Assets, Diversity, Content, and Everything That Goes with It.

Analyzing the knots tying DAM and digital marketing.

(photo source — https://unsplash.com/photos/ImcUkZ72oUs )

First Steps

Let’s start with simple things, right? What do we actually mean when referring to digital assets? Digital assets may represent any kind of media in possession of your company: videos, files, documents, you name it. This is where DAM (or Digital Asset Marketing) solution comes into the picture. You may have a reasonable question: “Why do I need a separate solution for managing files?” The problem is the growth. The number of assets is closely related to the number of clients you have. If your storage is scattered, it is most likely the marketing team will lose important documents or be spending too much time browsing the archives.

Diversity and functions

So, you agreed with the management on the necessity of implementation of the DAM solution. Great. But how do you choose the right one for your business? I say, the good DAM solution should be able to perform the following:

• Making the structuring of assets simpler

It is not just the matter of placing the right files into the right directories. There are multiple variables that should be taken into account. To make files easy to pick for the right project\situation the system must organize them by types, campaigns, channels, categories, formats etc., to name a few. I believe an experienced marketer would continue that list almost endlessly.

• Finding relevant assets

However, just organizing the content is not enough. A user should be able to find the right file almost instantly. So, searching by file name or approximate location of the folder won’t work anymore. Big companies have hundreds of folders with thousands of files. Good luck dealing with that on your own.

• Providing the inter-company communication

Keeping the correct versioning, performing QA activities, and tracking comments using the functionality of a corporate messenger is a difficult thing even with the smallest volumes of document flow. Using emails is better, but all of it eventually bums into the human factor — the process will stop should someone lose a letter. A good DAM solution will take it to the next level, accumulating all involved people into one “room” and pinging them constantly upon the activities performed. Sounds better, doesn’t it?

• Maintaining access control

All employees should be given enough access needed to perform their job. A need-to-know principle is one of the main pillars of any field of information security. Say a sales manager finds three versions of the same case study file. Knowing nothing about the way the marketing team handles the versions he will be forced to find the right person to contact and make an inquiry. Too much time and resources. Likewise, a member of a technical team should have access only to the final version of a banner and be absolutely indifferent to the number of iterations this banner underwent.

DAM and digital marketing

Even though the thoughts of marketers often discord as for what the term “digital marketing technology” means, in a broader sense it accumulates all digital hardware and software used by marketers to collect and use the information on leads and clients.

As a rule, such systems can be used to outline the customer’s brand or product, though I believe this is already a little outdated. Marketing develops and evolves directing itself towards the customer and pushing marketers into finding new approaches. We now concentrate more on what potential buyers fancy, the history of their searches and purchases in order to define the preferable channel of serving the content. Digital assets play the role of instruments in all this.

Take ad tracking as an example. You find a product on a certain website and then it continues to pop up almost everywhere. I would call this aggressive, as not all people would take such an approach kindly. It looks like a desperate salesman awkwardly stalking you the whole week after you left his shop. And such obsolete marketing approaches do not end on ads. Digital marketing technologies can be integrated into other systems to analyze the content and feed the potential buyer with it until his death.

It is a common practice now for top companies to focus more on delivering the information through digital channels in the most qualitative way. Merchants that deal with physical products turn more to combining in-person and online shopping, which increases the effectiveness and brings the customer experience to the next level. A combination of the right DAM solution and well-thought-through digital marketing technology can do wonders serving as an ultimate “feeder” of content for any customer range.

DAM really keeps your assets ready, so that when you’re decided on the marketing strategy they can be grabbed along the way. The abovementioned combination of DAM and martech shall draw parallels between the metadata and the actual content. This way customers get the desired and non-irritating content, while marketers still act as peaceful intermediaries, making everybody happy.