For the last twenty years, innovators in the Digital Asset Management (DAM) industry have been connecting the dots to solve the challenges of creating, managing and distributing an ever-increasing amount of content to fuel the content marketing machine.
Initially, the biggest challenges lay in image management, which drove the deluge of “image bank” solutions that sprung up in the late ‘90s. As technology evolved, B2B marketers needed to find support for rich media formats like video. As marketing stacks grew, the DAM industry began to integrate their solutions into existing business systems. This practice continues today as organizations continue to explore how DAM fits within their marketing technology ecosystem.
What does this mean? How is DAM integration evolving based on customer needs and what does this mean for today’s B2B marketer?
User Experience Drives DAM Evolution
For all technology-based industries, the pace of digital evolution has — and continues to be — mind-boggling. What’s more important than the technology itself is the quality of the customer experience and the ability to meet and adapt to end user expectations.
Imagine your sales team is on the road, meeting with a prospect. As part of their pitch, they need access to the latest images from a recent ad campaign. How do they access the latest content without bothering the marketing team OR struggling with large file transfers? Having a DAM system is critical, but if the UI is complicated, the average sales person simply won’t use it. You risk them sending outdated content.
Using DAM To Operate With Agility
Companies that use DAM to fuel their content marketing efforts realize a huge time savings by reducing costs associated with retrieving content. Consider a marketing team tasked with pulling together a sales presentation. If all the content within the DAM system is current and approved by legal, the team is able to meet the deadline and can rest assured all content is useable from a legal perspective. This expedites the approval process, thus shortening the sales cycle and driving revenue.
In addition, DAM offers a real benefit for geographically dispersed teams collaborating on projects. A centralized solution that is flexible to support local marketing teams is especially powerful in the production and execution phase of campaigns. Local teams need freedom to be able to execute their own campaigns. A DAM solution facilitates this by allowing teams to operate locally within guidelines.
Using DAM To Ascertain What Is And Isn’t Working
Simply put, DAM is a repository for media assets and shows marketing what assets are driving engagement. This insight enables B2B marketers to plan and budget future content production needs and retire assets that are no longer generating ROI.
Bruno Van Hecke is the Product Marketing Manager for North Plains Systems. He joined the company in 2012 as a Sales Engineer for the EMEA Region. Van Hecke has a broad range of experience, including more than 15 years in the Digital Asset Management space and 20+years in the creative/publishing field.
