Marketing teams often question: “How can we manage and distribute our ever-growing collection of digital assets more efficiently?” Every day, marketing professionals handle the constant growth of marketing assets. These digital assets are vital for brand representation and project success.
However, with the marketing world becoming increasingly digital, the challenge intensifies. Distributing content means careful planning and collaboration. The goal is to ensure the right content gets to the right people at the right time, and in a format that works best for where it’s being shared.
Fortunately, there’s a tool designed to address these challenges and elevate your content distribution approach: a digital asset management (DAM) system.
So, to address your team’s need for easy and accurate file sharing, we’re going to share how a DAM tool helps by improving total content management and distribution. We’ll explore how DAM not only offers a solution to these challenges but also revolutionizes the way marketing teams operate.
By the end of this blog, you’ll have a better understanding of how your marketing team can streamline their workflow, specifically when it comes to content management and distribution.
What Is DAM?
Digital Asset Management (DAM) refers to the practice of organizing, storing, and retrieving media and managing digital rights and permissions. Digital assets can include photos, videos, audio files, animations, documents, presentations, graphics, and other digital files.
DAM helps organizations manage their digital content more efficiently, ensure brand consistency, reduce time spent searching for assets, and streamline collaboration among teams.
What Is DAM in Marketing?
The collaborative efforts needed in marketing, both internally and externally, present an ideal scenario for advanced DAM platforms to demonstrate their capabilities.
In the context of marketing, DAM is a critical tool that helps marketing teams store, organize, find, retrieve, and share digital content. From the creation of a marketing piece through to its distribution, DAM systems offer several benefits and functionalities (which we’ll go into later) specific to the needs of marketers.
DAM systems tailored for marketing efficiently categorize, preserve, manage, and share a company’s collection of digital assets.
Essentially, for marketing departments, DAM isn’t just a storage solution. It’s a tool that enhances the efficiency, consistency, and effectiveness of marketing campaigns by ensuring that the right content is used in the right way at the right time.
What Is Content Management and Distribution?
Content management relates to creating, storing, and organizing digital content. It starts with the actual production of content, which can range from written articles to videos, images, graphics, and audio files.
Once this content is created, it requires an efficient system for storage. Platforms such as digital asset management systems (DAMs) or content management systems (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal are often employed for this purpose.
Content distribution, on the other hand, is the strategy and execution behind ensuring that digital content reaches its intended audience. This involves identifying the most suitable platforms for distribution, such as websites, social media, email newsletters, or apps.
Given the diverse nature of these platforms, content often needs to be adapted or reformatted to fit seamlessly into each source. For example, a detailed article might be simplified into shorter social media posts or even an infographic to make it better for a different audience segment.
What Content Management and Distribution Challenges Do Marketing Teams Face?
People managing digital content operations daily face numerous obstacles in content distribution. Are the file sizes too large for email or your file transfer system? Struggling to locate the correct content or specific file? Having difficulty accessing the appropriate digital asset?
These are just some of the challenges marketing teams might face when dealing with content management and distribution. Let’s take a detailed look at each challenge.
Difficulty Finding Assets
Every marketing team has an extensive collection of digital assets. However, these assets aren’t always located in a single location. Assets may be scattered across various drives, folders, Slack channels, emails, or even individual employee computers.
Having scattered assets complicates the process of finding and using assets for content distribution. It can lead to considerable time and effort spent searching in the wrong locations for the right file, or even more concerning, completely losing track of your files.
An organization’s digital assets and creative materials should be readily accessible and shareable. This ensures that staff members, particularly those in sales and marketing roles, can easily access, modify, and distribute these assets through the appropriate channels.
Without a centralized system, finding the right content becomes a time-consuming task.
Time-Consuming Manual Processes
Tasks such as resizing images, converting file formats, or adapting content for different platforms may need to be done manually, consuming valuable time and resources.
For example, various channels and platforms require distinct content formats. While video content might thrive on social media, it’s largely unsuitable for email marketing.
Likewise, images might require resizing or cropping to fit mobile and tablet screens or to align with different social media platforms. The task of adapting and refining content for diverse formats can be both repetitive and time-intensive, particularly when carried out manually.
The same concept can be applied to file size limitations, affecting the resolution of the digital asset.
Unorganized File Naming
Inconsistent file naming conventions, without a DAM, can lead to inefficiencies, errors, and complications that hinder smooth content management and distribution.
Marketers might not always maintain uniformity in naming and organizing files. In the absence of a standardized naming system, there can be overlapping and ambiguous file names, which can damage content distribution.
For example, using vague filenames like “image1.jpg,” “image2.jpg,” and “image3.jpg” makes it challenging to locate the appropriate image needed. Moreover, such naming may cause you to use an old and outdated version of a digital asset. This makes the content distribution procedure unnecessarily difficult.
Brand Inconsistency
Maintaining consistency in your brand values across all distribution channels is crucial, yet it poses significant challenges. The lack of a central reference point can lead to errors in brand representation. For example, an old version of a logo might be used in a new campaign, or inconsistent messaging might be put out across different channels.
Brand inconsistency can impact an organization’s credibility, customer trust, and overall market presence. It can lead to a damaged brand image where customers and partners receive inconsistent messages, making the brand less memorable and weakening customer loyalty.
Version control issues can lead to outdated or incorrect materials being distributed, potentially harming the brand’s image. This makes it difficult to identify the most recent or approved version of an asset. With no centralized system to house approved brand assets, there’s a higher risk of inconsistent branding across various platforms.
