DAM: The Missing Piece in Your Digital Content Management Strategy
In the age of digital marketing, content is king. Some of a business’s most important assets, including branding and promotional materials, graphics, video content, and secure documents, are stored digitally. With so much content to work with, it can get tricky for a team to stay organized and maintain consistent messaging across all channels.
The solution? An intelligent digital asset management platform. Here’s what you need to know about digital asset management software ? how it works, why you need it, and how it will help streamline your content management strategy.
Understanding Digital Asset Management (DAM)
Digital asset management (DAM) is a system that stores, organizes, and streamlines digital content within an organization’s database. Most businesses today spend the bulk of their marketing budget on digital marketing. That means a lot of content generated by a lot of creators across a lot of platforms.
To understand the role of DAM, you have to know what a digital asset is and why it matters. A digital asset is any piece of digital content that belongs to your company. That can include:
- Graphics
- Videos
- Photos
- Animations, logos, or designs
- Written content
- Audio files
- Presentations
These assets were created exclusively for the company and therefore hold value ? they shouldn’t be stored just anywhere. That’s where DAM comes in.
A DAM platform doesn’t just securely store digital content. It also organizes assets through meta-tagging, allowing team members to easily sort, edit, compare, and combine all kinds of digital assets, taking the confusion out of content management.
Challenges in Digital Content Management
According to experts, around one-quarter of a company’s marketing budget should go to content marketing. That means a lot of content bouncing around the company ? in varying forms, touched by various creators. This creates challenges for the marketing team, such as the following.
Too Many Channels
A successful marketing campaign reaches your target audience through multiple channels. Those channels might include:
- Social media
- Blogs
- Website content
- Guest posts
- Podcasts
Digital content management means supervising all of these channels at once, while ensuring the content on each channel meets brand standards and is posted on schedule. The more content a company produces, the more complicated that process can be.
Staying Consistent
A lack of clear messaging and weak calls to action are among the main reasons why marketing campaigns fail. To send a strong message to your audience, it’s important to remain consistent across all channels. Your brand’s voice, values, and calls to action should be the same on YouTube as they are on your blog.
With different team members generating content for multiple platforms at the same time, staying consistent can be tricky.
Version Control Issues
Your digital content belongs to your company. It should be securely stored and monitored to prevent leaks, flaws in messaging, and other risks. Traditional content management strategies often fail to provide that crucial oversight.
Integrating DAM Into Your Content Management Strategy
The right digital asset management system will help you get organized, drive collaboration with creative teams, and streamline content management. However, those changes won’t happen overnight. Here are a few steps to successfully integrate DAM into your current content management strategy:
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Identify your needs: Define your team’s biggest challenges when it comes to content management and identify potential solutions.
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Find the best system: Evaluate DAM systems based on scalability, usability, and features to find the best solution for your content.
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Implement your DAM solution: Integrate your new solution into your content management operations, taking time to meet any implementation challenges.
Benefits of Incorporating DAM
Once you?ve successfully integrated your DAM solution into your content management strategy, you’ll see benefits to the oversight, organization, speed, and simplicity of your content management system.
Here are a few notable benefits of DAM systems:
Streamlined Workflows
Once your DAM system is integrated, all team members will have a platform to store, share, and collaborate on digital content. This helps to eliminate miscommunication and improve coordination, cutting out the hassle of back-and-forth emails in the content creation process.
Enhanced Consistency
With all digital content managed through a single platform, it’s easier to compare projects and ensure consistency across channels.
Increased Efficiency
The digital marketing industry moves fast. For companies to keep up, they must quickly produce and share new content. DAM systems help brands maintain their audience’s attention by making content management more efficient, allowing more content to be produced every day.
Future Trends and Innovations in DAM
In the increasingly digitized world of marketing, DAM isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s only getting better. The future of DAM is more accessible, and intelligent systems make content creation as seamless as possible.
Industry leaders are currently enhancing DAM platforms with artificial intelligence, making it easier to tag and sort through content. Cloud-based DAM solutions create more accessibility, boosting collaboration for remote teams. On top of that, the best DAM systems today can integrate with virtual reality, helping creators fully immerse themselves in their content and reach their audience on a more personal level.
As DAM systems continue to improve, they’re quickly becoming the best way to optimize digital content management.
