Maximize Your Human Capital with a DAM
By Joshua Cruz and Andrew Jury
The decision to add a digital asset management (DAM) system within your company depends on a variety of factors. For some business leaders, a DAM can seem like an overzealous addition to the day-to-day operations of their creative and marketing professionals For a small organization with few employees, a DAM may be excessive and too expensive for the number of digital assets that are created and owned by the company. However, as companies grow and expand, the value of a DAM can become clearer. When teams grow and tasks need to be delegated across various departments in order to complete projects on time and on budget, a DAM can help simplify operations. Obviously, a DAM can manage your company’s digital assets, but it can also benefit an organization’s human capital. Remember, DAM is a human endeavor; it needs people power to make it all work. The organizational benefits from a DAM are just as important as the technical benefits when trying to maximize the ROI of the company’s digital assets.
To provide a fictional example of the effect of DAM on a company’s operations, let’s take a look at Debbie Ann Miller, the founder of DAM Good Bars, whose healthy snack bar company has seen massive growth over the past three years. The company has grown to the point where Debbie has been able to create departmental teams within the company to help manage and continue to build the brand. Debbie has been thrilled by the recent growth and the expansion of her team, but she has recently noticed a few things about the company that has caused her to lose some sleep. Determined to understand the happenings of the company better, Debbie sits down at her desk and begins to list out what she has recently noticed:
Adding bodies doesn’t always make things better:
The company is growing quickly. Debbie was able to hire more employees to help manage the growth and maintain the steady accumulation of business. However, even with the hiring, Debbie has heard from numerous employees that they have been staying late to meet the deadlines for projects and that they have been struggling to find already existing digital assets.
Even great asset owners can be a bottleneck:
Debbie has noticed that with the growth, the number of emails surrounding asset usage and permission-based tasks have exploded. She feels like she must answer these emails as quickly as possible or else the teams are unable to move forward.
Finding the right asset continues to be a challenge:
DAM Good Bar’s marketing team has been creating fantastic digital assets such as new images and videos that have been used as content for the company’s social media campaigns and website updates. Debbie is troubled, though, by the continued use of digital assets that have been deemed “off-brand”, “outdated”, and “out-of-place”. Debbie is curious as to why this continues to happen with an otherwise great team.
Assets can sometimes disappear:
Finally, Debbie wants to ensure that the assets that had been created in the early days of DAM Good Bar’s existence are able to be used for limited-time bar releases or holiday social media posts, but the assets all live on her personal hard-drive which had recently been misplaced, but thankfully returned. Debbie wants to limit that type of risk.
Keeping Debbie’s list of concerns in mind, we examined the benefits that a DAM would have on her and her employees.
Saving time:
In our first example, Debbie’s marketing processes did not scale with her business. Instead of the new hires increasing marketing output, they were limited due to the difficulty of finding the right assets. In a survey of current DAM users, 81.5% stated that they save up to 5 hours per week on their tasks, while 11% are saving over 10 hours per week. If Debbie implemented a DAM, Debbie and her employees would ideally see a similar amount of time saved as finding assets becomes much simpler, allowing for employee time to be spent on their deliverables.
Minimizing inter-departmental stress and project delays:
Some employees spend hours looking for the right content, and if they can’t find it, or if they assume that someone will have the time to find it for them, they will lean on another employee to do so. This only leads to lost time on their projects and subsequent delays. In the same survey mentioned above, 63% of organizations reported that their DAM cumulatively saves them 10 hours per week, while 33% of organizations saved between 10 to 50 hours per week, and 3.7% saved more than 50 hours per week. If Debbie was at a conference or on vacation, and her employees needed to ask her for a certain asset to finish a project, the project would be on hold until she returned to the office, or worse, they might move forward with using an unapproved version.
Ensuring the use of the “right” assets:
In our third example, by publishing the wrong content, DAM Good Bars is failing to generate any type of ROI as their new content sits on their server. The misuse of assets could be attributed to issues of version control, searchability, or approval processes. Regardless, these are all examples of added unnecessary stress on the team. Department morale might also take a hit as their marketing team is essentially choosing not to publish assets that the content team may have been working on for days, or even weeks.
Centralizing assets in one place:
In our final example, Debbie was extremely fortunate to not lose all of her marketing assets from the company’s early days. Luckily, she only had to worry about one hard drive instead of having years of content spread out in multiple locations. If Debbie centralizes her assets within a DAM, she gains a secure location to store those assets, where they can be easily findable by her marketing team to create timely campaigns around them.
If any of Debbie’s challenges are familiar or the solutions sound appealing, you may be a perfect candidate for a DAM. Deploying a DAM can alleviate many operational pain points and help you and your team scale your business. Creative professionals and all those working in marketing, communications, operations, and other areas require content to be provided at the cost of remaining competitive and delivering what the consumer wants, when and where they want it. Content is only valuable if it can be found
At Salt Flats, we have helped clients across all industries deploy and maximize the ROI of DAM systems to solve problems just like these. If you want to learn more about leveraging your digital assets in new ways and providing your team with the best practices of asset management, consider reaching out to the team at Salt Flats.
