If you’re a member of the marketing management team then you’re most likely familiar with the need for Digital Asset Management (DAM) in one way or another. Maybe you’ve worked somewhere before that had a DAM in place and you’ve seen the impact it can have first hand. Maybe you’ve been researching ‘image management solutions’ and you’ve been looking into options for a while. Or maybe you just know that your firm’s digital assets are incredibly time-consuming to find and manage, there must be a better way to get to grips with them and you’re in the very early stages of finding out that there are alternatives. No matter what stage of your DAM journey you’re in, you know that the way your firm is currently managing and using digital assets needs to change.
Marketing Managers or Marketing Directors are usually the biggest champions of finding a digital asset management solution and overseeing its implementation. This makes a lot of sense, marketing teams are the ones who work with digital assets the most and see the effort that goes into managing, maintaining and using them every single day. The difficulty with this can be getting other people, outside of marketing, within your business to understand the value that DAM will deliver. How do you explain to someone, who potentially holds the budget or influences purchasing decisions, what the value of a solution is if they don’t truly understand the scale of or feel the effects of the problem? So, as a Marketing Manager, Director or just all round DAM champion, that is your challenge and we’re here to help you with that. In this blog post we’ll be looking at:
[open-asset-list type=”ul”]
[li text=”Identifying DAM stakeholders”]
[li text=”Understanding the full impact of DAM to form a clear use case”]
[li text=”Getting to grips with your Return on Investment (ROI)”]
[li text=”Putting together a winning business case”]
[/open-asset-list]
Identify your DAM stakeholders
Knowing who your stakeholders are from the beginning of your DAM project will potentially save you a lot of headaches further down the line. Stakeholders may not always have a final say in whether you get the DAM you need or not but they may influence the people who do or the decision-making process, so it’s important to know who they all are from the start. Your stakeholder list may include; other people in your marketing team, people from business development, your head of IT, Director of Marketing, CEO, COO… the list can become pretty varied especially if you’re at a larger firm.
Next, identify who are the decision makers and who are the influencers so you’re aware of what impact people can potentially have. This will also help you to tailor your business case to the right people, so if your Head of IT is a decision maker then you know to highlight the key issues a DAM solution will solve from an IT perspective, where possible and relevant.
In our guide to justifying the investment in DAM, we’ve also listed some of the questions that might come your way from decision makers so you can be well prepared and minimize the risk to your DAM project.
Understand the full impact of DAM at your firm
Quite often it’s obvious what the overarching digital asset management issues you’re tackling are, your existing system is cumbersome, your processes are inefficient, your workflows are far from streamlined. A good start to showcasing the full value of DAM is to combine this with breaking them down into their individual parts, for example, take ‘inefficient processes’ what does that actually mean for your firm?
- The wrong digital assets are being accessed and used – there are no restrictions around the use of your assets which means that they are subject to being misused. This can damage your brand consistency and also make you liable for infringements even when mistakes are accidental.
- You can’t find your digital assets in a folder-based system – folders are one dimensional which means, even if all of your assets are in one place, you aren’t able to easily search for the files you need.
- You have a huge amount of duplicate files – as digital files aren’t available in the correct formats, employees are constantly recreating, resizing and reformatting them, meaning that you have multiple versions stored on your server. Not only does this create unnecessary workload but it compounds your storage problem.
- Your digital assets aren’t available to the people who need them – with the issues of files being stored across different servers and drives comes the issue of permissions. Files aren’t readily available to share with the wider teams across your business which means value marketing resource is being used on asset distribution.
This is a great excercise to do in general, even as a DAM champion you may find things you didn’t consider or realize were an issue and further compound your argument for DAM. This listing also can then form your criteria for choosing the solution that bests suits the needs of your firm during your vendor review.
Get to grips with your ROI
Return on Investment (ROI) is a measure of performance that is used to assess the success of an investment. ROI attempts to give a direct measurement of the return of an investment, relative to its cost. As ROI is measured as a percentage, it makes it an easy figure to compare against other investments. It is a relatively simple metric to interpret and allows organizations to understand an investment’s profitability.
DAM won’t necessarily be viewed as an essential piece of software for your firm, it won’t always be seen in the same way as an accountancy platform or CRM for example. That doesn’t mean it won’t deliver value, it just means the justification and ROI needs to be super clear and strong to convince budget holders. Luckily with DAM, this isn’t a problem.
We know how important this aspect of winning your argument for DAM is so we’ve created our Guide to Understanding DAM ROI and an interactive ROI calculator. What’s the difference?
- Our ROI calculator looks at 4 key high-level elements of calculating your return on investment and gives you an ROI range and an estimated time savings percentage. If you’re new to looking at DAM this is a great place to start getting an idea of what DAM can save your firm.
- Our Guide to Understanding DAM ROI gives you a break down of all the metrics you need to consider to get a true and individual ROI value for your firm. If you’re looking to really get to grips with your ROI this is the guide for you.
Put together a winning business case for DAM
A lot of the elements for your business case will have started to come together by now. A winning business case for DAM usually includes the following steps:
- Plan – create a vendor review with clear criteria based on the specific needs of your firm.
- Identify – key stakeholders should be identified early on in the process
- Trial and test – day to day users should be given the opportunity to trial a shortlist of DAM products
- Review and select – score against the initial criteria you set in your plan and select the DAM that best meets the needs of your business
- Make your case – make your argument for DAM at your firm and include ROI to give financial value and some clear gains from the start
- Rollout and adoption – have a plan! SaaS needs support and momentum to make it successful.
This final step in your playbook is all about pulling everything together and making your case for DAM a tough one to argue with. We’ve got a Guide To Your Winning Business Case For DAM to help you with this where we run through vendor reviews, trialing, DAM selection and more.
Between this playbook and our guides, you should have everything you need to get you in good shape for getting the DAM you, your team and your firm needs.
