How dam creates value beyond the marketing department in the enterprise

• Three key takeaways from this blog post:

  • While digital asset management is a marketing technology platform, the benefits of a well-adopted platform reap benefits across the enterprise, from internal departments such as human resources all the way to customer service.

  • One thing is to improve the productivity of different processes related to content management. Another is getting the ability to realize missed opportunities or mitigate external risk. Digital asset management can realize these “values”.

  • Looking to purchase a digital asset management system or replace an existing one? Understanding and communicating the benefits of the ideal digital asset management platform across the enterprise can help create alignment and smoothen decision-making in a larger, more cross-functional buyer group.

While content creation, management, and distribution more or less reside in the marketing department, it does not mean that the benefits of the platform are isolated.

A general trend we see is that as companies grow and expand the amount of products they sell and the markets they sell in, the complexity of managing content does as well: 

> The volume of content required increases

> The number of channels and customer end-points increase

> The amount of content varieties increase

As this trend continues to accelerate, it attracts stakeholders outside of marketing who access and use content, internal stakeholders as much as external.

Let us use an example of a shoe company:

The shoe company’s marketing department controls the website and e-commerce.

It distributes content to those channels to ensure that buyers can explore the products and conveniently purchase them. But for the shoe company, content distribution doesn’t stop there.

The shoe company’s salespeople need content to effectively sell to partners, and resellers and retailers need its content to sell shoes to consumers on their platforms – be it e-commerce or brick’n’mortar.

Media agencies need content to distribute it to paid channels (TV, social media, outdoor advertising).

And customer service needs content to deliver the best service when the shoe gets broken and the customer calls them or wants to return the product.

That is just an example of how the management and distribution of content play out in an organization.

This creation, management, and distribution can only be truly enabled by digital asset management: A martech platform that governs the whole content value chain – from content creation to content distribution and reuse. 

And while the platform is almost always funded by the marketing budgets, digital asset management delivers value at a much larger scale than make marketers’ life more productive.

In this blog post, we will reflect on the benefits of digital asset management outside of marketing across the following departments:

1. The sales department

2. The HR department

3. The product development department

4. The legal department

5. The IT department

6. The operations department

The sales department

As virtual sales meetings are now the norm rather than the exception, salespeople have undergone a huge change as buyers go omnichannel.

To accommodate this shift, sales leaders have realized that their sales reps must become hybrid sellers and excel at virtual selling as much as they do physically.

Beyond virtual selling capabilities, sales leaders acknowledge that digital-first content and tools are needed for sales reps to keep the buyers’ attention.

A meeting experience can be completely ruined if salespeople spend time finding and trying to share the right content during the meeting.

They need a fast way to search for the correct type of content in a sea of different images, documents, and videos.

To avoid the most used sentence during Teams and Zoom meetings: “Leeeet me just shaaare my screeeen”.

Not only that, without the right technology, salespeople can’t sophistically curate content into sophisticated presentations efficiently and have relevant discussions with potential buyers.

How digital asset management solution empowers virtual sales enablement

While digital asset management is not the right solution to develop virtual selling capabilities, it enables sellers to conduct powerful sales engagements by allowing seamless access to the right assets and content.

• As digital asset management provides a single source of truth of sales-oriented content and tools, salespeople can spend less time searching and sharing for content such as:

  • 3D objects such as product demonstrators or configurators

  • Quotes stored as PDFs

  • How-to explainer videos

  • …and more time on listening to their customers and prospects wants and needs in the short timeframe they have with them.

The HR department

The HR department is somewhat the opposite of marketing.

Instead of focusing on external customers, HR focuses on employees.

Despite their differences, content plays a vital part in HR’s daily tasks to attract, maintain and improve the performance of both current and potential employees. HR’s primary objectives are to:

1. Recruit new employees

2. Deliver a successful onboarding

3. Improve performance of current employees where needed

How digital asset management helps the HR department with its objectives

While it is an art of its own to successfully recruit, onboard, and improve employee performance. Digital asset management delivers practical use cases relevant to HR to reach its objectives.

(1)   Easier to manage and distribute digital content for job advertising and employer branding purposes

(2)   Manage videos and other digital assets related to onboarding, including company introductions and more

(3)   Deliver e-learning modules to the right employees to develop capabilities

The product development department

Why do product developers and managers love their job? Well, because they love to develop new, innovative products with a great and unique market fit!

But often, that love gets challenged as the process of getting a product to market meets delays, gatekeepers, and reviews, resulting in a long and complex product development process.

A typical process looks like this:

And while the product development process is filled with bottlenecks, the last thing product leaders want is getting delayed in the sixth and final step in the process:

Commercialization through a successful product launch.

