Pictures and visuals are an incredibly effective way to build a relationship with audiences and capture their attention. It also assists companies in sustaining an edge in areas where it has relevance. Producing, managing, and disseminating the large amounts of material needed to succeed in gaining commitment today can be difficult to do consistently. The individuals responsible for assets need to plan out every probable alternative prior to the event and generate a copious number of versions of each asset, on each channel and screen size which it could be exhibited on.
In most companies, it is challenging to ensure that each department has the ability to obtain the necessary resources whenever required, as well as have the knowledge to utilize them optimally across the platforms they are being used on. Due to the current health crisis causing much of the workforce to work from home, as well as non-fixed working hours, it has become more difficult to implement and sustain effective operational procedures.
Expecting those in creative and development roles to tackle these needs and obstacles singly drains your resources and puts to improper use the abilities of your most gifted individuals. Your teams should be concentrating on developing fresh content concepts, creating exclusive visual experiences, and plotting out details for campaigns – not worrying about the dimensions and proportions of files. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way.
A properly constructed Digital Asset Management software can effectively cope with high demand for content. Modern DAMs now go beyond the simple databases of the past, which were used to take in, store, and fetch assets. Nowadays, they take care of a vast majority of the optimizing and delivery procedure for you without any extra effort. They create versions by intelligently cropping and resizing, and it is really easy to create new assets from existing ones.
What is DAM?
DAM stands for Digital Asset Management and this system is designed to help you effectively organize and keep track of all your digital items.
What does it mean to ‘manage’ digital assets? Most companies, regardless of if they are a B2C or B2B business, a retailer, or a service provider, have some kind of digital resource. The Digital Asset Management (DAM) system would be the single location to save visual items such as pictures, videos, illustrations, audio files, information graphics, GIFs, symbols, and additional assets along with the relevant Metadata associated with each. A straightforward platform is available for users to effortlessly access the necessary asset and employ it whenever and wherever needed. It should be relatively straightforward if you establish one.
Why should we give a DAM?
A DAM solution sounds simple because it is. This is an uncomplicated and efficient answer to a complicated problem that most businesses have. Managing a steadily increasing amount of assets and helping the organization remain in order is an overwhelming job without a Digital Asset Management system.
It is likely that you have grown weary of hearing about how the way we transact has changed and is continuing to change. Yesterday, the way customers communicated with us was not the same as the current day and will certainly vary the next day. Companies must be malleable to remain competitive, which is a heavy burden if they don’t have frameworks put in place to help them.
The latest results of a survey conducted by IDC/Adobe demonstrate that the majority of marketers are feeling the pressure to create marketing materials or launch campaigns rapidly. Moreover, 71% stated that they now need to create up to ten times as many resources to reach out to customers in all channels. Using personalisation has an effect, with more than three-fourths of marketers feeling that in order to keep up, they need to have more resources.
Essentially, a DAM is a tranquil respite in a chaotic market. In business, having a digital asset management system ensures that whenever there is urgency or a need for new documentation, items, or announcements, the people involved are confident that what they are using is accurate, current, and valid.
In addition to fighting fires, a DAM is among a growing selection of martech solutions available to hone in on business proficiency, making it a more friendly and successful environment (you heard it from us!). This ultimately leads to increased profits.
What are the benefits of a DAM?
Why do you need a DAM today?
Brands have shifted their focus from the point of purchasing to the point of communicating. What does that mean? Essentially, whenever someone who could potentially be a customer interacts with your brand, that interaction could be essential in potentially generating sales and creating ongoing loyalty. It is thus essential that companies should use each interaction opportunity to the fullest, this includes sales mediums, media, digital and non-digital, point-of-sale, wrapping and more.
A Digital Asset Management system (DAM) is able to effectively manage all the components and data streams essential for providing seamless interactions of high quality which customers expect. Overall, there are four major advantages that a Digital Asset Management system brings to a contemporary business.
Deliver brand & campaigns at scale
A DAM enables you to regulate your output competently, economically, and immediately. It also helps companies handle the challenge of providing personalization while servicing a large number of customers. Organizations must focus on large groups of people, rather than using the outdated “shotgun” approach. Every customer desires to be appreciated, and that brings value to the business. McKinsey estimates that implementing personalised products and services on a large scale could generate somewhere between $1.7 trillion and $3 trillion in increased value. A DAM will ensure that the most effective visuals are used for your marketing efforts.
Build brand salience
The world is bustling, so brands will have successful and memorable presence in the minds of their customers if they consistently appear everywhere and maintain their importance on many levels in a variety of contact points. This implies creating strong brand recognition, the level of knowledge and recall required to ensure that you are the go-to option.
Better ROI from assets
Assets isn’t just another word for picture or video. They act as an investment for businesses, as they bring in money, but also require a financial outlay. It has been observed that in the absence of a fully functional Digital Asset Management system, some organizations have found it faster to simply recreate an asset instead of trying to locate it within the saved files and figure out its file location. Some vendors claim that if a big business implements DAM, it can free up 6000 employee hours each year, leading to cost savings of £100,000 with a return of £8 for every £1 invested.
