Edward Boatman • May 19th
When you’re launching a marketing campaign, there are a lot of moving parts. You might have a design team working on graphics and videos for ads, as well as a marketing team planning the campaign and making sure your ads are published in the right places. That might seem simple enough, but coordinating across teams can become extremely complicated when you’re dealing with large-scale marketing campaigns.
Marketing digital asset management is one of the best ways to make marketing teams more efficient. Having a centralized library of digital assets means you don’t have to manually send those resources to individual teams. Plus, you don’t have to worry about your marketing or design teams using an outdated version of your brand visuals.
Using digital asset management to market your brand more efficiently is a smart way to propel your business forward. However, it’s important to understand how digital asset management works and how to implement a DAM system properly.
If you’re ready to make your marketing more efficient, here’s everything you need to know about DAM and marketing.
Marketing Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the process of organizing, storing, and distributing digital assets, like images, videos, brand guidelines, templates, and more, to and for marketing teams. A DAM helps creative and marketing teams stay on the same page. It ensures brand assets are easy to find, consistently used, and always up to date, so campaigns launch faster and stay on-brand.
Your DAM system is essentially a library that includes all your brand visuals, like your logo, color palette, typography, and documentation that tells teams how to use those visuals.
As you change or update brand visuals in your DAM library, those changes are reflected for everyone else. When you’re launching your next marketing campaign, your design team can update the library and create a kit or portal to help surface marketing resources the team might need to execute campaigns.
Marketing used to be all about billboards and TV advertising, but times have changed. Digital marketing accounts for a significant portion of modern marketing budgets, and those digital marketing campaigns rely on the digital assets in your library.
A robust DAM library means you don’t have to manually share resources with team members. Simply share your DAM library with relevant teams, and they can grab the resources they need as they work.
Understanding how digital asset management impacts marketing is important. Implementing a DAM system can help you align your marketing strategy with your brand goals and enhance efficiency.
Implementing digital asset management involves making sure your DAM system is aligned with your brand goals. You might want to make your brand more recognizable through consistent branding, or maybe you want to reduce marketing costs.
Your specific brand goals will impact your marketing strategy and how you use digital asset management. In turn, digital asset management can impact your marketing strategy by giving you deeper insights into how your digital assets are being used.
Efficiency and consistency are the two most important words when you’re talking about DAM in marketing. Digital asset management systems can save you time and money while ensuring brand consistency across multiple channels.
Since all your teams can easily access your brand visuals, you can market more efficiently. You don’t have to manually share color palettes and graphics, so your marketing team can focus on planning and launching your next marketing campaign.
DAM systems also give your teams access to the latest versions of your brand visuals. When you’re designing an ad, you don’t want to use an outdated version of your logo or typography. With a library of your latest digital assets, you can make sure everyone is using your most recent brand visuals.
Digital asset management offers numerous benefits, but implementing a digital asset management system can be more complex than you might imagine. From taking inventory of your digital assets to choosing the right DAM software and organizing your assets, it’s important to follow all the steps when implementing a DAM system. Here’s a quick breakdown of how to implement a DAM system.
The first thing you need to do is take inventory of your digital assets and consider your needs as a brand. Some brands have thousands of digital assets while others may only have dozens. The number of digital assets you have has a significant impact on the DAM software you choose.
Start by creating a list of all your digital assets. You can do this by auditing folders and drives where you store your digital assets, whether they’re stored on a local machine or a cloud storage service. Create a list of file types, such as .jpg and .png, then list assets by file type to organize them. You can also create a list of file types for each digital asset category to separate core brand assets from other graphics and documentation.
Your existing digital assets can help you choose the right DAM solution, but it’s also important to choose scalable software that can grow with your library of assets. You should also consider the challenges you’re currently facing and how DAM software can help you overcome those obstacles.
Now that you’ve got an inventory of your digital assets and you know what you need in DAM software, it’s time to choose your software. There are several features you can look for to make it easier to implement digital asset management.
