Keeping on top of marketing campaign assets can be a mighty task at the best of times, but managing them across global teams is an even greater challenge. As the capacity for organisations to reach consumers across the globe expands ever further, and the number of channels available to engage them continues to grow, the problem of effectively managing digital assets has become more prevalent than ever before.
Consider the following statistics:
- It is believed around 90% of companies meet bottlenecks when handling digital content
- 41% of companies have over 1,000 folders of sensitive assets accessible to anyone
- Up to 19% of an employee’s time is spent searching for files
- 15% of companies’ documents are misplaced, while a further 7.5% are kept despite being obsolete
These figures and more illustrate the overriding issues that many companies are having when trying to stay in control of their assets.
From the effort wasted on reproducing or duplicating content due to misplaced or lost files, to the time it takes to produce and supply tailored assets for specific markets, the inability to track and manage assets can be a significant drain on any organisation’s resources.
A DAM system can go a long way in helping organisations avoid and overcome these issues and become far more efficient and effective at managing their ever-growing collection of digital assets. Moreover, a DAM that’s integrated into a BAM portal becomes an even more powerful tool.
What is DAM?
DAM (Digital Asset Management) is software designed to centralise all of an organisation’s digital assets into one straightforward, spacious location. Be it documents, images, videos, photos, audio or any other digital medium, these assets are held in one place to remove the risks of content going missing or being unnecessarily duplicated.
Fundamentally, implementing a DAM solution is done with the goal of optimising the production, management and mobility of a company’s digital assets. Using one should help employees locate the media they need for upcoming campaigns without any hassle, eliminate doubts about lost content and preserve brand consistency across all locations.
In fact, it is estimated that the average DAM system can save a company over £150,000 in as little as five years, while well-managed, consistent brands are worth up to 20 times as much as those that do not invest in controlling their digital library.
This is why DAM makes up a key component of our BAM by Papirfly™. In order to help our clients harness the full potential of their brand, it is critical that they can maintain, access and share their assets in one place, ensuring there is little-to-no room for inconsistencies to creep in or wasted resources spent on unnecessary content.
Nevertheless, while a DAM solution is ideal in principle, it is vital that you select one that meets your specific needs. While these will vary from company to company, below we’ve identified three critical considerations that you should keep in mind when looking to introduce this powerful software into your organisation.
3 important considerations for your DAM solution
1. Make navigation and user experience a priority
First, it is vital that your DAM solution presents an excellent user experience for your employees and any other users. Because, as we’ve identified earlier, the primary goal of any DAM is to make it easier for your team to find and use the resources they need to support the creation of marketing collateral. If the UX makes this challenging, the DAM is not working as it should.
In addition, a poor user experience will make it more likely that your employees avoid using the DAM, instead relying on less effective but user-friendly means of storing assets, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
A good user experience will start with how people navigate the system:
- How intuitive is the structure, hierarchy and navigation of the software?
- Does the system allow you to tag and categorise assets using terminology you and your team are familiar with?
- Can you quickly filter resources by a particular tag or category to help you find the asset you’re looking for faster?
- Is the display and user interface straightforward and intuitive to users?
- Is it easy to share assets with your teams in a variety of locations?
- Can the system be translated into multiple languages to support its use by your teams across the globe?
- Does it offer any indication if an asset has already been uploaded to the system to remove the risk of duplication?
- Is it easy to operate across multiple devices, including mobile and tablets?
- Can you export digital assets into a variety of file formats?
These are just some of the questions you should ask about any prospective DAM solution to ensure it provides you and your team with an effective user experience. Without this, it will inevitably be ignored and underutilised, meaning you miss out on the ROI that other organisations gain from this kind of software.
Think of it as a library – if its filing system is too complicated or difficult to digest, it’s unlikely you’re going to visit it again.
However, the user experience also depends a great deal on how you as an organisation manage your assets when the system you’ve selected is implemented. While it can do a lot, it requires those responsible for the solution to manage it professionally and prudently.
