Learn what digital asset management (DAM) is and why it’s worth the investment.
Demand for digital content only continues to grow each year. And shoppers can certainly confirm that companies are churning out thousands of new products per month online. This volume requires brands to find a consistent, streamlined way to produce, store, and organize every image and asset to support their marketing efforts. A digital asset management (DAM) platform gives them a single source from which to manage and distribute their digital assets at scale.
DAM platforms are on most CMO wish lists if they don’t already have one. And the market for DAM is projected to grow from $3 billion in 2019 to $10 billion by 2026. But DAM is about more than just the software.
What is Digital Asset Management?
DAM emerged in the 1990s, quickly growing into a foundational piece of marketing software. With the rise of digital marketing, it wasn’t long before marketers needed more and more digital content to communicate with their audiences, represent their brands, and competitively position their offerings online.
When content volumes exploded, organisations laboured to contain large libraries of images, videos, and graphics. Personal devices, messy shared folders, random hard drives, CDs, you name it — content lived everywhere. As a result, marketing teams struggled to find and distribute their content for product launches, campaigns, and other important business initiatives.
To solve this challenge, DAM pioneers studied the information management techniques used by librarians and applied them to media files. Widen DAM was at the forefront of this initiative, launching as a web interface for an image database in 1996. Today, Widen is part of Acquia and is still a leader in the DAM space offering an enterprise content management platform built with DAM at its foundation.
What are Digital Assets?
Types of digital assets include:
- Images
- Video
- 360º photography
- Audio files
- Brand guidelines
- Documents
- PDFs
- Invoices
It's common for brands to rely on scattered hard drives, thumb drives, and basic cloud-storage tools to manage their digital assets initially. But many find they quickly outgrow these systems and need something more.
Types of Digital Asset Management:
DAM systems offer a range of capabilities to support different marketing practices. Understanding the challenges marketing teams need to solve will help brands find the right solution.
Here’s a look at types of digital asset management solutions that marketers commonly turn to.
- Brand management. Marketers use brand management software to ensure that colleagues and external partners represent the brand with consistent messaging and imagery. There are a wide range of brand resources that can be stored and managed in a DAM system.
- Marketing resource management. Marketing resource management, or MRM, is software that unifies marketing teams, processes, and technology in one system. An MRM solution helps businesses track, manage, and report on marketing operations to optimize resources and make processes more deliberate.
- Video management. Video asset management software supports the storage and organization of video files across their lifecycle from creation to archive. Because video files are often very large, this software needs to simplify how teams access, share, and publish such content.
- Product information management. Product information management, or PIM, software assembles and distributes specs, descriptions, and content needed to market and sell a product. It also helps brands prepare accurate, compelling product listings for their global e-commerce channels.
Ideally, an enterprise DAM solution supports these four forms of digital asset management. While different roles in an organisation will have different needs, a DAM system should empower everyone. With multiple teams using DAM for different purposes, which teams commonly benefit from a DAM system the most?
Who needs a DAM?
Anyone at a company who uses digital assets needs DAM – in short, everyone. And it’s not just the software; it’s also the digital asset management processes, guidelines, strategies, and tools that organisations with digital assets can (and should) adopt. For most brands, this means investing in a DAM system to streamline the process of storing, organising, and publishing all those files.
DAM systems help increase collaboration, create better customer experiences, and drive more revenue. A DAM platform enables a brand and all its partners to streamline its day-to-day content work. While everyone will benefit from DAM, some roles will benefit from DAM adoption more than others, including:
- Creators. Creative directors, brand managers, graphic designers, videographers, and any member of a creative and production team save time, streamline workflows, and create better work with a DAM system.
DAM tools empower them to organise their library of digital assets and find exactly what they need. The right system also streamlines the creative approval process – streamlining tasks like sharing proofs, getting feedback, and securing approval. Once approved, final creative can be automatically distributed to company-wide teams using self-service portals and share links. This helps eliminate messy email chains and gives everyone more time to do their work.
- Marketers. Once the creative assets are approved and ready, marketers use DAM systems to manage the media files and build effective campaigns, product launches, and content marketing initiatives.
DAM platforms give marketers an easily searchable library where they can look for assets by keyword, convert file formats on the fly, and publish content to multiple channels. They can also create custom portals for sharing assets (like a media kit) with agencies, distributors, retailers, and other collaborators. DAM analytics tools offer insights that help marketers prioritise their work and make smarter content investments.
- Agencies. Agencies use DAM software to protect their clients’ assets, simplify workflows, and access the most up-to-date content for use in campaigns and for building customer experiences.
Account managers, agency creatives, and other client team members can use a DAM system to search for content or access curated collections of assets via a portal. One of the biggest DAM benefits for agencies is that whenever they update a file in their system, it updates anywhere the asset is embedded online. This feature helps agencies create consistent brand experiences, saving them time (and billable hours).
- IT professionals. IT pros are the ones who have to do the hard work of integrating marketing technology (martech) tools into a cohesive stack. DAM systems give them a solution that reduces redundancies and improves collaboration between systems and teams.
A DAM platform provides a central hub that can power all of a brand’s go-to-market technologies with content. With pre-built integrations and APIs, IT teams can connect their DAM solution to other systems – including content management, sales enablement, marketing automation, social media, customer relationship management (CRM), and more.