Solve for 10 Modern Business Initiatives With DAM

It was already challenging to manage a digital presence before generative AI hit the market. Now that your company (and every other brand in the world) can produce more content faster, it’s crucial to have a system in place to manage your digital assets. Digital asset management (DAM) systems make it possible to effectively organize, access, and publish your growing libraries of images, videos, documents, brand logos, and other multimedia content.

Generative AI applications like ChatGPT and Midjourney are just the newest business cases that make DAM systems vital. Company mergers, acquisitions, and launching new digital products or brands are business initiatives that will always require advanced digital asset management. It can be hard enough to find the right logos and product images for one company, much less for three or four. 

Your organization might also be tasked with launching new websites, delivering personalized content across all channels, growing your product catalog by thousands of products over the next five years, or optimizing your content workflow. All of these are content-intensive business reasons you need a DAM system to support you.

Without a DAM solution, these things can turn into expensive, stressful nightmares. 

What is a digital asset management (DAM) system good for?

You’re already expected to maintain a consistent presence across websites, social media, email campaigns, and offline materials. Without a centralized system to manage all your assets, you’re likely to experience wasted time, slow content creation, and duplicated tasks. 

With a DAM system, you can skip the messy email chains and efficiently share content across different teams, departments, and channels. 

High-level DAM capabilities

• Centralize and organize. Secure your assets in a central source of truth where permissions, roles, and metadata ensure that brand-approved content is used consistently.
• Optimize workflows. Track content through every stage of development so marketers know what to expect, when to deploy it, and how best to use it.
• Clean up busywork. Help creators get into a flow and get clear feedback without worrying about version control and the daily grind of triaging emails.

You might be getting by without one now, but odds are that your brand could already benefit from the capabilities of a DAM system.

Five signs you already need a DAM

If there’s content chaos at your company, you likely need a DAM system. Here are five signs to look for: 

1. Nobody can find files they need quickly.

2. Your assets aren’t clearly labeled with metadata and need additional explanation in order to be used.

3. File conversions are eating up too much design time.

4. Your systems don't communicate with each other (e.g., you can’t update an asset in one place and have that change cascade across all relevant locations).

5. Your business depends on a strong brand presence.

Almost every organization without a DAM system deals with these scenarios in one way or another. Initially, they might be easy enough to cover up in workflows, but once you start to scale and build advanced omnichannel experiences, you can’t afford to waste time converting files, searching for logos, or publishing the wrong content. 

Soon, it’ll be impossible to ignore your need for a DAM solution. 

Business initiatives that require DAM support

Content is being created at lightning speed and having more brand assets means you need a central location for them. A growing content library isn’t the only prompt for new software. There are always several other changes on the horizon, such as new digital experience initiatives; merger and acquisition requirements; and the regular changes in strategic direction. If content abundance alone isn’t enough to motivate your search for a DAM solution, one of these business initiatives is sure to make it a necessity. 

1. You’re implementing artificial intelligence in content and marketing

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technology into content creation can include everything from writing blog posts faster to generating new images from text prompts. But AI tools aren’t just limited to creating. They can also be used to organize and optimize assets for findability by generating metadata and visually similar searches — this functionality will be critical for AI-generated content in the future in order to provide more specific, detailed metadata. Ultimately, brands who have their content and brand standards structured will be better equipped to train the AI to generate unique and on-brand content. 

Benefits of using a DAM system with AI as part of your content and marketing workflows

• Generate metadata 100x faster than manual processing, at a 90% lower cost, in 53 languages.
• Automate content workflows to speed up time-to-publish.
• Use AI for sentiment analysis on published content insights.

2. You’re launching a new digital experience initiative

Consider omnichannel personalized content that’s made up of text, audio, images, and videos. Not only do you need more content in more formats, it needs to be well organized, easily accessible, and connected to all your systems – from websites to social media and more.

Benefits of using a DAM system for launching a new digital experience

• Prep for omnichannel distribution. Organize product content for centralized syndication across websites, digital and print catalogs, and thousands of e-commerce channels.
• Accelerate content workflows to meet demands for higher quantity, new formats, and increased quality.
• Track and measure insights about content performance.

3. You’re undergoing a rebrand

New logo files, consistent image styles, and clear messaging come along with a brand relaunch. You’ll need to update logos across many web properties and channels, ensure consistent communication of your company’s brand, and have multiple teams across the world collaborating on the effort.

Benefits of using a DAM system when rebranding

• Share assets and information with internal and external partners through portals.
• Update your logo and other brand assets in one place to cascade changes everywhere they appear.
• Ensure only the most up-to-date versions of assets are available to use.

