By: Shubhank Goyal, Principal Consultant, LTIMindtree Consulting

With the recent surge in digitalization, enterprises are adopting different solutions—breaking the silos in the MarTech stack to provide best-in-class customer experience across channels. It includes various systems like CMS, DAM, PIM, CRM, MDM, and the list goes on. A digital marketing initiative with MarTech needs a strong and streamlined digital content supply chain. To manage the huge volume and velocity of the content, digital marketers are considering Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems, a cloud-based media library to easily store, find and share all digital assets. A modern DAM comes with the capability to integrate smoothly with other MarTech components and to serve extended business use cases.

With the evolution of Digital Assets Management (DAM) over the years and the inclusion of integration APIs, collaboration & approval workflows, AI tagging, modular content, etc., DAM is not an isolated island but an integral part of MarTech. Let’s see how DAM, when integrated with other systems, serves the purpose of modern marketing requirements and delivers enhanced customer experiences.

DAM with CMS: Sometimes confused as competing systems, but they are rather complementing systems. In simple words, CMS helps marketers edit, create, and publish content across multiple touchpoints. However, it is not designed to manage digital assets’ high volume and velocity. DAM not only helps with the latter use case but also ensures that only the latest and approved assets flow to the CMS. While CMS adapts the representation of the content as per the touchpoint, user’s context, etc. DAM helps CMS with correct media format and size variation. With powerful taxonomy management, approval workflows, and versioning, DAM helps marketers to deliver experiences that are relevant and brand consistent.

DAM with CRM and data platforms: CRM platforms, with a plethora of features, serve various aspects of customer experience, right from 360⁰ customer views to marketing automation to personalize communications. Their efficacy is enhanced when backed by a huge media library that can supply different varieties, formats, and sizes of media along with taxonomy and metadata details. Metadata and media, when coupled with customer preferences information, can help marketers to provide a personalized experience at scale across channels. The performance of the assets can be tracked per customer context and channel and stored in the data platforms. This information can further be used for creating the assets that impact the most.

DAM with PIM and e-commerce: PIM handles the product information, and DAM handles all media and metadata related to the products’ assets. Creating product-related media is just half the fight. The target is to combine product media and information to provide a unique product experience and drive customer engagement. DAM and PIM, when combined, the duo brings wonders for the e-commerce setup. The two-way integration between DAM-PIM ensures correct product assets and metadata match the correct product information. This results in an enriched product catalog, which then can be fed to the e-commerce platforms or other channels to provide a consistent and enhanced product experience. Enriched product catalogs help marketers gain a competitive edge and drive customer loyalty by providing a quality product experience.

DAM is adapted across industries to support their overall content operations and stay ahead of the competition. DAM benefits marketers across industries in one way or another. Here are a few DAM-related use cases and benefits across a few industries.

DAM in Retail, Manufacturing, and Consumer Goods: Marketers in the industry face a paradigm shift in the way users interact and engage with brands. A huge shift toward digitalization poses challenges to marketers in providing omnichannel, personalized, and brand-consistent experiences to their customers. Also, the end consumers are bombarded with lots of content. To stand out from the competition, they need an agile content strategy to help them meet ever-evolving consumer expectations. DAM helps them develop relevant, personalized, and enriched content in shorter timelines to stay ahead and provide the required experience to engage and retain customers. DAM plays a vital role in quickly distributing the latest assets in various formats to different channels. A few e-retailers are also working towards coming up with personalized e-shops with integrated capabilities from DAM, PIM, CRM, and e-commerce platforms.

As content needs increase, it becomes extremely tedious and cost-inefficient for marketers to manage agencies from ideation to final content delivery. DAM with incorporated MRM (Marketing Resource Management) capabilities help plan, budget, and approve content. DAM also accelerates the re-usage of content and thereby provides marketers ample agility to adapt the content strategy as per local requirements.

DAM in life sciences: The timelines in this industry, from R&D to product launch, are quite large. Overall timelines are further extended because of the known road blockers like internal and external approvals, submission to regulatory authorities, etc. Since the marketers in the industry are dealing with legally and medically sensitive data, it holds them back from faster content generation because of multiple iterations in approval processes. This raises the need for a dynamic platform that not only collaborates with multiple cross-functional stakeholders but also drives the re-usage of already approved content to shorten the timelines. DAM’s features like claim libraries, collaborative workflows for LMR (Legal, Medical, and Regulatory approvals), and submissions to health authorities (e.g., FDA, EMA) provide marketers an edge with faster time-to-market and lesser marketing spending. Also, if a claim changes, marketers need not struggle to find and pull all related assets back. With DAM and its claim-asset linkage, they can pull all assets at once (even if they are live) to avoid any potential legal actions. This provides them control over the asset’s generation and distribution from one centralized platform.

Conclusion

When well-integrated, DAM amplifies the impact of each component of MarTech and backs it up with a strong supply of enriched assets. Thereby helping marketers to provide amazing and relevant experiences for their customers while ensuring brand consistency. DAM helps marketers modernize their overall marketing with a streamlined supply chain of enriched assets. If you want to know how you could modernize and innovate your marketing with DAM, please write to shubhank.goyal@mindtree.com.