Effectively overseeing those resources can lead to considerable financial savings. Using them effectively will increase revenues. One vendor stated that a consumer was able to save 70% of their expenses when it came to duplication.
The IDC Technology Spotlight reported that the usage of a DAM would result in a major reduction in expenses of up to 80%, as well as an increase in earnings of 24% and a 23% decrease in the danger from illegal exploitation of assets. Making the most of your assets in your paid media campaigns is crucial if you’re trying to elevate engagement. Matching the proper advertising creatives that have been shown to be successful on Instagram and Snap will ensure that your financial resources are being employed to their highest capability.
How does modern DAMs improve workflows across the enterprise?
AI-driven organization and analytics are a powerful combination for campaign planning
Dynamic DAMs possess three characteristics that enable them to function properly. These are the capacity to automatically modify and improve assets, the capability to peek at various versions without difficulty, and the aptitude to circulate the assets in the most suitable form. Before anything else can occur, companies need to be aware of the resources already at their disposal, which requires intelligent preparation aided by artificial intelligence.
For companies with a lot of pictures and video recordings, AI can be used to categorize the data in order to quickly tag search terms and make the material findable in an instant. This is particularly helpful for media collections used by retail, tourism, and hospitality industries. For instance, AI’s worth is especially powerful when you consider how many pieces of clothing as well as the number of images necessary for each one that retailers need to show off with each fashion season.
In the majority of cases, it’s preferable to not devise new content if it is not necessary. In lots of circumstances, teams may ask that a new, personalized image be made even though there already exists one that fits their desired end result; they simply don’t realize it exists. By using a current DAM system, supplemented with artificial intelligence-based tagging and analytics, teams responsible for creating content can be sure of what materials have already been produced. Analytics can give an explanation as to why an asset that is rarely used exists, allowing teams to make it better, or come up with a different variation of it. Measuring the extent to which users interact with content assists content producers in getting valuable information which can be utilized to modify or enhance existing content.
Critical image and video transformation is expedited with AI
AI helps with both keeping the organization in order and retrieving the resources necessary, and it also takes care of editing and improvement. It has the ability to identify the key elements in an image, changing the backdrop to get rid of extraneous material. AI adjusts and cuts up images so that they fit each necessary dimension. All activities occur within the Digital Asset Management so there is no requirement to grab items, process them in outside tools, and then transfer updated versions.
Content is indeed highly important, however video holds the top spot. When someone first sees a picture of a handbag, the image quickly sticks in their mind, allowing them to take note of the finer points like small details of the material or the way it is sewn together, or the number of compartments it has within. A 10-second video on the item’s page shows a woman easily packing the pouch, and unexpectedly, the customer realizes the genuine shape and utility of the purse.
The importance of using video transformation that can shift and modify itself is essential when deciding on a digital asset management system. AI is used to make dynamic DAMs, which can produce brief summaries of a video that only include the most noteworthy and powerful portion. Videos can be watched while they are being processed into the Digital Asset Management system. Videos that are added can be automatically changed for any type of web browser or phone, and similar to pictures, can be changed in size and cropped smartly.
How to deploy a DAM, considering emerging technology and distributed workforces
It is significant to understand what factors to look for when assessing choices if you want to introduce a cutting-edge DAM. Having a cloud-based platform that serves as a single source has become increasingly crucial, especially amid the pandemic when teams are working from different locations and need to collaborate remotely. A cloud-based DAM system eliminates the obstacles of accessing the platform from anywhere, allowing work to proceed without obstruction. Consider a Digital Asset Management system as the connector aiding in producing quality results from the differential between asset management and delivering material.
What other capabilities are required to utilize DAMs for creating contemporary asset management processes? Over the past several years, workflows have certainly evolved. It is now essential for a DAM system to incorporate the basics such as taking in resources, classifying them, and providing a way to look up and access them. Today, look for a DAM that is by nature:
- Mobile-first, automatically adapting assets to display attractively on any device or screen size – including mobile – which requires intelligent cropping, resizing, and adjustments made on the fly.
- Supportive of rich media, able to transform next-generation image formats, videos, 3D models, animated GIFs, and 360-degree images. Tools in these cutting-edge DAMs automatically transcode, crop, and resize all rich media to create multiple versions for different uses.
- Equipped for last-mile asset delivery, delivering creative assets to end-users at high quality and quick load times. DAMs generate URLs for assets, which can be used directly in websites and mobile apps to ultimately deliver content through a fast Content Delivery Network (CDN).
The Last Words
With DAM in place, the world is your oyster. You have the option of enhancing your media campaigns with the conviction that the materials you are using include the most productive elements in the proper location and moment. You also have the option of trying something different by using automated systems, advanced marketing techniques, and a combination of personalisation driven by data collection; as well as bringing data, resources and materials together to construct efficient synchronized campaigns on multiple platforms.