The need to ensure that the right assets and content are created and distributed effectively and efficiently cannot be overstated in this last stage.

Especially related to the latter, as product leaders are measured on time-to-market.

Case studies show rapid revenue gains by reducing time to market by months, even weeks.

How digital asset management speeds up time-to-market

The ability to optimize content creation through workflows and approvals – and distribute in the right channel, format, and language is near impossible to do correctly and efficiently without a digital asset management system.

Without a digital asset management system, acting as a central content hub, product launches risk getting delayed and promoting the product in the wrong context or in markets where the product is not being sold.

The legal department

Imagine a situation where access rights of images go out of date.

How do you determine where that content is being used across the enterprise, in multiple locations, websites, publications, documents, or videos?

For marketers without digital asset management, it’s a nightmare, as they need to search across a sea of channels to identify and remove content.

And due to this manual approach, human errors are bound to happen.

Suppose just one piece of content is not identified. In that case, the company is unprotected from compliance and legal accusations, risking legal fines for infringing content rights.

How digital asset management ensures compliance and legal protection

With digital asset management, marketers get notified when any bought content is nearing its expiration date, mitigating the risk of right infringement.

As digital asset management acts as a single source of truth for all content, marketers can conveniently archive or replace out-of-date content to ensure compliance and legal protection.

In other words, making the job easier for the legal department.

Moreover, legal leaders can rest assured that future content is compliant with regulations.

As leading digital asset management systems include approval processes and workflows for content creation purposes, the right information owners can be included as approvers to avoid any wrongful or even illegal claims being exposed to markets.

The IT department

A key challenge for IT leaders is storing and retrieving files in multiple systems and storage areas.

A typical scenario for the CIO is the emerging data silos created inside solutions that were initially implemented to solve this very problem, to begin with.

Take, for example, an organization where:

1. MS SharePoint™ is the central file storage library

2. External agencies store the client’s content locally

3. Filesharing via e-mail and local storage simply happens organically in the workforce

For the everyday employee, it’s not a significant problem.

But for the IT department, whose purpose is to maintain and optimize computer network systems within a company, it is a road towards a much more fragmented IT space that leads to a disconnection between systems and low maturity in cybersecurity.

How digital asset management helps IT get the organization technologically streamlined

The promise of digital asset management is to break down silos and set up a single hub for all content in the organization.

A platform that is secure, stable, controllable, manageable, and easy to service and support.

Every IT leader’s dream.

And during purchasing decisions, the last thing IT leaders want is to rip off existing systems.

From IT’s point of view, the ideal digital asset management platform is a system that easily integrates with current IT systems and platforms.

Contrary to end-to-end suite solutions, best-of-breed digital asset management platforms deliver the capability that IT professionals desire.

The operations department

The purpose of the operations department is to ensure that the business is running smoothly and efficiently and oversee day-to-day tasks.

As the operations department engages with marketing, they’re often looking to see where time and resources can be saved to increase the productivity of the marketing operating model.

And they should. Due to four reasons according to IDC Insights and SiriusDecisions:

1. Organizations with over 1,000 employees that cannot locate and retrieve documents see an annual cost of over 2.5 million USD.

2. The subsequent need to duplicate mismanaged content costs an additional 5 million USD.

3. White-collar workers spend approximately 5 hours searching for documents and content per week.

4. For larger organizations, 70% of content ends up being unused.

Unfortunately, large organizations are unproductive and most of marketers’ hard work isn’t paying off.

How digital asset management ramps up productivity in the organization

As we highlighted in a prior blog post, digital asset management is a key platform for reducing time spent on redundant content identification and increasing content usage.

It does so by empowering marketers to upload, manage, search, share on multiple channels and reuse all types of digital content from one place.

• With automated and optimized processes, marketers can ramp up productivity for all internal stakeholders by:

  • Tagging digital files (to make search boolean, and a fast and convenient experience)

  • Enabling rights management (to ensure only the right people can find and get access to your content)

  • Creating collections (a group of files to select and send to specific people)

  • Sharing content across channels simultaneously

The bottom-line: Digital asset management does more than create value to marketing

A good way to get the budget needed for maintaining the current or purchasing a new digital asset management solution may not only be marketing-oriented arguments such as efficient content management.

Instead, showcase how the enterprise benefits from it.

Especially during purchasing decisions where a diverse buyer committee consists of more than marketing professionals. By using tailored arguments, you can create alignment and smoothen decision-making.

Want to know more about digital asset management?

Contact us today for a free, personalized assessment of where you are today, and we’ll be happy to share our expertise and insights on how you can help your business hit your 2022 growth goals.

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