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The increasing importance of brands means we are living in an age of content. Brands need interesting, engaging content for each stage of the customer journey. Content is needed to build brand awareness, to position and differentiate the brand, and to drive customer identification and loyalty. Every piece of content needs to radiate the brand’s values and communicate them clearly and consistently.

To deliver a consistent content strategy, your Marketing Team need to plan, create, organise, manage and distribute high-quality content across different channels. Speed to market with fresh content is increasingly important in the digital era.

As your brand grows the requirement for content will grow too, thereby increasing the volume and variety of marketing assets you will need to keep your content fresh and engaging. It is likely your Marketing Team will expand alongside an increase in stakeholders involved in the creation and distribution of your content.

Processes around collaboration and approval of content are becoming more complex. With the growing need for content comes the requirement for more efficient organisation and management of assets, the necessity to keep it all under control. Disorganized content slows Marketing Teams down: digital assets need to be available and easily accessible when they are wanted.

A DAM is the solution many Marketing Teams are choosing to organise their assets and manage their content strategies. A DAM brings efficiencies and agility to the content creation and distribution process. But what exactly is a DAM?

What is a DAM?

A DAM (Digital Asset Management) is a secure online system that centrally stores and organises a company’s digital assets and content and enable them to be used and reused efficiently. The core functions of a DAM are creation, management, collaboration, review, editing, approving, distribution, storing and measurement of assets. Digital content and assets include logos, images, presentation slides, PDFs, artwork, texts, videos, audio files, documents, photos, and other marketing material.

A DAM is often referred to as the single source of truth for the assets a company owns or has the right to use: if it isn’t in the DAM it doesn’t exist. The stakeholders that typically have access to a DAM include Marketing Teams, Creative Teams, and Sales Teams. External agencies, contractors and partner companies can be given access to designated areas of the DAM.

So, what are the main reasons your Marketing Team needs a DAM?

Top reasons why your marketing team needs a DAM

1. Simplifying processes
   A DAM simplifies processes around storing, creating, managing, producing, and deploying content. Process streamlining helps to avoid clutter and improves efficiency and productivity by reducing bottlenecks in creative and production workflows
2.  Brand consistency
   Brand and communications consistency is vital to engendering brand identification, trust and loyalty. Consistency of logos, colours, tone of voice all contribute to projecting brand values and how they are perceived. A DAM system will help to ensure the consistency of your brand across all channels and platforms, to your external and internal audiences.
3. Storage
   A DAM provides a central hub for all your company’s assets in one searchable location. Your Marketing Team and all stakeholders who work on your brand can have access to preapproved brand assets on a permissions basis.
4. Find assets faster
   Searching for assets that aren’t properly organised is more difficult and takes longer. Your Marketing Team can waste a lot of time looking for a specific file and may even recreate an asset they can’t find. A DAM’s sophisticated tagging protocols and filters will locate assets very quickly.
5. Sharing Marketing materials
   Sharing content through the DAM is more efficient than sending assets via email, portable devices, or file copying systems. Content held in a DAM can be made available, self-serve, to authorised stakeholders anytime, anywhere, on any device. Giving stakeholders access to files reduces the number of requests to your Marketing Team to send files and the subsequent emails about file size and type.
6. Collaboration
   Shared files can be reviewed and edited by colleagues and teams across the globe, which saves Marketing Teams considerable time and reduces the risk of inconsistencies undermining the brand.
7. Streamlined distribution
   Automation within a DAM can create personalised content that can be published on all your channels, such as social, advertising, print and outdoor. This is an important consideration with the continued growth and evolution of digital media across multiple formats, channels, and media.
8. Reusing and repurposing assets
   Content can be reused and repurposed. Users can search, locate, preview, share, repurpose, and republish content to different channels. For instance, your Marketing Team can reuse logos, charts and infographics across presentations, web pages, brochures, social media, and direct mail.
9. Cost and saving time
   Cost and time is saved by not having to recreate work that can’t be found and searching for material that isn’t readily available. Reusing materials in campaigns and across channels improves time-to-market. Collaborative and approval workflows reduce time spent on manual tasks.
10. Scalability
    As your brand grows the size of your and the number of stakeholders who need access to branded content is likely to grow too. The scalability of a DAM will future proof your brand growth strategy.
11. Governance and version control
    Without an efficient and accessible storage system, assets are often saved onto local drives and used after they have become outdated. Using out of date, potentially inaccurate, material can have serious legal consequences and can cause reputational damage to the brand. A DAM will provide access to the up to date version of your asset.
12. Compliance
    You can ensure that correct processes are followed in content creation; adherence to brand guidelines and the approval of content by the appropriate stakeholders, including Compliance and Legal. Expiry dates can be added to assets to alert the Marketing Team when a file needs to be reviewed, reducing the risk of an asset being misused.
13. Insight
    Asset tracking provides rich information that is important for your brand growth strategy. The Marketing Team can analyse how assets are performing i.e. which assets are most viewed and used, who is using them and where. Asset tracking over time will build a history that can be used to determine trends and provides useful market information.
14. Manage Digital Rights
    Rights information can be managed so that the Marketing Team and other stakeholders know which content they can use, when, where and how. The DAM lets you know when a license expires. You can protect your assets with terms and conditions, watermarking and other tools.
15. Templates
    Smart branded templates are a useful companion to a DAM. Stakeholders without design skills can create audience specific material with approved material from the DAM. Templates enable the Marketing Team to manage and protect the brand while allowing front-end employees to react to local market opportunities quickly.

If you would like to know how Perivan’s content distribution platform, Enable, with an integrated DAM can help you, please get in touch!