However, rolling out a DAM comes with its challenges. In order to get started on the right foot, you need to keep in mind the ultimate purpose of your DAM: to make the most of your digital assets. The way to do this is by connecting those digital assets to your marketing channels and promoting a company-wide adoption.

Of course, you can’t force user adoption among your employees. The solution has to speak for itself. You can accomplish this by turning your DAM into an operational system of record (OSR) and a single source of truth (SSOT) that is relevant to all stakeholders.

censhare provides enterprise-level DAM solutions for organizations of all sizes. The platform also offers modular systems so you can start by solving one or two key issues before growing your use cases over time.