Don’t Drop the Ball with Your CMS
By Brendan Healy and Andrew Jury
“If I have one, do I really need the other?”
Whether deciding on streaming service subscriptions or which multivitamins to take with your morning coffee, this question comes up in all aspects of life. It is the same question facing web developers and marketers that use a content management system (CMS) to run their business website and wonder what value a digital asset management system (DAM) would add. But with the right planning and metadata we can easily change the premise from either/or to both.
On the surface, a CMS appears to cover all your fundamental web publishing needs. It can post, edit, remove, and store any content that you want on your business websites. So where does a DAM come into play? While a CMS media library can store and manage any content, such as videos, blog posts, product images, webinars, etc., that will be posted to the website, a DAM serves as a company’s repository for all digital assets (photos, videos, documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, animations, etc.) across the organization. Because most organizations would prefer that their business teams avoid hunting down slide show images in the CMS, there is also a DAM. DAMs offer better asset organization and search functions than a CMS media library. A DAM with robust metadata will also integrate with a CMS to seamlessly import assets that will become content for your website. At the core of any successful integration and, by extension, confidence in a single source of truth, is a foundation of meaningful and rich metadata.
Professional sports can offer a realistic example of how integrating a DAM into a CMS ensures an organization can keep its online content up to date. Due to the unpredictable nature of professional football, specifically the National Football League (NFL), off-season trades, injuries, or firings can quickly change the makeup of a team or league. Without an integration between the two systems, the risk of incorporating a traded player, a fired coach, or even an outdated logo becomes a real possibility.
To help illustrate this point, consider the following scenario: A web developer for the Seattle Seahawks is rushing to launch the team’s season ticket webpage ahead of the start of the season. In a rush to get the page live as soon as possible, they quickly choose the most recent graphic depicting a player that is stored in the organization’s CMS’s media library and hit publish right before the deadline.
Minutes later, the team’s marketing manager fervently emails asking why the season tickets page features an image of Russell Wilson – the team’s FORMER superstar player who was traded away in the offseason. The marketing manager explains how all the player graphics were updated and stored in the organization’s DAM, which the developer did not check….
The solution to this situation would be integrating the DAM into the CMS, so that the web developer could access all DAM assets through a plugin and conveniently find the most up to date marketing materials for the website. The success of this integration hinges upon adherence to a codified business-wide metadata management strategy. A robust metadata model is at the core of a MarTech stack, which may contain both CMS and DAM. Each of these systems are powerful and crucial to the marketing success of the business in their own right, but by integrating the two, you enable your business teams to collaborate effectively and fully leverage your company’s digital assets.
