By Picturepark Communication Team • Mar 07, 2022
The possibilities are almost limitless for any business with a large digital marketing scope. Their channel-specific content can be retrofitted into new content, fueling multichannel strategies. Individual assets can be repurposed, shared among teams, and used across different platforms. They can even be used to craft press kits, helping businesses get much-needed media coverage. But there lies a challenge, too; it’s endless. Content marketing requires time and effort, which all too often translates into budget strains and productivity losses. As one’s reach expands, deep pools of digital assets become increasingly hard to manage efficiently. This is where Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions emerge as a solution, as their name implies. To explain, let us explore what it is and exactly how DAM can improve your content marketing strategy.
The challenges of content marketing
If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re somewhat aware of both content marketing and its inherent challenges. Still, let us briefly outline them here to contextualize what follows.
Content marketing refers to expansive content creation, distribution, and moderation strategies. A digital marketing staple, it has become interlinked with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) no less than Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. It thus offers ample opportunities to broaden your reach and facilitates brand growth, as it begins with brand visibility and awareness and ends with securing conversions. In the simplest of terms, content marketing strategies fuel sales funnels and enrich customer journeys like a few others.
Yet this invaluable business practice comes with distinct challenges, which time only exacerbates. Among others, consider the following telling statistics:
Marketers waste almost 7 hours a week on pure content duplication, according to NetImperative.
Some 60% of created content is “just clutter” that fails to benefit brands, MarketingWeek finds.
In terms of B2B, content marketing budgets will increase like B2C. Yet, CMI research finds only 49% of B2B companies even use a Content Management System (CMS) at all.
Digital Asset (Content) Management is a significant challenge, especially for businesses lacking central content hubs. Worse yet, it easily spirals into less productivity, schedule inconsistencies, and a lack of focus on what content actually performs.
What is a DAM?
We may now assert that DAM can improve your content marketing strategy with this context in mind. To support this, let us briefly explain what DAM is.
As the name implies, DAMs like Picturepark are centralized digital asset management solutions. Their functionalities cater to the entirety of the content life cycle, from planning and creation to distribution and retention. Their exact features will vary among different solutions but will typically include:
Advanced search features including search suggestions for easier asset retrieval
Custom metadata enrichments with structured and unstructured metadata
Asset manipulation features, such as conversion, resizing, and reformatting tools
Asset history and version tracking
Custom access permissions for different departments and external users
Because of these features, many marketers use CMS and DAM as interchangeable terms. However, that’s not quite accurate; CMSs delve into final content management, whereas DAMs manage assets that fundamentally make up the content. That’s not to say one is superior to the other, of course, but only that they’re genuinely different. They can synergize brilliantly, but one offers no complete substitute for the other.
How DAM can improve your content marketing strategy
Having established DAMs’ potential for content marketing, let us finally explore our main subject; exactly how they can do so. In no particular order, consider the four factors that follow.
#1 Content creation speed
Perhaps the most readily visible benefit of DAM lies in plain content creation speed. Where disorganized content creation can lead to the aforementioned time waste, DAM solutions allow swift access to exact assets.
The proverbial “asset hide-and-seek” can occur all too often. Consider such examples of content creation setbacks it can result in as:
Asset recreation; having to recreate assets from scratch to meet deadlines.
Asset substitution; having to use second-choice assets, which diminish content effectiveness.
Asset misuse; using assets sub-optimally to avoid further time waste.
Such cases are all too common, and they considerably slow down content creation. DAM solutions help teams save time and perform at their best through metadata, keyword tagging, and advanced search features.
#2 Cross-team and cross-party collaboration
In turn, DAMs’ centralized asset access can considerably improve collaboration. Beyond content creation, distribution and use present challenges, typically due to asset silos.
To elaborate on this, consider the parties that may be involved in content marketing:
Internal collaboration is crucial in in-house teams - from different marketers to sales teams.
External marketing partners - agencies, resellers, affiliate marketing partners, and more may also require selective asset access.
PR and media - finally, as highlighted above, press kits and reporter requests also hinge on swift, efficient collaboration.
In this regard, DAM can improve your content marketing strategy by reducing time waste and minimizing human error across channels. It prevents redundant communication for file request follow-ups; it prevents file transfer mishaps; it reduces the need for channel expansions. Everything all relevant parties might need lies in one central asset hub, ensuring seamless collaboration and appropriate, selective access.
#3 Brand compliance
For that matter, the collaboration also entails brand compliance. Content efficiency hinges on proper, consistent brand representation when it comes to branding, which content marketing often spearheads.
You may consider a brand’s visual identity in terms of assets that will fuel content. It will span tone, style, and similar qualities, but primarily rely on asset content and substance. This type of compliance should ensure assets avoid case-sensitive subjects, and users readily know of the characteristics and needs of each asset. However, the massive scale of modern content marketing often inhibits manual asset moderation in this sense.
For these reasons, Picturepark offers a wealth of brand compliance features for users to ensure brand compliance and content quality, including:
AI-powered content tagging
Automatic asset scanning and flagging
Selective flag-based asset access permissions
With robust metadata and efficient collaboration, such features should help ensure optimal content efficiency.
#4 Content efficiency
Of course, content efficiency does hinge on a plethora of factors itself. The aforecited statistics show content performance remains a challenge, which many cannot overcome through conventional means. Still, as the culmination of the above, DAM can improve your content marketing strategy in this regard as well.
By itself, DAM can already streamline content creation, enhance collaboration, and ensure brand compliance. Coupled with minimizing the room for human error, those benefits alone improve productivity and thus content efficiency. But its key strength in this regard lies in integrations; most DAM solutions actively seek to integrate with other solutions.
Examples include:
CMSs - bridging the two natural allies.
Shop - provide content along the customer journey
Insights tools - acquiring field data to inform asset use.
Brand template apps - further expanding creative options.
Of course, such options will differ drastically across individual DAM solutions. As such, it’s highly advisable that you examine your candidates for integration options in advance.
