As a marketing leader or CMO, does it get harder for you to share and collaborate on content each year, or easier? Many marketing teams are decentralized and even if they aren’t physically separated themselves, the teams and agencies they collaborate with are. How do you share lots of content between these groups? I mean, LOTS OF CONTENT, not a few pictures or folders. If this is your problem, you may find this article interesting.
Content traditionally and currently may be stored and shared over multiple laptops, servers, and cloud-based storage accounts. Maybe it’s on a hard drive somewhere. Maybe that hard drive belongs to an employee that left the company last year. If your content lives in any of these places, it is potentially at risk.
From a CMO or marketing leader’s perspective, you may have less insight than you want into how content is being produced, if it’s being managed properly, if it is being distributed effectively, or if the marketing initiatives are producing a positive ROI. Or, you might have a handle on some of these, but not others.
Centralize
Fundamentally, content centralization is nothing new. You have Dropbox or Box, so you’re all set, right? Folder-based storage is useful for storing content, just not that much of it. Individual folders of assets are shared through links sent via email, Slack, Skype, or some other communication platform.
The problems really arise when you have thousands or tens of thousands of digital assets – pieces of content. It’s at this point where people typically lose control of their content.
The good news is that there is a solution to this problem. It’s called a DAM – a digital asset management solution.
A DAM is a centralized hub where multiple types of media can be ingested, stored, classified (metadata), and searched. All of the content can easily be routed as needed to distribution destinations. All assets are tracked and have a “history,” so they can be found in the future to be repurposed or archived.
Digital asset management solutions grew 20 to 30 years ago out of the media industry’s insatiable demand for immediate content, where millions of other assets already existed, or tens of thousands of assets were being ingested and processed per hour, as the New York Times experienced during the 9/11 tragedy. You might not need this kind of capability now, or perhaps ever, but the underlying strengths that power the MerlinOne DAM are things that will benefit you immediately, even with only a small library of assets: Robustness, fault tolerance, ease of use, great customer service, many integrations, speed, and many other features benefit all types of DAM users.
So how do yesterday’s media problems help me unite my marketing teams today?
1) Deploying a DAM can both control access to content where needed, but it can also democratize access to content. A DAM is a single repository where all work is stored, and work that is ready for distribution can be shared with others, and work that isn’t ready can be kept accessible to only the team working on it. As employees leave and enter the company, the data doesn’t go with them.
2) Making the content accessible in a self-service portal fosters collaboration between specialized contributors. It allows them to be alerted when a piece of content has been approved, or if it needs to be processed within the next step in a workflow.
3) The DAM also creates a historical record of content, making it much easier for content producers to reproduce marketing campaigns.
4) The DAM goes beyond just being a sophisticated storage tool. It is also a highly-robust production and distribution tool. It can automate approval / versioning processes, file conversions, and distribution workflows. A DAM can deliver content to print, web and social media channels with the click of a button.
5) The DAM provides versioning support – a complete historical view of all actions taken, allowing teams to roll back changes easily if needed. They can see who did what, at what time.
To learn more about how a DAM system can help unite your marketing teams, download our White Paper below.
