Your digital assets are crucial to your marketing efforts.

Tech companies naturally want to leverage their media towards marketing initiatives. To do so, they need to to maintain tight control over how and where their images, videos and podcasts, are used. Scattered and fragmented asset storage leads to lost files and  expensive revisions. You will likely spend countless hours looking for things that should be a click away.

Digital asset management (DAM) solutions keep marketing materials and branded content centrally-organized in a searchable, indexed database. This empowers organizations to work seamlessly regardless of circumstance.

What do Digital Asset Management solutions do?

Digital asset management platforms give companies a way to store and organize their content and content-related data in a consistent, uniform way. When your company deploys a DAM, it gains access to a library of its digital assets. This library will be organized in a cloud-powered, indexable database. This makes it easy for employees and partners to find the assets they need.

Digital assets come in many forms. Even a small tech company with a modest marketing budget can create thousands of files. All of these need to be stored, organized, and versioned accordingly every month.

These assets may include:

• Videos
• Podcasts
• Images and photos
• Audio
• Documentation
• PDF files
• Presentations
• Animations
• Customer feedback
• Analytics data generated by any of the above

These solutions help businesses take control of the content they create. According to the Content Marketing Institute, between 60%-70% of all created content goes unused. This  is often due to the kinds of communication miscues that digital asset management platforms solve.

Why your company needs to invest in Digital Asset Management

Growing companies have to deal with ever-increasing infrastructural challenges to remain competitive. Without establishing an organized, automated solution for asset management, a sudden peak in conversions or sales is simply unsustainable. This becomes a bottleneck that prevents growth.

Deploying a digital asset management solution is the first step towards creating a sustainable platform for marketing growth. This is especially true in a marketing landscape dominated by video content and analytics, and in a ecosystem that values constant content creation.

Here are five reasons why deploying a DAM system will empower your company’s video marketing and analytic strategy:

1. DAMs support communication and collaboration

Without a DAM in place, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of marketing materials and video content. The lack of a single, centralized repository for your organization’s content is a huge problem. It becomes a constant, expensive drain on valuable employee-hours, dragging down productivity.

Have you found yourself searching for a file that another employee sent a week ago? Or, maybe have found yourself frustrated by the fact that you can only seem to find an outdated version from two weeks ago? Well, you have confronted the exact problem that DAM technology solves.

Managers who have to work with a large number of partners, distributors, sales reps, and retailers quickly outpace their ability to autonomously organize content. Forgetting where a certain file is stored is not an end-of-the-world scenario. You can always set aside time to search for it.

However, it does drag down productivity. This will affect business profitability and consumer confidence over time.

Being able to automatically organize and update digital content is incredibly important when it comes to video analytics and content. A good DAM allows users to intuitively upload and share video content with employees, users, and customers while automatically replacing outdated content. DAMs ensure your team is always operating based on the newest information contained in your video content strategy.

2. Managed digital assets = secure digital assets

Email fraud and phishing attacks remain one of the biggest cybersecurity threats out there. Companies that do not centralize their content storage and communication processes are leaving themselves exposed to deliberate attacks.

In an email-only environment, an opportunistic attacker can easily gain entrance to an unauthorized inbox and start searching for sensitive data. This could include customer data – leading to an expensive and reputation-damaging data breach announcement. Alternatively, it may result in the leak of important confidential documents.

In a cloud-hosted environment using Google Drive or Microsoft Office 365 this can prove extremely problematic. Productivity can easily suffer when an unauthorized but well-intentioned employee starts editing materials unannounced.

If you don’t want non-creative personnel interfering with intricate marketing materials, you have to make sure they can’t.

DAMs address this issue by establishing a centralized repository for storing documents, images, and video content and assigning user privileges on a secure basis.

Only DAM administrators have permission to extend privileges to different users, and they can grant or withdraw these privileges whenever needed.

Protecting digital assets from internal and external threats requires paying close attention to DAM user permissions. A digital asset management solution for video marketing will make it impossible for viewers to save images and videos on their devices. This will shield corporate assets from being used and reused illegally by bad actors. Additionally, your brand’s reputation will be protected; your tutorials, testimonials, infographics, and other assets are not hijacked and used to benefit your competitors!