This includes ensuring that all labelling is applied consistently and in terminology that your global teams can recognise, that any resources specific to a particular location or outlet are clearly marked, and that assets that are grouped together are done so for a specific reason.
When the user interface offered by a high-quality DAM aligns with the effective organisation of the team operating it, then the management of your digital assets can reach a whole new level.
2. Work on a global and local level
Secondly, there is a need to differentiate between digital assets that are globally available, and resources that specifically cater to a particular market or location. A problem that our clients identify before working with Papirfly is that the time and resources required to produce dedicated campaigns for a particular location mean these often aren’t worthwhile.
Yet, as we’ve explored in other articles, localised marketing is essential to effectively engage your audience at a deeper, personalised level. Giving this attention can help you build stronger bonds with the various communities your brand interacts with and foster customer loyalty. Remember: 71% of consumers prefer advertising tailored to their situation.
How can a DAM solution help you achieve this? By establishing a central hub for all on-brand digital assets and making this accessible via the cloud to employees based around the world, you can provide them with the resources they need to create and share assets for localised campaigns, rather than conserving time and resources by sticking to a global, universal focus.
Through your DAM system, employees should be in a position to access content that is translatable to the required language and contains imagery that is culturally appropriate, which means you can create hyper-targeted local campaigns quickly to work alongside your global branding – all while ensuring your overarching brand messaging is never compromised.
Of course, BAM by Papirfly™ takes this a step further in providing teams, regardless of their design experience or expertise, with an intuitive creation suite and intelligent templates. This means that, once they have access to the assets available on the DAM, they can then immediately use these to edit or create new, tailored assets for an upcoming campaign, without the financial or time burden of bringing in a specialist.
3. Don’t give everyone access to everything
Thirdly, let’s discuss accessibility. While one of the key benefits that a DAM solution offers is sharing assets to employees worldwide, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll want every asset to be available to every person at all times.
This can lead to human error and inconsistencies creeping into your process. For instance, say someone mistakenly selects an asset designated for the incorrect country or campaign for a separate project; this would at a minimum be time wasted on developing an unusable asset, or at worst be shared to your audience and potentially hurting your brand’s reputation.
To prevent this from happening, it’s vital that any DAM software you implement has measures in place to assign administrators and lockdown certain assets for particular employees or locations. By adding this extra level of security, it gives you greater assurance that your assets are governed and nothing off-brand will be broadcast across any of your platforms.
In addition, setting these administration levels will make it possible that not everyone can upload or delete files, or can only do so when permission is granted. This helps add another layer of protection from duplicated or low-quality content reaching being stored within the library, which again goes further to protect your brand’s reputation.
Our BAM portal expands on this with an “add to basket” feature. This allows the user to select multiple files from different sources within the DAM and download these at one time, speeding up the process for people to access the resources they need.
Finally, check with your DAM provider if the system offers a way to monitor who is adding, sharing and editing assets. This ensures you have a record of any changes that have been made to your library of assets at any given time, so nothing ever has to slip under the radar. Plus, if it carries stats about how often particular assets are used, this can help marketing teams determine the ROI of these materials.
Take control of your digital library
We hope this will help you in your efforts to properly manage the vast array of digital assets that any organisation needs to have to hand nowadays. With the potential for assets to be mislaid or misused a high as ever due to the assortment of channels that organisations need to have a presence on, having a DAM solution that meets these considerations in particular is more crucial than ever before.
With that in mind, our BAM solution is geared with a dedicated, intelligent DAM, making it easy for you to store and locate an unlimited number of assets, categorise these appropriately and present them in the right format and optimal resolution.
However, BAM is much more than digital asset management, empowering users to also:
- Create high-quality, on-brand assets through an intuitive, powerful creation suite
- Educate your employees worldwide on the values and guidelines behind your brand
- Manage campaigns with a birds-eye view of all materials used at a given time
If you’d like to know more about how you can activate your global brand, request a demo or speak to our team today.