Unlocking 7 Best Practices For DAM In The Food & Beverage Industry
As the CMO of a thriving company in the food and beverage industry, your plate is undoubtedly filled with a variety of responsibilities.
You're constantly immersed in a world of culinary creativity, product launches, and captivating marketing campaigns that keep you on your toes.
But, it’s not all fun and games, as you’re faced with a daunting challenge:
Managing thousands of digital assets like pictures, videos, and details about each brand.
Making sure these digital assets are easy to find, retrieve, and used well across your various brands is quite complex.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) plays a crucial role here. It acts as a tool that collects all your digital assets and keeps them safe - helping you organize, store and share these digital assets easily.
In this article, we explore 7 best practices for DAM in the food and beverage industry.
Table of contents:
Content management challenges facing the food & beverage industry
7 best practices for DAM in the food & beverage industry
Conclusion
Content management challenges facing the food & beverage industry
In the dynamic landscape of the food and beverage industry, three key challenges demand DAM:
1. Inefficient product image and video management
In the food and beverage industry, visual content plays a crucial role in marketing products.
We’re talking about everything from showcasing images and videos of food items, packaging designs, promotional materials, to advertisements - you name it.
However, managing this vast collection of digital assets (associated with tons of various products) can be quite challenging.
2. Regulatory compliance and labeling
In the food and beverage world, there are strict rules about how you can label and market your products. These rules can vary by location and may change over time.
One thing is crystal clear: It's super important to stay on top of these regulations, especially when it comes to how you present and promote your products. This is essential to avoid legal troubles, product recalls, not to mention false claims and off-label marketing.
3. Collaboration and localization
Lots of food and beverage companies operate all around the world. They often find themselves in a situation where they have to tweak their marketing materials to suit different places, languages, and cultures.
But making sure everyone is on the same page and coordinating content creation and localization across various external teams and locations?
Not the easiest task.
7 best practices for DAM in the food & beverage industry
The challenges highlighted above call for solutions like DAM.
From being a centralized repository for your content, to integrating with other platforms that you use on a daily basis, here’s 7 best practices for DAM in the food & beverage industry.
Centralized repository for global brands
Maintaining brand consistency across multiple locations and marketing channels is key in the F&B industry. To get this done, a centralized DAM repository (aka “single source of truth”) is a lifeline.
This repository isn't just a digital storage unit; it's a well-organized hub that caters to various asset types - say logos, menu item visuals and promotional materials.
Simply put: It's where franchisees, marketing teams, and designers from different corners of the globe come together.
It’s a surefire way for all teams (even remote) to access the latest, officially approved assets, ensuring that everyone is on the same page with the freshest brand materials.
The result? Safeguarding your brand’s integrity.
Picture this: Your marketing manager at the global headquarters needs to update the company website's promotional banners to align with a new worldwide marketing campaign.
They dive into the centralized DAM repository to get the latest versions of content, ensuring the website visuals harmonize seamlessly with the global brand message.
Metadata and tagging for rapid asset retrieval
In the food and beverage industry, quick and easy access to digital assets is crucial.
And in the DAM world, detailed metadata and tagging are the linchpins. Not only for customizing menus across diverse regions but also for upholding consistent global brand standards.
There are three key types of metadata:
Descriptive: Simplifies asset search using keywords, file types, colors, brand markers, and campaign attributes.
Administrative: Manages asset usage, ownership, compliance, and streamlines workflows.
Technical: Ensures correct image usage with specifications like file types, dimensions, and platform-specific resolutions.
Picture the scenario:
A regional menu coordinator needs to update a franchise's menu with seasonal items (say summer). They quickly locate relevant digital assets by searching for menu item images tagged with "summer promotion" in the DAM system.
Maintaining consistency across enterprises with version control
For big players in the food industry, it's crucial to keep things consistent across different places and ways they promote their products. Think of version control in DAM like a digital conductor—helping organize all the digital assets.
So whether you’re updating an ad campaign or launching a new advertising push, version control makes sure you use the newest and the correct content in the same way everywhere (ensuring that your customers get the same omnichannel experience).
