One of the biggest struggles of marketing and communications teams is the assembling of digital content, managing the workflow and approval process, and then determining how that content will be shared, distributed, or published. If your marketing team does not work in a centralized fashion then you run the risk of wasting time locating assets, delaying opportunities to share them, or quite possibly delivering the wrong or outdated version content.
To avoid these problems the deployment of a Digital Asset Management solution (DAM) will allow you to take control of how assets are catalogued, managed, and accessed within a single repository.
So what can a Digital Asset Management Solution do to help?
Quickly locate images and videos for various marketing campaigns
Stop browsing through folders and waiting for thumbnails to load or even worse-wait several minutes for a file to open from the shared drive, just to find out it was not the one you really wanted. A DAM makes your content searchable and quickly viewable.
Painlessly make a selection from studio shoots
Tired of opening full sized files in a slow imaging or video program? Photographers or videographers can load their shoot into a DAM and you canquickly view low resolution thumbnails or proxies and rate the best.
Keep track of the rights to content to avoid embarrassment or lawsuits
A DAM can help with tracking any usage restrictions, expiry dates and model or product release forms. Content that is out of date can be prevented to be downloaded or even deleted automatically.
Make your brand consistent
How do you make sure the team is using the right digital asset? With a shared file server, you don’t. If it takes someone too long to find content on the shared drive, they might just use what they can find on their computer or email. With a DAM you can make sure only the most recent version is available for your reps in the field and you can keep track of previous versions for historical context.
Approve and distribute your content efficiently
DAMs can manage the approval process and then keep track of who and when they are used. A workflow can be set-up for multi-level approvals with the final approval triggering the distribution to websites, social, print fulfillment partners or become available to reps in the field. Reps can play videos of products from their smart phones or tablets or have quick access to product literature.
Rande Anmuth Simpson
Director of Sales
Email: rsimpson@MerlinOne.com
Phone: 912.258.5060