DAM ROI: The Business Case for DAM

If you manage content, brand, or marketing operations, you have a wide range of business needs for using digital asset management (DAM) software. Sometimes, it can be hard to justify the new or continued investment in technology, but the return on investment (ROI) for DAM is there. It can help you streamline content operations, protect your brand, and overcome e-commerce content challenges.

Of course, everyone knows money will be saved if you can “overcome content challenges,” but how much? You need to be able to calculate the ROI for your DAM investment to show how it supports your strategic initiatives. Before we show you a few ways to calculate ROI for DAM, let’s start by building a business case. 

How to build a digital asset management business case

Let’s sync up on a common understanding of the business case for DAM.

DAM software and work management, when applied correctly and consistently, will help your business by:

• Increasing marketing efficiency and effectiveness
• Connecting you with revenue opportunities faster
• Improving brand consistency
• Increasing your brand equity

Securing, controlling, and appropriately using your digital assets makes it a vehicle that drives connections with customers and revenue, while streamlining workflows. 

Global companies like Hootsuite use DAM software to power their brand management. With a central source for all their brand assets, Hootsuite has eliminated bottlenecks and redundancies in their workflows and increased brand consistency. In the span of 12 months, they tracked 287,000+ asset views from their blog, enabled 14,000+ downloads from their brand content portal, and captured 575,000+ views from embedded assets.

Another company that gained operational speed with the help of their DAM solution is Zurich Insurance Group. With a new DAM system, content authors are able to find assets in under 2 minutes, a vast improvement over the average of 12 minutes to locate assets in their previous system. Pairing this efficiency with the increase in users engaged in the new DAM platform, Zurich estimates a 75% reduction in system cost per user.

Whether your business case involves marketing, company-wide asset management, or e-commerce product content, you can use DAM as a foundation for getting a return on your martech investment.

The importance of DAM ROI

Part of a functioning digital asset management strategy is proving its value to the company. Martech is a big investment and you need to be able to gather, understand, and present ROI metrics for your DAM investment. Don’t worry; it’s possible. Whether you’re producing content for 10,000 SKUs a year or managing a global brand with strict visual requirements, there’s a model to show the value you’re creating. 

Here are some of the most important factors in calculating DAM ROI, no matter what your business case. These will help you build a case for an initial DAM investment and for continuing along your DAM journey.

How to calculate DAM ROI

Content creation entails valuable resources in terms of time, talent, and money – all of which goes to waste if you’re not using a DAM solution. You might know this intrinsically, but you need to justify a DAM investment. We’ve worked with over 850 brands around the globe to understand DAM business cases and investments across industries. Here are some of the approaches we use to calculate ROI for DAM.

1. Search and share time savings

Our first model asks you to consider the time disruption your graphic designers and marketers experience by constantly being asked to find, gather, and send digital assets to internal and external stakeholders.

This is a simple calculation. For example, let’s say you have two designers that each spend an hour a day searching for and sharing content. At the average hourly wage of $25, that adds up to $13,000 wasted annually because your teams (and external partners) don’t have a centralized self-serve content repository.

Now imagine how many other people are spending their time looking for digital assets. Apply this calculation to any position or department and you’ll start to see how much time and money can be saved when you give people a content portal that expedites content distribution. Plus, DAM can positively impact revenue generation when you consider how it can accelerate time to market. Autodesk, for example, saw its time to market slashed in half by using DAM to more efficiently get product and brand assets into the hands of its customers, partners, and agencies.

2. Asset fulfillment savings

This next model builds on the previous concept by looking at what you would have spent without a self-serve content hub.

We’ve found that the average mid-size enterprise customer has about 60,000 asset downloads per year.

Our customers have told us it took an average of four minutes (at best) to fulfill one asset request prior to having a DAM system in place. Crunching the numbers, that equates to 4,000 hours spent fulfilling requests at the “pre-DAM” rate. And this doesn’t count those hard-to-find assets that take hours to locate on somebody’s local hard drive or Dropbox account.

In this case, using DAM software can help companies reduce the over $100,000 annually that they waste from having staff members spend excessive time fulfilling asset requests.

You could also use this exercise to demonstrate that with DAM, the number of downloads and uses far exceeds what could be accomplished before.

3. Asset creation and repurposing savings

Think about the average cost of a photo or video shoot — including models, retouching, production, and travel. All these things add up to the total estimated value of individual assets. Based solely on creation cost, we’ll estimate $300 per asset.

Without a safe, secure access point for your existing work and creative investments, this is money out the window if these files get lost or misplaced – not to mention the costs to then conduct a whole new shoot to replace what was lost.

Aside from avoiding wasteful spending, DAM can actually help you get more value out of the assets you already have. Content reuse is a great way to save money, but you can’t reuse what you can’t find. DAM helps with that. 

And as generative AI tools become more sophisticated and integrated into DAM systems, you can give your content a whole new life. Rather than starting over from scratch, AI tools can help you augment and repurpose your existing assets. For example, consider you’re marketing your company’s latest over-ear headphones. You have a great set of photos of a model wearing your headphones, and want to use the same imagery across multiple campaigns and seasons. Rather than reshooting in different settings, generative AI can help you repurpose the original images by changing the background from a summer vista to a more autumnal backdrop, or from a college dorm setting to an outdoor stroll in a park. 

Asset repurposing saves your creators time and increases their productivity by allowing them to work on other valuable projects. And these savings add up: If you repurpose just 50 assets, that’s $15,000 saved from having to do reshoots.

Making your case for DAM

With the information in this article, you can make a strong and detailed case for DAM. Start with the business case, outline the foundational DAM functionality, and calculate potential ROI from the three approaches above.

Want some more help calculating your DAM ROI? Try our DAM ROI calculator to explore seven areas across marketing and creative teams where DAM can help you save time and money. 

Note: This article was originally in 2021 and has been updated to remain current.