When it comes to deciding on digital asset management, many decision makers tend to focus on return on investment (ROI) to justify their solution purchase. DAM can certainly provide ROI over time, but despite what some ROI calculators claim, it is often hard to quantify and they tend to overlook some of the other benefits DAM offers organizations.
If you’re responsible for pulling the trigger and investing in DAM, or you are hoping to persuade your organization to adopt a DAM solution, consider these seven other ways DAM can delivers tangible value for your organization:
DAM helps you get the most out of your digital assets.
Photography, videos, and other digital assets cost companies a significant amount of money and/or time to create. But, as our latest research on AEC firms shows, many organizations that do not have a DAM solution in place find a majority of their digital assets go unused. Why? In many cases, digital assets are locally stored and aren’t shared, or file servers or file sharing services are mismanaged where digital assets are often misnamed or misplaced. In large organizations, employees may not know they have permission to use certain digital assets – or they may not know certain files exist at all.
With a cloud-based DAM like OpenAsset, images, videos and other files can be automatically tagged and organized by project. Based on our customer survey, DAM dramatically improves the likelihood that digital assets are found and used, and used again, improving ROI on those expensive and time consuming projects.
DAM enhances the value of your main technology solutions.
A premium DAM solution can integrate seamlessly with your ERP, CRM, and other enterprise solutions, increasing the value of components in your tech stack. The integrations between solutions lets you automatically share information, reducing data entry time and eliminating the need for constantly moving, downloading, uploading, and saving new versions of your assets. Additionally, DAM integration helps you insert your visual assets into standard company workflows– increasing visibility of those assets and providing context to your projects for your whole organization.
DAM makes your marketing team more efficient.
Increased marketing productivity is one of the main advantages of implementing a DAM solution. For starters, DAM eliminates situations where one office holds all the files on a server, and other locations have to wait on access.
Additionally, DAM reduces tedious tasks like finding and managing images while improving productivity for document creation and other creative assets. Integrations with PowerPoint and InDesign enable seamless creation with existing templates, allowing automatic image resizing and drag and drop functionality from your DAM solution to your template, which saves a ton of time creating and editing marketing documents.
Members of creative teams benefit from DAM as well, gives them a tool for a more streamlined workflow. Using access levels and permissions, creatives can easily pass work on to marketers who can see when an asset is approved for use, or if it’s still a work in progress. Creatives and marketers can also use DAM to keep track of purchased images and copyrights.
DAM highlights your prized work across your organization.
With DAM, team members, including new hires, can quickly get up to speed on your organization’s past and current projects and areas of expertise. A project-based DAM provides a central location for easily accessing files. And it gives you a well-organized visual library that makes it enjoyable to review your organization’s work, know the team members behind the project, and learn the project details via synced information from your CRM or ERP solution.
DAM fosters collaboration and better communication.
When it comes to file sharing, DAM makes it a lot easier to share and view large files throughout your organization without having to download. Album features enables team members across offices to collaborate on global initiatives and encourages interoffice projects and cultural development. Additionally, DAM removes bottlenecks in the approval process and provides an easy way to maintain consistency of files and sizes.
DAM inspires new ideas.
DAM can be used as an internal inspiration board or idea repository for your firm. Employees can save interesting images, artwork, designs and other assets to folders that can be accessed firm-wide rather than being limited to a single user, team, or office. These assets can serve as inspiration for current or future projects and may just be the key to your next big idea or project. DAM makes it easier for the marketing team to keep tabs on reference images and keep track on copyrights.
It’s easy to get started with a cloud-based DAM.
When a DAM solution is cloud-based, there is no software to download. If you have an internet connection and a browser, you can access your organization’s digital assets securely from anywhere in the world.
Full service DAM solutions, like OpenAsset, also offer free support and training included with the subscription. The OpenAsset customer success team is dedicated to helping you get started, and we can assist your organization with file migration or integrating your existing solutions with OpenAsset. Alternatively, we can handle the entire process for you, delivering an intuitively-organized, ready-to-use DAM without tying up your internal resources during onboarding.
From our experience, most companies who adopt a digital asset management solution find it to be a great investment and an essential part of their tech stack. In fact, more than 98% of OpenAsset customers renew their subscription year after year.
Want to learn more about digital asset management? Get in touch to learn how to get started with DAM.
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The Growing Role of DAM in Modern AEC Marketing
DAM vs. DropBox, Box and Cloud-Sync: 5 Key Differences
6 Ways DAM Streamlines Content Creation and Marketing
