“Digital Asset Management empowers content marketers to deploy the right visual content to the right channel, in the right format, at the right time, for the right audience.” – Widen – Digital Asset Management
Digital asset management or DAM is about how a company uses practices, software, and policies to monitor and optimally use the company’s digital assets. According to experts, digital asset management solutions must display the culture, thoughts, and work processes of the company – a collective consciousness. For a company, proper DAM would ensure that everyone working in the company currently and in the future would gain answers to all their questions simply by looking at the data. Digital asset management is so important because it proves to be invaluable for creating engaging and memorable experiences necessary to attract and retain customers. The longer a company can keep customers engaged, the higher the chances of brand loyalty and affinity. Digital asset management solutions and systems enable a company create, manage, and disseminate digital content with consistency across channels, ensuring that it reflects the ‘personality’ of the brand, thereby reaching a wider audience more effectively.
Today most transactions and interactions have ‘turned digital’, which has changed the landscape of marketing, asset management, service, and other domains directly connected to a company’s customers. Given these facts, at least 67% companies have looked at increasing the budget for managing digital content and initiatives. In the digital world, digital assets determine the customer’s experiences significantly, and it would be prudent for companies to ensure that their teams and technologies work cohesively, in order to ensure success through customer satisfaction. By integrating digital asset management with customer experiences, companies can swiftly and effectively, deliver rich content and high quality media. This in turn enhances customer interactions by making them relevant, personalized, and more efficient – all factors that keep customers with a company and make them want to help the company become successful.
Many companies today (84%) believe that one of their biggest challenges in digital asset management is locating files. This becomes even more critical with regard to customer data and information – imagine being unable to locate information because it is scattered across files, hard drives, and possibly ‘the cloud’. The other major benefit of digital asset management is that it conjoins with customer experiences, and provides a company with in-depth expertise related to compliance management, removal of legal hassles usually associated with negotiation rights, and of course expertise in managing every customer experience and interaction. Digital asset management for customers is about a company being able to protect its assets across every campaign, which in turn would be beneficial for customers too. The complexity of managing so many assets is simplified through the ‘marriage’ of digital asset management and customer experience management. The conjoined system ensures that the relevant content becomes approved, available, and protected effectively across every channel and customer touch-point.
A company’s digital asset management generates the most value for customers, because it the company is able to deliver consistent, engaging, and personalized customer experiences. A happy combination of DAM and customer experiences enables a company to use the content that works best for customers, and can be presented in the right context to customers. This essentially means that a company would be able to serve customers better since they would have access to the customer’s history with the company and the details of all interactions customers may have had with the brand in the past. Customers expect the very best and the most relevant products and it is the job of companies to ensure that they provide customers with what they need. Through an integrated digital asset management and customer experience process and strategy, the company would be able to offer its best assets in a way that meets and maybe exceeds their expectations. A company may have the fanciest technology and the flashiest advertisements for its products, but it would not be taking full advantage of its assets without a proper integration of digital asset management and customer experiences. It would not be able to deliver the relevant assets to the right customers at the time that they expect.
In the business world today, both the marketing and IT departments are responsible for digital asset management and for personalizing the customer experience. Companies today understand that they must invest in the latest marketing technology and the IT department has a pivotal role in helping companies decide on those technologies. These two departments must work closely to align digital asset management and customer experiences, ensuring that the technology remains relevant, durable, helps to meet the customer’s and business’ requirements. The technology must help the company by being reliable and applicable at a global level. Neither of the departments must waste resources especially time to search for the assets of the company, or in fretting about permissions, or manually aligning the digital assets to customer interactions – the combination of digital asset management and customer experience will ensure ease of operation.
There are several companies today doing remarkably well in creating top class customer experiences, simply by aligning digital asset management and customer experiences. However, it must be remembered that it is not only the ‘big boys’ who would need such alignment and integration. Customer behaviour and expectations are unique and they are demanding from every company, and hence brands must formulate effective selling and marketing strategies, and be able to present their digital assets – read content – to their customers.
With the rise of digital content across all industries, competition has become tougher making companies look at modernizing and automating their processes and methods of communication. Companies understand the importance of online reputation management and the management of content – this enables them to work towards creating seamless methods for designing and distribution of content. Of course, it is necessary for this content to appear similar and relevant across different channels, platforms, and electronic devices. Successful companies know that content is not only about relevance but also about being compliant, and even though digital asset management is a new area and businesses are taking time to understand it, failure to adapt will result in issues around customer data and the company’s asset security and privacy, leading to serious problems for the company.
Through digital asset management a company is able to secure the relevant and required permissions and rights to effective content such as text, videos, images, and other multimedia. Digital content has to be compatible and compliant – across all channels, without compromise. Today the number of businesses that have adopted digital asset management continues to rise. There seems to however, be a lack of skilled employees to use these systems and leverage its strengths to help enhance customer experiences and help the business to progress and reach its goals. Since digital asset management and customer experiences are tied together closely, companies without in-house capability must collaborate with professional agencies to effectively manage the alignment. Today innovation and efficient implementation of communications is a necessity for all companies spanning all industries and markets. By using digital asset management, a company would become quality and compliance assured, and would be able to increase their ROI on customers, thereby improving their revenue and profits. Companies would be able to focus on more important and strategic business processes, and be able to serve customers better, leading to happy loyal customers. Is your company using digital asset management?
