Marketers feel unprecedented pressure to produce more content in less time. Consumer attention spans are short. They want results fast so they can get on with the rest of their lives. To meet this challenge, we need more personalisation on more channels with more campaigns, all delivered faster than ever. These needs converge to create a demand for content velocity that is the perfect storm seemingly guaranteed to sink any marketing ship.
You may think that the last thing to consider in weathering this storm is Digital Asset Management (DAM). Historically, DAM is a storage solution, and you know that a faster hard drive is not going to help you stem the rising tide. Next-generation (next-gen) DAM goes far beyond storage to integrate creative marketing campaigns across all marketing teams, all platforms and channels, and across all stages of the customer lifecycle. You feel the need for better processes constantly, so how do you make a case to fund this to those who are more removed from battle?
Describe Your Current State of DAM in Concrete Terms
Can you chart the path of a typical asset from creation to publication? You have multiple team members and stakeholders, from creative to legal to campaign management, publishing on multiple channels, from web to in-store to email and social. Are they all using their own storage solutions? That asset is traveling a maze of pathways and resides in multiple copies on a variety of servers. If you could diagram this, it would form a tangled web of confusion and complexity. Multiply by the number of assets in use (can you even determine this number?) and it becomes clearer why time-to-market is so long, and also clearer how next-gen DAM could help your teams do more faster.
Here are some signs that you need a next-gen DAM solution:
- You have trouble finding assets when you need them.
- When you do find an asset, it takes time to verify that it is the correct version.
- You have hit a wall in personalisation to all of the necessary channels and cannot scale to meet the demand no matter what you do.
- Creation of content is spread out among multiple teams and content libraries.
- You cannot quantify your spend on creating assets.
- You do not know which assets are in use and which are the best performers for a given use case.
Show How Next-Gen DAM Relieves These Pain Points
Next-gen DAM integrates content creation and management across all stakeholders throughout the marketing cycle. Key creation processes are automated, allowing you to start with one master image that is then automatically resized, re-encoded if it is video, and retouched to meet the requirements of any screen size or publishing platform. Automated workflows can change in real time in response to metadata, creating smart content targeted to each specific interaction. These capabilities reduce or eliminate the time spent on repetitive tasks, transforming DAM into the foundation of scalable personalisation in every campaign with a dramatically reduced time to market, letting you deliver more campaigns in less time and driving revenue growth.
Storage and management functions soar to the next level as well. A central repository for assets transforms that tangled asset trail you tried to draw before into a clean, easily understood pathway. As assets are entered into the system, as much as 75 percent of essential metadata is captured automatically, reducing the time spent on this tedious but necessary task. Not only can you now find the asset you want in a flash, but you also will know that it is the correct version and is licensed correctly, as well as how many times and where it has been used and how well it performed.
The capabilities of next-gen DAM will lower production costs as you eliminate the costs of reshooting, creating, and retouching derivative images for multiple platforms. Storage costs will be reduced as you eliminate duplicate copies of assets, and the potential for costly licensing violations will be greatly reduced. Not only do you boost content velocity, but you do it at lower cost as well. DAM has transformed from a static library into the core of a dynamic marketing machine.
Are you ready to make your case? Download our whitepaper for more details and strategies.
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