4. You’re launching a new website

Whether your website has thousands of products or a few dozen landing pages about your services, it takes a lot of content to function. If you already have to manage one website, you know how hard it is to get all the right images and content organized and published. 

Benefits of using a DAM system to launch a new website

• Quickly create digital product catalogs that give dealers, distributors, and sales teams up-to-date assets and information.
• Use version control, metadata, and rights management to always use the right asset in the right format — no more folders of files named logov6.png.
• Protect your reputation and enhance your product listing accuracy to reduce negative reviews and returns, and build compelling marketing stories.

5. You’re launching a new brand, product line, or content series

It takes a well-coordinated effort with a lot of digital assets to launch a new brand, product, or content series. Managing digital assets is one of the things that slows down a launch, but it doesn’t have to.

Benefits of using a DAM system for launching a new brand or product

• Launch products faster with DAM. Accelerate speed to market by managing product hierarchies, variants, attributes, assets, and more in one system.
• Manage all content across channels with one source of truth, so teams can put your brand assets to work without worry.
• Publish your up-to-date assets by keeping track of asset versions. Update once and your asset is automatically published across all share and embed links. 

6. You’re part of a merger or acquisition

It doesn’t matter which side of an acquisition you’re on, both brands need to contribute to the new face of the company. That means all of your content must come together to work toward a new common goal. This also means you’ll need to get all your teams and systems up to speed as soon as possible. 

Benefits of using a DAM system as part of an acquisition change management

• Sync data across systems to break down organizational and content silos. Use existing integrations or build your own connections with an API to import data and publish it across channels.
• Encourage adoption with ease of use. It also inspires confidence and reduces friction across departments.
• Empower your teams – no matter their region or time zone – to find what they need, when they need it.

7. You have a new agency or multiple agencies

Whenever you hire a new agency, you need to give them quick access to all your brand assets so they can get to work. You might be able to manage one agency without a DAM system (at a loss of time and quality of work), but if you have multiple agencies you’ll need DAM capabilities to produce good work together. 

Benefits of using a DAM system when working with an agency

• Present a consistent brand identity through social media, the web, events, and sales collateral by empowering your agencies with brand guidelines and approved assets.
• Set up proofing workflows so creators can produce better content in fewer drafts – no matter their time zone.
• Integrate DAM with Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, and other key creative, marketing, and sales tools.

8. You’ve reached a breaking point in your content management process

Sometimes you just know you can’t manage your content the same way anymore. Perhaps you’ve outgrown your current marketing technology (martech) systems. Or maybe you struggle to provide easy access to your content to users and other systems. Or it could simply be that your deadlines are just becoming unmanageable using your current process. Whatever inspires the realization, a DAM solution can help you move forward. 

Benefits of using a DAM system for content management

• Bring content together with a searchable, shareable library of your photos, videos, documents, podcasts, and product information.
• Securely distribute content to any person or system to support sales, marketing, and e-commerce.
• Accelerate your workflows with automation to guide content through creation, review, approval, and distribution.

9. Major event presence or increased media attention

Your content process might work well internally, but once you have a major media event, those systems break down fast. Now you need to work with external partners, produce high-quality content, and coordinate on tight timelines. 

Benefits of using a DAM system for media

• Create flexible, no-code portals to easily share guidelines, logos, colors, customer testimonials, templates, and key assets with a simple link.
• Reuse and repurpose your best-performing content. Empower your designers with access to working files so they pull layers from existing assets to use in new communications.
• Leverage web-to-print templates to help your designer save time by creating templates that your sales team and dealers can customize for their market or region.

10. New marketing leadership or strategy

We’ve all been through marketing leadership changes or shifts in strategic direction. This almost always comes with higher demand on systems that used to work but can’t live up to the new standards. A DAM system takes the pressure off by managing your content while you focus on new core business needs.

Benefits of using a DAM system for business pivots

• Distribute content to any system for publishing and distribution.
• Streamline work requests, creative production, reviews, and approvals with the level of sophistication that’s right for your organization.
• Sync and deploy content across the martech stack. Eliminate access headaches, licensing issues, and the need to update file versions across tools.

How to get started with DAM

If you don’t already use a DAM platform, you’re going to need one if your company wants to grow and thrive in this digital economy. The right DAM system can simplify everything from omnichannel customer experience initiatives to mergers and acquisitions. With all your content organized in one place, you can do everything else faster. 

Whether you’re going through one of these initiatives or feeling any other effects of content chaos, Acquia DAM (Widen) might be your answer. With over 20 years of enterprise success, our DAM solution helps marketing, sales, and e-commerce teams find what they need, coordinate content-related workflows, and publish up-to-date content. Learn more about Acquia DAM and, when you’re ready, reach out to our advisor team for a free, personalized demo.