If you’re a chief experience officer (CXO) at a large company, proper digital asset management can help you deliver stellar experiences to your customers across their customer journeys.
Since providing prospects and customers with valuable content and positive interactions is the key to superb experiences, managing all these communications is a must. No matter where your customers are on their journey, they need to hear a consistent message that communicates your value proposition wherever they go online.
What Are the Benefits of Using Digital Asset Management Software?
The right digital asset management (DAM) system can make that job a whole lot easier. Digital management systems store and organize all a company’s digital assets across the enterprise. Those assets can include images, videos, graphs, audio files, PowerPoint presentations, emails, web content, social media posts, and other communications, both customer-facing and internal.
Effective digital asset management systems use metadata to categorize these assets by topic, position along the buyer’s journey, version, keywords, type of content, access permissions, pain points, and other significant categories.
The benefits such storage and searchability bring include:
- Cutting costs: With a DAM system, you can easily find and reuse assets, such as images, graphs, and infographics, saving the time and money it takes to create or purchase new assets.
- Speeding up content production: Instead of wasting time looking for the latest version of an asset, your teams can access it immediately with digital asset management software. Additionally, they can quickly find templates and routine responses to customer inquiries, allowing them to spend more time personalizing communication by filling in the blanks.
- Streamlining asset distribution: Other teams often need to access marketing assets. For instance, sales teams might want to send a white paper or a link to a blog post to a prospect to answer their questions. Or, a support team member might like to provide a customer with a video that shows how to troubleshoot an issue. With a DAM system, they can simply search for the asset by topic or pain point and find it quickly.
- Enabling teams to repurpose or update content quickly: To perform well in searches and provide up-to-date information to their audience, content teams often need to refresh blog posts, videos, and other web content at the end of their content lifecycle or repurpose well-performing content into different content types. With DAM software, they can spend less time hunting for these assets and more time revising the content.
- Access control: Only specific teams and personnel should have access to confidential or sensitive assets. With a digital asset management system, you can limit access to only those who need it.
- Maintaining a single source of truth and a consistent brand message: Without the capacity for version control, your teams might have difficulty tracking down the latest version of an asset. However, if your DAM has version control, like Canto, it’s easy to keep your messaging on point across the enterprise.
- Avoiding the email black hole: With all the approvals, edits, and revisions your content teams need, messages can get lost in the shuffle. Even using tools like Slack can result in missed messages during content collaboration or other tasks. With a DAM that integrates with your content platform, though, you can collaborate and communicate right on the platform where your teams create content.
- Keeping your assets secure: Today’s cloud-based DAMs employ the highest degree of security, including two-factor authentication, to keep your digital assets safe from hackers or other criminal elements but easily accessible to those who need them. Definitely beats file folders – and even hard drives, which can develop errors over time.
- Simplifying your teams’ workflow: With a cobbled-together approach to content creation, communications, and storage, your teams have to switch gears mentally as they move from system to system. If you’ve ever accidentally typed @ColleaguesName into an email after you’ve just finished a long Slack session (I have!), you know how awkward using multiple applications can be. With a DAM system, you can handle every task in your workflow under a single “roof.”
- Enabling cross-departmental collaboration: The ability to communicate with others during content creation can also extend to teams outside CX and marketing when you have a DAM. Instead of walking down the hall or searching for Sally in Engineering’s cell phone number when one of your team members needs to explain how your new product works, they can simply message her as they write.
What Should I Look for in a Digital Asset Management Platform?
Before you start looking for a digital asset management platform, you need to assess your needs to help you narrow down your search.
- First, estimate the number of digital assets you have so you’ll know how much storage you need.
- Next, list the file types you need the platform to handle.
- Determine how you will migrate your assets.
- Plan a metadata strategy beforehand, so the organizational process is in place before you deploy.
- Finally, think about your current workflows as you shop. Will the DAM platform accommodate your old workflows, or does the new system open up new roads to more streamlined ways of doing work?
Once you’ve settled these issues, look for DAM platforms that offer demos or, even better, free trials. As you’re trying out these new systems, evaluate their performance in the following categories:
- How intuitive is the DAM’s user interface? Consider your teams’ familiarity with technology. If they’re not tech-savvy, make sure that even your resident technophobe will find it easy to learn to use.
- Does it make your teams’ work go more smoothly? Although you can expect some adjustments when adapting to new software, the DAM should show promise in streamlining your workflows. Make sure you bring in other teams that will use the software on the free trial or demos, such as your content, sales, and support teams.
- Do its features match your needs? Look at how its hierarchies are organized, its filtering and search capabilities, metadata management capabilities, and its capacity for notifications and messaging during collaboration. If you need any specific capabilities, such as two-step authorization for security purposes, be sure to ask the vendor’s sales team and confirm it with your own research.
- Will it have a favorable benefit-to-cost ratio? First, determine how much time and effort the software will save you and translate that into a dollar amount. Then, compare that to the cost of the software. Even if buying the software might stretch your departmental budget, a sizable benefit-to-cost ratio might convince the other executives on the board to fork over a bit more to save money and generate more revenue in the long run.
- Will it integrate with your content platform? Since your content marketing teams will also use your DAM, you’ll want it to integrate easily with your content platform. Otherwise, you’ll be going back to the cobbled-together approach that drove you to a DAM in the first place.
Do We Really Need a Content Marketing Platform If We Have a DAM?
While a digital asset management system is a valuable tool for searching and storing a broad range of files, a content marketing platform is a must for devising these experiences for your brand’s customers and prospects. With a content platform like DivvyHQ, you can ideate, plan, schedule, amplify the reach of, and analyze the results of every piece of content your teams create.
With DivvyHQ’s dedicated content ideation area, robust metadata management, and content analytics customized to your company’s exact needs, you can refine and re-refine your communications until they reach into your prospects’ hearts and turn them into loyal customers for life.
And, even better, it integrates with Canto, one of the finest DAM platforms for enterprise brands.
Don’t take my word for it, though. Try it for yourself absolutely free for 14 days. Start your free trial today!