Without Digital Asset Management (DAM) software, businesses have to get by with ad-hoc solutions.
Most of the time, that means a combination of home-grown processes and a variety of tools and databases. All of these are disconnected from one another.
Having multiple disconnected systems running in parallel is expensive. It costs time and resources that can be put to better use. As your company grows, they become even more expensive.
There comes a time for every growing business when investing in digital asset management makes sense. Knowing when it is the right time to implement a DAM solution requires examining your current workflows with a critical eye.
There comes a point when hiring more employees to handle asset and media file management stops generating value. This is the turning point that business leaders should look out for.
5 signs it’s time to purchase a DAM system
If any of these situations sound familiar to you, it might be time to improve digital asset management.
1. Publishing and sharing video has become resource-intensive
When your business first starts using video content as a value-generating marketing tool, content production is the main expense. As time goes on, video becomes more streamlined while publishing and sharing costs soar.
This is especially true if you have hundreds of different products and multiple reseller channels. The sheer volume of imagery, video, and other content your marketing team creates is too high. Anything less than a purpose-built digital asset management system will not produce results.
Forward-thinking executives opt for digital asset management software before reaching this critical point. Organizing your digital infrastructure early on makes it much easier to maintain best-in-class resource efficiency down the line.
Centralized management enables more advanced processes. Team members can’t track, report, or secure a large library of brand assets without the right toolset in place.
2. Your DAM processes have become repetitive
DAM solutions automate your team’s most repetitive tasks. Every digital asset you use has to be named, sized, and formatted to various specifications. Some assets must exist in multiple formats. Without a system in place, organizing, reviewing and approving them requires a great deal of repetitive, low-value work.
All of the work that goes into formatting digital assets and updating their metadata is necessary. But that doesn’t automatically make it valuable.
There is an opportunity cost to assigning employees to do repetitive work – namely, the value of the highest-impact work they could be doing.
If managing your digital assets is a repetitive task that produces little bottom-line value, it might be time to improve digital asset organization. Automating these repetitive processes helps you free up resources for higher-impact strategic tasks. Your team can focus on the work it does best.
3. You need to track and optimize video performance
Videos might be your most important digital asset. Video content does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to promotion, marketing, sales, and support. If you cannot track video performance success, improving it is impossible.
Without digital asset infrastructure in place, there is no way to systematically track and improve the performance of digital assets. Your intuition might tell you that replacing a certain video will improve sales, but you can’t be certain without gathering data.
Using a digital asset management platform that enables data capture and tracking changes that. You can start optimizing your sales approach by regularly improving the content you use to promote your products. Best of all, you can do this in a thorough, organized way.
4. Managing digital assets is becoming too complex
Optimized sales content includes a combination of images, videos, and PDF content. Creating, tracking, and managing this content for a dozen products can be challenging. Doing this consistently for several hundred (or several thousand!) products is not feasible.
Simply cataloging every product is a task in itself. Some products will be missing images. Others will be missing support documents. Many of these digital assets will be in various stages of production. Keeping track of them all is not possible without a purpose-built database.
Without centralized digital asset management in place, your company has to make a compromise. You either limit the number of products you make digital content for, or you dedicate more employee-hours to managing that content over time.
The first option will result in missed sales opportunities. The second option increases the cost of creating optimized marketing content. That drives up customer acquisition costs across the board.
If asset management becomes something too unwieldy for a single full-time employee to handle, implementing a DAM solution becomes the best option.
5. You want to monetize digital assets but don’t know how
Many businesses have an opportunity to monetize digital assets. This can mean anything from selling specialized support plans to educational video content. It could even mean opening up your digital content to third-party advertising.
Once your videos, images, and documents start producing cash on their own, tracking their performance becomes a necessity. Publishers, advertisers, and partners are going to expect you to gather data and justify their investment in your content.
This cannot be achieved without a DAM solution in place.
Capturing and analyzing engagement data through a monetization-oriented video hosting platform will let you demonstrate the value of your content to third-party partners. It will streamline the time-to-value of all your digital assets and allow you to focus on delivering that value to end-users and partners.
Make Digital Asset Management part of your growth plan
Digital infrastructure is critical to business growth. The ability to automate image, video, and document management tasks improves the average value of every employee-hour paid.
Growth is the first indicator your business is ready for digital asset management. Invest in a feature-rich video hosting solution that streamlines your management tasks and processes today.