Issues With External Collaboration
Various companies use different technological solutions, and it’s not uncommon for external partners to encounter barriers when accessing these systems. You’ve likely faced challenges when an external entity couldn’t access the necessary content, data, or information essential for productive collaboration.
Collaborating with third parties often brings complications, especially in the sharing of files. For effective work with external stakeholders, such as firms, agencies, and partners, reliable content distribution platforms are needed.
Additionally, when you have limited access control over digital assets, it becomes harder to control who (internal and external parties) can access, modify, or delete content. This can pose security risks or lead to unauthorized distribution.
How Can DAM Benefit Marketing Teams?
By implementing a digital asset management system, marketers can efficiently manage routine marketing activities. This includes finding files, reviewing, approving, and sharing them with internal and external stakeholders. A DAM system’s asset organization and management capabilities make content distribution across various channels and platforms easier.
By automating routine tasks and enhancing collaboration, a DAM system assists marketers in reducing mistakes and preventing roadblocks. Here are more details of how a DAM solution can benefit marketing teams when it comes to content management and distribution:
Centralized Management
DAM software serves as the central hub for all your digital assets. From images to documents, every asset is stored in a single space, granting easy access to your team. A DAM streamlines the tasks related to storing, crafting, overseeing, generating, and distributing content. Refining these processes reduces clutter and eliminates hurdles in creative and production workflows, enhancing efficiency and productivity.
A centralized approach not only streamlines the retrieval of assets for distribution but also guarantees that the most updated and approved assets are being used when applied to multiple digital platforms. Efficient digital asset management with a centralized hub leads to saving time and resources.
With DAM, you can use metadata tagging, categorizing assets based on various factors such as type, project, date, and more. This facilitates quick content sourcing for distribution. Its superior search functionality ensures that stakeholders—both in-house and external—spend less time asset hunting and more time improving distribution strategies.
A standout feature of DAM systems is the AI-suggested keywords. With AI smart tagging, the software can auto-generate relevant keywords for your entire asset library. This reduces the time it takes to tag images manually and helps businesses build and expand taxonomies.
Leveraging metadata, smart tags, categorization, and intuitive search functionalities, finding and accessing your digital assets becomes an easy and quick task.
Brand Consistency
When dealing with branding, it’s essential to keep your branding consistent and of high quality on all platforms. Using set templates and guidelines helps in keeping your brand’s look and message clear.
However, with a DAM system, you always have access to the newest version of each file. This means you won’t accidentally use old or outdated content, especially when many people are working on a project. By always using the right, approved assets, your content will match your brand’s guidelines. This makes your digital brand look professional and trustworthy to your audience.
A DAM system also helps keep track of changes made to files, so you’re always sharing the latest information. If updates are needed, they can be made quickly in the system, ensuring your content is always current.
Security
A DAM system protects your digital assets against unauthorized entry and possible risks. A robust DAM system implements multiple security features, including encryption, user verification, and specific access permissions. This allows for detailed control over who can see, modify, distribute, or remove your digital content.
Within your organization, specific teams or individuals can be granted access to the necessary digital assets, ensuring that unauthorized modifications or usage are avoided. This is especially useful for large organizations with spread-out teams. Additionally, you can track the activity and update the history of your digital assets using logs.
Scalability
One of the primary advantages of a cloud-based DAM system is its inherent scalability. As your brand expands, both the volume of your assets and the number of stakeholders requiring access to branded content will likely increase.
Depending on your business demands and objectives, you can effortlessly expand or reduce your bandwidth. The scalability of a DAM ensures that your brand growth and marketing strategy remain resilient and advanced.
Sharing
When working on projects, it’s common to collaborate with various internal and external stakeholders who need access to specific files. It’s crucial to ensure:
- Smooth sharing of relevant files among all involved parties.
- Strong permission settings that prioritize cybersecurity, yet are adaptable enough to facilitate collaboration and file distribution.
When working together on marketing materials, projects, or campaigns, distributing large files to the right people becomes essential.
To streamline content management and distribution, you shouldn’t rely on emails, portable drives, or other file transfer methods. That’s why using a DAM system proves efficient.
With user permissions and access, A DAM allows authorized individuals to access the necessary content anytime, anywhere, and on any device, streamlining the process. This direct access decreases the frequency of requests to the marketing department for files, saving you time and allowing you to focus on what matters– getting work done.
Moreover, these shared assets can be accessed, reviewed, and modified by teams worldwide. This not only saves time for marketing teams but also ensures brand consistency by ensuring you’re not sharing outdated content.
How OpenAsset Can Help AEC Marketing Teams
As we’ve covered, a DAM system offers numerous benefits for content distribution. However, not every DAM system is the same. They can vary in features and functionalities. Moreover, certain systems might align better with your specific business needs or industry requirements.
OpenAsset, tailored for the unique needs of AEC marketing teams, streamlines content management and distribution for AEC firms. With its robust features, OpenAsset simplifies content management, ensuring brand consistency across projects and saving you valuable time and resources. It removes the common issues of misplacing assets or using outdated content, allowing AEC teams to focus on what they do best: crafting compelling proposals.
As the digital age continues to evolve, AEC marketing teams must leverage the power of efficient digital asset management. Don’t let your valuable content get lost in the shuffle. Take control of your assets and elevate your marketing strategies with OpenAsset.
Ready to transform your AEC marketing approach? Discover how OpenAsset can streamline your content management by scheduling a demo.
