Why every successful marketing campaign starts with a DAM

We live in an era where the average marketing spend for companies worldwide is above 10% and growing at a rate of 5% each year. Marketing departments are moving to a profit center model and spending 26% of their budgets on content creation. It makes sense then that the most successful brands are investing in technology that helps their Marketing departments protect and repurpose these assets across more channels, more frequently. To do this successfully, Marketers are using Digital Asset Management solutions or a 'DAM.'

What is a DAM?

Anyone who has used a stock image library has used a type of DAM. A DAM is how you store thousands (or tens, or hundreds of thousands) of digital assets safely, then search and discover them in seconds. DAM's allow you to use metadata created by content creators and AI to refine your searches from thousands of images to just a few in seconds. DAMs enable you to discover assets using multiple cues including formats, colors and subject matter. Even if you don't know an image's name, a DAM allows you to do visual searches to find what you need.

Why do DAMs change the way marketing departments and organizations work?

As humans, we tend to use file naming conventions meaningful to us, even when business rules dictate something different. When you have successive team members and external providers creating content, these naming conventions can vary dramatically. This is why as collections become larger, it becomes increasingly difficult to find digital assets in folder-based storage systems, like Dropbox. Conventional storage systems don't use metadata or tagging as guides to help with discovery. They also don't use visual previews at every level. Without these features search times increase and so do the chances of unsuccessful searches. It's more than just problematic to marketers; it often results in underutilization of valuable visual assets and lost time.

Why DAMs are not just used for Marketing departments

DAMs allow any approved user in an organization to lay their hands-on digital assets in seconds. DAMs provide more intuitive search functions, allowing team members across multiple departments to access assets in multiple formats instantly. DAMs also enable organizations and brands to control who has access to digital assets and how they are used. DAMs also allow brands to manage version control across all forms of communication and provide an auditable trail with reports on asset usage.

Why are DAMs essential in an era of agile marketing?

Agile marketing has crept up on us all. Best practice social media marketing tells us we need to create as many as 600 posts per month ... and that's just for the top 4 social channels. We all need to better utilize our email and cell/mobile phone databases, with more accurate marketing segmentation and personalization. It all starts with a DAM. It's how successful brands worldwide are repurposing each piece of content up to 5 times and amplifying it across all of their digital and analog channels. It's how they are managing teams of content creators remotely and securing valuable assets against staffing insecurities and cyber-attacks.

Once you have a DAM, what's next?

Your new DAM allows you to collect, curate, and access your digital assets more quickly. In a perfect world, the next step would be to deliver these assets into an agile campaign creation tool seamlessly. XL.Today™ is the first agile campaign creation solution with a DAM at its core. With XL.Today™ you can now manage all of your digital assets in a way that makes discovery instant and allows you to create and launch multi-channel campaigns in just a few minutes.