March 06 2015 0comment

Maximize returns from your marketing assets

Marketing assets are expensive to produce and store. It is therefore imperative to ensure that the right content is not only available to users on the platforms that they choose but also ensure that content consumers are met with consistent brand messaging. Marketing users are continuously looking for ways to improve their productivity via automated collaborative and workflow solutions, easy search and retrieval of content, easy repurposing content for consumption across multiple channels. With Digital Asset Management, enterprises can immensely enhance workplace productivity and brand value since rich media content is now more efficiently managed across its lifecycle from creation to multi-channel and multi-platform consumption and preservation.

Need for a DAM

Marketing and brand assets carry an intrinsic value that is far more than the cost of production of the asset. Most mid to large organizations spend an average of 6-10% of their revenues in the form of marketing dollars. With the increasing adoption of mobile and social media, CMO’s are increasing looking for ways to best leverage digital marketing channels to accelerate cycle time to reach to their end customers and engage with them more effectively. In a

2013 US Digital Marketing Spends Survey by Gartner, digital marketing was found to consume about 25% of the CMO’s overall marketing spend. Mobile advertising continued to make great strides with spends more than doubling in 2013 vs. 2012.

The cost of the rich media asset is one of the biggest marketing costs for an enterprise. The lifecycle of new products is only reducing and marketing is expected to launch new campaigns with supporting materials in a rapid way.

Organizations are continuously creating several types of content such as corporate videos, podcasts, e-learning modules, infographics etc. Any asset that has a purpose, value, history and future is considered a digital asset.

Effective management of these assets is a business imperative to maximize return from these investments. On the one hand, the cost and time taken to production should be brought down, and on the other hand, these assets should be readily accessible and re-usable as much as possible for future campaigns. A marketing campaign may be repeated years after its original production with only updates to the format rather than re-creating the campaign all over again.

Assets should be catalogued and securely stored. Business users, creative agencies, and stakeholders in the CMO organization should be able to search and retrieve these assets when required. They should be able to collaborate and work on an asset during the creation process rather than working in silos.

It should also be possible to quickly transcode assets into various formats for dissemination across multiple channels. Users should have visibility into Copyright license lapses and legal compliance at the time of usage of an asset. Assets should be only available to trusted users so that they do not get corrupted due to misuse.

Choosing the right DAM

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution effectively manages the whole lifecycle of a digital asset. DAM software is available in various flavors including on-premise and hosted solutions but the CMO’s needs to consider various parameters in order to choose the best DAM solution for their enterprise.

Some of these are:

  1. Identify goals and create a blueprint – The DAM solution should be rich with features that are in line with your goals for this investment. It is important to evaluate which features take priority over some others based on the goals that enterprises set for themselves. Importantly, it will help put together a roadmap that supports in a phased wise approach to implementation.
  2. Total Cost of Ownership – including cost of software and related maintenance for license, recurring support costs, hardware costs, network bandwidth costs and change management costs.
  3. Choosing the right implementation partner – This is a very important element in getting you DAM solution right. Not all services organizations are adept at understanding the unique requirements of the CMO organization. Enterprises should therefore be careful to choose the right partner who has consultants with the right expertise to sell, implement and support the DAM solution.

Benefits of DAM

Some business benefits of a DAM solution include:

  1. Cost savings and improved productivity: DAM supports costs savings by:
    •  Enabling faster cycle time in asset production.
    •  Finding the right asset when the business user needs it based on his / her usage rights.
    • Ensuring that licensed assets are not downloaded repeatedly by business users but only downloaded based on needs.
  2. Enables new revenue streams: Increasing the usage of the asset across multiple distribution channels ensures that all revenue channels allows new pricing and packaging options that was hitherto non- existent
  3. Compliance and Risk: This is significantly brought down as a result of ensuring that copyrights / license right lapses are considered. Also only authorized users now have access to the content.
  4. Analytics: Usage patterns and trends can now captured for enterprise rich media content, thereby supporting the CMO planning cycle.

Summary

DAM is a strategic investment area for most mid to large enterprises. A DAM increases the value of your brand, maximizes returns from your marketing investments and if implemented correctly can be a long term, valuable asset for any enterprise