Automation is one of the best features to look for in DAM software. For example, Lingo allows your design team to upload an asset, say a JPEG, and we’ll automatically convert it to different file types. This saves the design team time by not having to create the same file in various formats. Likewise, the marketing team simply selects the asset they need and downloads it with the file type (and size) they require.
AI-enhanced search means you don’t have to spend time manually tagging photos to search for them later.
These features can save you a lot of time and money.
You should also look for customizable DAM solutions. Custom branding and custom domains help you make your digital library unique to your brand, making it easier for teams to access and navigate your digital assets.
Organizing your digital assets makes them easier to find in the future. Adding metadata and tags makes your digital asset library searchable, but there are some best practices you should keep in mind before you get started.
For starters, Lingo uses AI-enhanced search to eliminate the need for manual tagging. Every time you upload a photo to Lingo, tags are automatically added to make sure that photo is instantly searchable. This is a key feature if you’re looking to streamline digital asset management.
If you’re manually tagging assets, start by creating a list of tags. Using consistent tags will make it easier to find what you’re looking for, especially if you use a standard naming convention for files.
You can also create a manual to send to your teams to help them find the content they’re looking for. This manual should include a list of tags you use, what’s included in those tags, and any instructions that make it easier to navigate your DAM library.
Once you’ve implemented your marketing digital asset management platform, it’s time to leverage that system to streamline your marketing campaigns. Let’s take a closer look at how digital asset management impacts marketing campaign success and how you can measure the impact of your DAM system.
Louisiana State University has one of the best examples of how DAM systems work in the real world. Before leveraging digital asset management, team photographers were taking thousands of photos that weren’t being used.
After implementing DAM, team photographers can simply upload the photos they take to the DAM library and from there, those photos go into their respective sports and can be used for social media, marketing, public relations, and more.
Measuring results is an important part of making sure you’re leveraging your DAM system to enhance your marketing campaigns. Measuring return on investment (ROI) is simple, and it’s one of the best ways to determine how cost-effective your DAM system is. Here’s how you can calculate ROI using your DAM costs:
(Gain from DAM - Cost of DAM) / Cost of DAM * 100 = ROI
ROI isn’t the only important metric to look at. You should also look at the raw numbers to see how implementing DAM impacted your marketing campaign. Looking at things like website traffic, sales, and engagements can help you measure the reach and success of your marketing campaign.
If you want to smoothly implement digital asset management, you need to understand the common challenges brands face when deploying DAM systems. In this section, we’ll take a closer look at some of the most common pitfalls in deploying digital asset management.
Getting started with digital asset management is easy enough when you have a small handful of assets, but it becomes more complicated with a larger library. Uploading and organizing hundreds or thousands of digital assets can seem like a chore that’s not worth the time.
Even after you’ve migrated your digital assets to your DAM system, scalability can be a concern. As your library of digital assets grows, it’s important to make sure your DAM system can scale with it.
Digital asset management is effective when implemented properly, but cost can be a concern. It’s important to choose a cost-effective DAM solution based on your needs, especially if you’re working with a tight budget.
Data overload can be a concern as well. As you keep adding digital assets to your library, it becomes harder to organize and retrieve those assets in a timely manner.
You can get started with digital asset management by taking inventory of your digital assets and choosing DAM software based on your needs. Make sure you understand how to implement DAM before you get started.
Common challenges for beginners include choosing the right DAM software, organizing and tagging assets, and onboarding stakeholders and teams.
DAM improves marketing efficiency by streamlining content creation and sharing, so your marketing team can plan, create, and deploy your campaign in less time.
Digital asset management is one of the most effective ways to streamline your marketing campaigns and ensure brand consistency. When you have your latest digital assets in one place, teams can seamlessly collaborate to help your campaign succeed.
At Lingo, we make it easy to implement digital asset management with features like AI-enhanced search and automatic file conversion. Start your free trial or contact us to learn more about getting started with DAM.