DAM for Influencer Marketing: Maximizing Visual Impact
As social media evolves, influencer marketing collaborations between brands and online tastemakers have created unique opportunities for brands to connect with consumers on a more personal level. Speaking through the internet’s favorite creators, brands can reach larger audiences through sources those audiences both admire and trust. Collaborating with an influencer involves creating, editing, and approving multiple types of media for your brand and the influencer to share digitally. Digital asset management software eases collaborative media processes to keep workflows running smoothly and ensure the quality of the final product.
Introduction to DAM for Influencer Marketing
Digital asset management (DAM) is the process of creating, storing, organizing, accessing, and distributing all digital assets. This includes all documents, data, images, videos, and additional digital assets that a company owns and uses. A DAM platform is a tool that companies use to better manage and organize their digital assets, create better processes and workflows around asset creation and approvals, and distribute the final versions of assets to their intended channels.
Using DAM for influencer marketing helps brands maximize their visual impact by improving the processes behind image and video storing, editing, approval, and distribution. It makes content collaboration easier for all parties, which means finished influencer marketing campaigns can reach audiences sooner.
The Power of Visuals in Influencer Marketing
Visuals play a major role in influencer marketing campaigns. The images or videos associated with the campaign hold the power to stop users from aimless social media scrolling and pay attention to your product or service offering.
To properly conceptualize the power and effectiveness of visual content, consider these statistics proving the influence of visual platforms:
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58% of U.S. shoppers bought a product after seeing it on social media in 2023
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There are more than 500,000 active Instagram influencers in the U.S., with the majority having fewer than 10,000 followers. Content creators with smaller followings, called ?nano-influencers,? tend to have the highest engagement among all Instagram influencers
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There are more than 100,000 TikTok influencers in the U.S., with the majority having access to 50,000 to 100,000 followers each
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There are close to 500,000 YouTube influencers in the U.S., with the majority having access to 10,000 to 50,000 subscribers each
Understanding DAM and Its Role in Influencer Marketing
So how does a digital asset management system fit into the process of creating high-quality influencer marketing visuals? DAM software streamlines three key aspects of using visual assets for influencer marketing, namely:
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Storage: Providing one secure place to find assets, protected from misuse by access controls that allow only necessary personnel to see, change, and provide feedback on assets.
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Organization: Using tags and metadata, related assets will automatically be grouped together. As new versions of assets are uploaded, past versions are tracked so changes can be easily reverted if necessary.
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Retrieval: Assets are easily searchable within the DAM system through relevant keywords. Advanced digital asset management software reads your asset’s metadata to understand its context, enhancing search results.
Benefits of Integrating DAM into Influencer Marketing Strategies
DAM software enhances collaborations between brands and influencers, who oftentimes may not be working within the same locale, by making all relevant assets easy to find and access. Centralized asset management promotes efficiency gains and time savings in use cases like:
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Managing workflows: Set automated task assignments and reminders to keep visual content moving through the editing and approval process smoothly. Make sure visuals change hands easily, collect comments and suggestions, and track approvals directly within the system.
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Controlling asset versions: The asset metadata automatically tracks and remembers previous versions of assets. To understand this process, think about saving a document and then closing it. When you open the document up again, you see the version you just saved, but if you were to check previous saves, you would be able to access all past versions of that document. Proper asset control helps all parties avoid confusion and lack of clarity.
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Adapting assets to different channels: Through modular content tools, brands can create and edit visuals and graphics in smaller blocks that can be easily resized and reorganized to match the ideal image and video specifications for each social media channel.
Optimizing Visual Content for Maximum Impact
To optimize your visual content, follow these best practices:
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Image quality: Your images should be clear, well-edited, and eye-catching to attract consumer attention. Track the analytics on different types of visuals across different platforms to inform future decisions regarding influencer marketing and other social media campaigns.
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Format: Each different social media platform and type of post on each has different ideal image and file size specifications. Make sure to follow these with your visual content. Also, video performs better in some contexts, while images may be more appropriate in others. Research and track your target audience’s behaviors across social media channels to make sure you use the strengths of each social media platform to better reach consumers.
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Consistency: Brand consistency across channels helps make your brand more recognizable and memorable to consumers coming across your company in their daily omnichannel experiences. Balance making your brand easily recognizable with avoiding making influencer marketing, which should feel more personal, look cold, too sales-y, or corporate.