3. DAMs provide best-in-class analytics

Video analytics is one of the most valuable benefits that a DAM can provide. Analytical options for other content types (e.g. email click through rates) are relatively easy to find and integrate. However, it’s much harder to leverage the incredible benefits of video viewer analytic without using DAM systems.

When someone watches a DAM-hosted video, you know it. You can tell where the video was watched, what device the viewer used, and even how far into the video they went.

DAMs that support video heatmaps aggregate this data. You’ll see exactly where your video content is performing the strongest – and where you need to improve.

One of the mistakes that tech companies often make with their digital asset strategy is undervaluing the importance of video analytics. It is not enough to publish video content and wait for people to flock to your website. You need to analyze the traffic you get and find ways to complement it.

Without a DAM in place, you will have to use a video hosting platform, such as YouTube or Vimeo. These companies use their own digital asset management platforms to monetize content. However, they will keep these insights to themselves. They analyze viewer behaviors and engagement in order to increase their conversions – not yours.

With your own DAM in place, you can start learning important things about your audience, with every new video you host.

4. DAMs enable brand consistency for internal and external content

One of the most common problems that companies without a DAM solution face is mixed messaging from their marketing and sales teams.

Imagine that your marketing team just broadcast a new offering to help drive sales by rebranding one of your products or services. Customer requests start pouring in, but your sales team has never heard of the rebranded product that people are suddenly asking for. During the time it takes the sales team to realize it was not kept in the loop, you’re likely to lose out on revenue.

This is a classic consequence of brand inconsistency that ties into company-wide communication. All of your content, and the messaging it includes, has to deliver a consistent experience throughout every customer touchpoint.

Tech companies that present images in generic galleries are denying their users a branded visual experience that a purpose-built gallery would offer.

Embedded YouTube videos are a common culprit of brand inconsistency. Users are often unaware of where YouTube’s suggested content is coming from. If the YouTube video player is embedded on your site, it looks like your brand is suggesting cat videos and teenage livestreams to your users. That might not be the message you want to convey to your audience.

A good DAM prevents you from disrupting the consistency of the customer experience at any part of the sales cycle.

A great DAM will ensure that your internal and external communications are aligned with customer expectations. Additionally, it will enable you to establish branded templates for your own digital assets. Your image galleries and video players can be designed to fit with your brand’s aesthetic, instead of contributing to another company’s.

5. DAMs increase marketing flexibility

There is no such thing as truly evergreen content. Even high-quality content has a shelf-life, and video content in particular can go out of date quite quickly. Any company trying to lay down a long-term marketing plan will need to establish standard operating procedures for its web assets. These will necessarily include editing and adjusting their best-performing videos.

The ability to collect and analyze user engagement with digital content is paired with the need to revise said content, based on user feedback. The ability to establish strict versioning rules for your videos and images will make this goal that much more attainable.

Without a DAM in place, you will need a lot of time engaged in back-and-forth messaging to find and adjust dated content. Additionally, you will also have re-embed that content along with all of the metadata it comes with. For video content, that can mean restarting your analytics from zero and creating a new set of captions from scratch.

Keeping content up-to-date without a DAM is a thankless, time-consuming task!

Keeping well-organized versions of every distributed video in your marketing plan enables unparalleled flexibility. Digital asset management platforms allow you to adjust your content to reflect new consumer trends or sales priorities in mere moments.

Invest in comprehensive digital asset managements with video analytics 

Digital asset management systems are meant to provide a centralized point of reference for all of your content. However, finding a DAM for video analytics is particularly valuable.

87% of marketing professionals use video as their primary marketing tool. A vast majority of marketers will look for a DAM that functions as a video hosting platform.

Prioritize video in your content management strategy. That way, you will be able to make the most of this powerful communication format when addressing your customers and solving their problems. You will save time and easily access valuable content, and undoubtedly streamline marketing activities.