I'm New to Data Driven Decisions -- Where do I Start?
By Erica Hornung
In a previous post, Salt Flats’ Insights & Analytics team members Joshua Cruz and Andrew Jury discussed ways in which implementing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system can benefit different types of businesses. Now, your company has taken the next step - you’ve implemented a DAM system and might be using other software tools, like Product Information Management (PIM) tools to manage, integrate, and track your company’s assets – but what’s next? Besides organizing and making assets more discoverable for your users, what other kinds of insights and analysis can you glean from your management tools? If your company is now handling many more assets or data types than any one person could ever keep track of, it might be time to look at making data driven decisions – but where do we even start?
In this, the first of a series of posts considering the extended benefits of DAM and data driven decisions we have planned for 2023, we look at the steps your company can take to start leveraging your DAM to make data driven decisions. No matter the size of your business or the maturity of your data model, there are insights to be gleaned from an analysis of your data.
Step by step: a strong data foundation supports data driven decisions
Any data driven decision starts with analyzing the data you are interested in – this sounds obvious, of course! However, if your business’ metadata model, implemented as a part of your DAM system, does not include the data you need, your analysis is over before it can start. By first taking the time to plan the types of data you want to analyze and including that metadata into your metadata structure, your business will be able to leverage that information in making data driven decisions. Next, your users will be able to analyze the data you have built into your DAM system, to discover insights that will lead to making more informed business decisions regarding your digital assets. But what does this process look like in the real world?
Let’s say your business runs a lifestyle website – your DAM might include thousands of images relating to cooking, travel, pet care, home décor, or wellness. What kinds of data driven decisions can be made with a collection like this? For a lifestyle website, your users might be interested in maximizing image ROI – being able to identify images that could be re-used, rather than investing in new images. With the proper metadata model, image selection decisions like these can be made based on data, rather than gut feelings. Let’s examine these use cases in more detail.
Maximize ROI on digital images
Whether your lifestyle site purchases digital images or creates them in-house, these assets represent a substantial investment of time and money. However, every year, your designers end up using the same pumpkin images over and over, because up until now it’s been difficult to find anything– but now you have a DAM, so finding images with the keyword “pumpkin” is easy. Because your company has implemented a well-designed data model, your images are not only tagged with topical keywords – “pumpkin,” “turkey,” or “apple pie,” – but are also tagged with the dates each image was used on your website. Now, when a designer searches for “pumpkin,” the DAM can return not only those images, but also report on how often an image has been used, in which content channel, and when. A user can decide to surface assets that have never been used on the site or used once a long time ago – using such assets again can result in significant cost savings. Combine these insights with website traffic data and identifying assets that haven’t been used recently that also have characteristics in common with your site’s most popular images is made much easier.
What’s the bottom line for my company?
Whether your business is new to DAM tools or has had tools in place for some time, data derived from DAM and other systems can be incorporated into decision making processes, resulting in cost benefits. Simple data analysis, such as identifying how frequently an asset has been used, can result in data driven decisions that maximize your investments in creating or acquiring digital images. More sophisticated tools, such as semantic analysis platforms, can identify topics that are over- or under-represented in your content, giving your business the opportunity to exploit gaps. In future posts, we will examine these more complex data driven possibilities, such as ensuring brand safety, keeping up with design trends, and using metadata to surface more diverse images in your collection.
Of course, the insights your organization may garner from analytics tools are only as good as the metadata attached to your assets. Salt Flats specializes in designing customized, future-looking metadata models that result in insights that are most critical for your business. If you are ready for the next step in your data journey, contact us today to start a conversation about what data driven decisions can do for your company.
Coming soon! Register here for our upcoming webinar, Where's my DAM Value?
January 17th, 2023, at 9:00 AM PST/ 12:00 PM EST.
Join Salt Flats’ John Horodyski to discuss how organizations can realize maximum value from their DAM.
Topics include:
Revenue drivers
Cost savers
Enabling business growth
Distribution discovery
In a world where tighter budgets require a clear return on investment, register now to discover how to unlock more strategic value from your DAM.