Imagine you want to introduce a new product across your websites, social media, and stores.
Thanks to DAM with version control capabilities, you make sure your teams only use the newest pictures and videos for all their ads (that go live locally and globally) - ensuring the same message.
Access control for regional marketing
Balancing global brand consistency while catering to local marketing needs is crucial. Which is where DAM access controls come in.
While core brand assets like the main logo require restricted access, regional marketing teams need the flexibility to make sure content adheres to local preferences.
Access controls make this happen by assigning user permissions to different groups within the company.
Security is key, and most modern DAMs today let administrators dictate access based on roles.
The result?
Ensuring only authorized personnel can access sensitive content like important documents and intellectual property. This keeps file sharing both secure and user-friendly.
Digizuite's DAM system excels in access control with straightforward permission settings and asset-specific restrictions, including expiration dates.
That means your marketing team in a specific region can easily customize promotional materials all whilst adhering to brand guidelines - thanks to their DAM system permissions.
Manage asset lifecycles for seasonal campaigns
Efficiently handling global seasonal campaigns in the food and beverage industry requires structured asset management.
Enter something called asset lifecycles - which define an asset's journey from creation to retirement.
For instance, a coffee chain may have specific lifecycles for seasonal promotions ensuring synchronized marketing materials across all touchpoints.
In action, the marketing team prepares for an upcoming holiday season by initiating the asset lifecycle in the DAM system. They set start and end dates for when the asset can be used, which helps ensure a coordinated global launch.
But here's the kicker: DAM tools like Digizuite not only streamline compliance and approval, but they also serve up content analytics. This feature helps you discover what performs well and what doesn't (all in real-time) - from downloads to geographic favorites.
It's your key to identifying valuable content and making content management a breeze. That way you can easily archive and get rid of content that just doesn’t do the job right.
Workflow automation for product launches
For large-scale food and beverage enterprises managing extensive product portfolios, workflow automation is a game-changer.
Why?
Because it enables rapid global product launches (which is needed nowadays where everything moves at a supersonic speed) and brand consistency across diverse product lines.
Say a major food and beverage company is set to unveil a new range of gourmet products. As the product development team finalizes recipes, an automated workflow springs to life. Design teams swiftly create marketing assets, quickly approved by the marketing department.
At the same time, regional locations update menus and promotional materials. Which in the end leaves them with a seamless global product launch.
Automation is a non-negotiable trend - backed by a 35% increase in adoption from 2021 to 2022.
Plus, 58% of B2B companies plan to amplify automation efforts, boosting sales productivity by over 14.5%.
So by leveraging DAM’s automation capabilities, you can streamline processes, accelerate product launches, and simplify asset tagging for faster time-to-market.
Integration with e-commerce platforms
Another best practice is to integrate your DAM with other applications you use on a daily basis, like your product information management system (PIM).
This integration ensures a consistent presentation of product images, descriptions, and essential assets on all your online storefronts.
Take this example: When a food and beverage company's e-commerce team prepares for a new product line launch, DAM integration with PIM simplifies access and updates to product visuals and details directly within the system.
This results in uniform, up-to-date, and brand-compliant online listings. Which as a result, provides your customers with a seamless and visually engaging shopping experience.
Digizuite DAM excels in this integration, partnering seamlessly with PIM systems and e-commerce platforms like Inriver, giving you streamlined content lifecycles and enriching product experiences.
Conclusion
We’ve highlighted 7 best practices for DAM in the food and beverage industry:
A centralized repository for global brands
Efficient metadata and tagging
Maintaining consistency with version control
Access control for regional marketing
Managing asset lifecycles
Workflow automation
Integration with other systems
Adhering to best practices when it comes to DAM is crucial in the food and beverage industry.
Why?
In order to make sure that you efficiently use your assets (in the right way, at the right time) to maintain brand consistency and streamline workflows. Which ultimately, drives productivity and success in this highly competitive market.
Want to learn more about how your company can benefit from Digizuite DAM?
Book a demo with us here and get in touch.
