Digital Asset Management Organizes B2B Content Chaos
Digital asset management (DAM) is the process of organizing all the content items marketing teams create. Find out why establishing DAM involves more than a software purchase, and how to ensure your team makes the most of every content item.
Back “in another lifetime, one of toil and blood,” (apologies to Bob Dylan) I worked in the field of records management. That line of work morphed into information management, and then enterprise content management, data governance, and then information governance and then, who knows? I haven’t been keeping track.
The point behind all these concepts is having the right information in the right place for the right people at the right time. In B2B marketing circles, the term people tend to use is digital asset management.
Digital asset management is the process of systematically creating, distributing, organizing and storing digital assets throughout their lifecycle. By digital assets we mean B2B marketing content items like documents, photographs, illustrations, audio and video files.
Organization Isn’t Always Creative Peoples’ Strong Suit
It’s a stereotype, but I’ve found it’s true. Organization isn’t always creative peoples’ strong suit - not because they’re lazy or careless but because their minds are always focusing on new ideas.
So, when the time comes to reuse the multimedia content they’ve come up with, it can be hard to track down the original versions. Digital asset management’s goal is to help businesses store, search for and share multimedia files within and across teams.
Today’s B2B content marketing programs thrive on multimedia creation. That makes?managing digital assets vital to your team’s campaigns.
Marketing Departments Accumulate Content Arsenals
By now, most B2B marketing departments have accumulated quite a content arsenal. Even so, to make the most of it, and avoid reinventing the wheel, teams are looking for better ways to organize and maximize the value of all these content assets.
The trouble is, too many teams have approached DAM by simply adding another application to their existing tech stack. Successful digital asset management calls for not only technology, but also processes and practices to improve the way teams work with content.
Acquiring the latest applications from Adobe, OpenText, Canto or Aprimo won’t, on its own, make your content easier to find, use or share. You’ll need to work with your team to come up with standard categories, tags, filenames and workflows to bring consistency and efficiency to they way you manage digital media.
Establish Standard Categories and Workflows
In fact, it’s smarter to work through that exercise before you go shopping for a DAM application. That way, you’ll have a clearer picture of what you need the selected software to do for your team, and you can include those needs in your product specifications.
The core of most DAM systems is a central asset library containing and organizing all your team’s content items. There’s often a folder structure, like a physical filing system, representing your categories, projects or campaigns.
The system should also help you find assets via metadata like asset name, description, keywords, copyrights and tags. Version control can be even more important, ensuring everyone works with the correct iteration of each asset.
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Choose a Tool That Supports Your Team’s Work Processes
One of the key advantages of reviewing how your team works, and how they’d like to?be working, is to assess a DAM’s workflow functionality. You’ll want to choose an application that facilitates collaboration, review and approval processes the way your team functions rather than creating bureaucracy or bottlenecks.
You also need to pay close attention to the user experience applications provide. You want something simple, designed with creatives in mind and to which team members can relate intuitively.
As always you’ll also need to consider how the DAM will integrate with other applications in your tech stack. You’ll want to work with your IT group to sort out the kinds of information the applications will need to share and how they’ll do it.
Start Bringing Order to Your Existing Chaos
Once your team has a DAM repository in place, you can start bringing order to your existing chaos. You’ll be spending more time creating or repurposing content and less time searching through folders and shared drives for existing content.
As team members adapt to your new ways of working, collaboration will also improve. Everyone will be on the same page with revisions, and approval processes will stop being such a hassle.
You should also be spending less time reminding your team about brand guidelines. Staff will be confident they’re working with the most up-to-date iterations of brand-approved content, which helps maintain brand integrity.
Maintain Consistency and Support Customization
While maintaining consistency, a digital asset management program also helps with personalization and customization. Your team can tailor and deliver custom content for particular market segments, while keeping track of various versions and iterations.
By automating your team’s digital asset management, you can also gain access to analytics and reporting. The system can tell you which assets your team uses the most, how they perform, and how well they engage customers. This can be an eye-opener.
Given the enormous volume of digital content with which today’s B2B marketing departments work, team members can’t be left to do their own thing in terms of storing and retrieving the assets they create. All assets require management, and developing processes for how content is created, distributed, stored and used will be critical in the evolving digital landscape of B2B content marketing.
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1 年It can very helpful when you want to have an quick view about what has been happened to exact product or service, also facilitates transfer experiment to new team members