If your enterprise-level marketing department relies on traditional asset management tools, chances are it’s costing you time, money, and sales. In an office environment, employees spend, on average, 25% of their time dealing with content. Personnel work longer and harder to keep track of your presentations, data sheets, case studies, and social media interactions; not to mention exorbitant print costs to keep all your content up-to-date.
As a result, productivity can suffer – whether marketing staff are scrolling through Twitter feeds, auditing the consistency and accuracy of materials deployed in the field, or simply making sure everyone who needs it has access to marketing collateral. If you don’t have a well-designed process, your marketing team can end up spending valuable hours each day on the tedious task of asset organization.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions are intended to make organization, distribution, and consistency of important marketing collateral easy. A great DAM makes asset management intuitive and quick, freeing up your team to do what they do best. Here are three telling signs to help you determine if now is the right time to implement a DAM solution.
1. Your field personnel are flying blind.
If you’re a relatively small operation—a handful of sales people with a small marketing department all working out of a single office—management of marketing assets probably isn’t holding you back. The minute things spread out and work becomes siloed, you should start thinking about when to implement a DAM.
Let’s say you have multiple sales teams designated by region, target organizations, and product line. Members of multiple product teams interface with marketing at multiple levels. These personnel are disbursed throughout buildings, across campuses, and in numerous geographic regions. You can’t just yell over the cube wall to confirm all stakeholders are using the latest version of a solution or product brief.
Without a defined process or system for asset management, sales people become unsure if they’re presenting the most up-to-date materials to new prospects or clients they are upselling. Marketing personnel spend time and resources policing decentralized assets—often reduced to email notifications imploring field personnel to confirm they are using the correct materials.
Large and growing companies deploy technology—increasingly from the cloud—to manage finances, operations, and sales. Why not marketing assets? Organizations with strong, consistent branding are 20% more effective than those lacking it, because their sales and marketing team are working from one unified playbook—the right one.
A DAM solution can make your marketing assets more effective in the same way enterprise resource planning (ERP) software helps optimize production and distribution.
2. You’re in the cloud, but the marketing department isn’t.
Have you already implemented cloud services in other parts of the organization? If your IT department already integrates cloud applications and storage securely into the company’s technology infrastructure, that removes a common roadblock to DAM adoption.
Implementing DAM technology in this case not only benefits sales and marketing, but helps streamline the broader operation. Storage and management centralizes, eliminating manual transfers and updates. Fewer on-premise resources equate to time and money saved on maintenance.
DAM technology becomes part of a larger, cloud-based IT strategy that saves money, time, and resources—keeping the organization more profitably focused on driving revenue.
3. You know you’re leaving money on the table, but you’re not sure how much.
If you’re reading this blog, it’s probably not the first time you’ve researched DAM tools and their potential value. The marketplace is full of remedial calculators promising astonishing returns on investment (ROI). It’s not that simple.
An equation involving the number of assets, labor hours, and dollar cost per hour will not do the trick. Assets by their very nature are not commodities. They change, they evolve, hence the need for a DAM in the first place.
To determine the benefit of a DAM against the cost of not implementing one, first consider:
- The diverse levels of employee education, IT literacy, familiarity with DAM concepts, and other factors impacting implementation
- Methodology for DAM implementation and strategy for data integration
- Size of your asset repository
- Depth of training required to effectively use the DAM once it is implemented
From there, ascertain how content is managed using the DAM. Is it actually any easier to ensure consistency and access for all users? Have you really accelerated your marketing efforts? A concerted effort must be made upfront to predict and then measure how your new DAM will effect your business.
Pop Art’s intuitive, easy-to-implement DAM solution can deliver tangible, quantifiable value to your sales and marketing efforts.
Better Asset Management
Have you experienced any frustrations due to poor asset management? How does your company ensure that sales and marketing always have the most up-to-date collateral? Is your current DAM working the way it ought to?
Resources:
- Learn more about Digital Asset Management
- Smart Source – Lightweight Sales Enablement with powerful Digital Asset Management
- Freightliner Sales Tool – World Class Sales Enablement
