5 Ways to Drive The DAM Buying Process
Enterprise needs are complex.
Meaning that working with a DAM that successfully meets these needs is critical.
Enterprise companies produce a lot of content and digital assets.
Struggling to manage an increasing volume of content is one thing, but sharing content across different teams and departments and efficiently distributing it across channels to reach their intended audience is another.
Especially when a lot of enterprises are used to dealing with shared drives and tools like Google Drive which typically aren’t equipped to handle that high-volume content.
Not to mention that global enterprises have multiple routes-to-market, and are often at compliance and regulatory risk - meaning that one mistake can lead to inconsistent branding or false claims and off-label marketing.
So how can enterprises structure and achieve a successful buying process - one that helps them choose the right DAM system with the right DAM capabilities?
A crucial step in achieving a successful buying process is to form an enterprise vision for two things:
What DAM will do for your organization and
How it will help elevate the business: How it benefits everyone, and not only the marketing department.
And while there is no one size fits all approach to structuring the buying process, there are some primary steps that we believe enterprises should take in the process of selecting their new DAM system.
Table of contents
5 steps to take in the process of picking your DAM system
1. Understand the business and needs and DAM vision
2. Use case mapping
3. Early vendor engagement
4. Vendor demos
5. Use case testing
Conclusion
5 Ways to drive the DAM buying process
Understand the business needs and DAM vision
One of the first steps is realizing that you have a problem (or problems) that you need to solve.
More often than not, its content management challenges like:
Inefficiencies and silos within your organization
A lack of consistency and process
Poor workflow management
Lost data, documents and assets or
High security risks and external threats
Once you acknowledge these challenges - what’s next?
Brainstorm with your colleagues and conduct research. You need to form a broad vision for what the DAM platform will achieve in your organization.
The person who does this varies, but it’s often a mixture of an IT professional and a business analyst - note that input from the business department is critical.
Document and make clear what business problems and challenges you want the DAM to address.
Maybe you want to reduce time-to-market, create a “single source of truth” or deliver an omnichannel experience to your customers?
It’s equally important to clarify what it’s not meant to address as well. Otherwise you risk broadening the scope a little too much, leaving you with a blurred picture of how your DAM system will genuinely add value.
Use case mapping
As the buying process becomes formalized and takes shape, the time has come to map your use cases.
This is where you start mapping the various use cases across all the departments that could benefit from a DAM - where a DAM can add value.
For example, enabling marketing teams to do what they do best; fueling the customer experience by orchestrating campaigns across the different channels and getting products frictionless to market faster.
As you map along, the overall vision should move towards completion.
In other words, you should start to understand all the types of requirements you need from your DAM in order to refuel your content operations.
At this point, you should also perform an audit of your current assets and identify the asset types and distribution channels the DAM system should manage (both today and future).
Not only does performing an audit help you gain an overview of what your company currently owns, it’s also a way of protecting your digital assets - which is just one of the fundamental capabilities DAM systems include.
At this point in the buying process there’s also an opportunity to identify outdated assets. These can be left out in a new system, so that you stop paying the price for unused content.
Identify vendors and early vendor engagement
The next step is to review 3-5 vendors that you consider to be good fits and send them an RFP (request for proposal).
A key element of ensuring a smooth vendor engagement process is the ability to be laser-focused on ‘disqualification’, for two things in particular:
For you as a buyer and
For vendors to mutually ensure you spend each other’s time in the best possible way
When you move forward in this step and start reviewing proposals from potential vendors you should be left with planning demos with about 3-5 vendors, which score well on the requirements you’ve already laid out in the previous steps.
Vendor demos
The main goal of these vendor demos is to gain that in-depth understanding of exactly how that particular vendor can help facilitate and support your long-term DAM vision.
However, there’s a catch:
You need to have successfully and fully gone through the previous three steps of the buying process to have formed an idea regarding the long-term business outcomes you want to make happen.
In other words…
The previous steps will have prepared you to have those much more productive conversations with vendors that actually get you somewhere - investing in a DAM.
Make sure to brief the vendor on not only what functionalities, features and short-term vision you’re interested in, but also what long-term vision you’re after. Why?
Because this allows the vendor to show you a demo that is not filled with random features, tips and tricks - but instead resonates with your actual business needs.
What does this lead to in return?
You are positioning yourself to better select the best possible vendor for your company - the one that provides the best value to your business.
Conduct real user case testing
By now, you should have encountered quite a few use cases.
If you were to test all of them, it would take you hours. Maybe even days. It would be the same as fully implementing the system, which is undesirable for both you and the vendor - as you’re not making the most of each other's time.
What we recommend is narrowing it down to a few, maybe two or three, use cases that lie at the very core of what you’re looking to solve.
Here’s two use cases that describe what this looks like:
USE CASE 1:
Testing the Ability to Control the Data Model Taxonomy
Imagine the following scenario:
You need to know how you can control the structuring of assets through data taxonomy.
You would therefore want to test for:
If the AI can be trained to auto-tag your content.
How you can change the data model supporting the tagging
The flexibility of permissions for controlling the data model taxonomy if integrations and the data model structure allow for pushing metadata between systems
You need to make a judgment of whether the functionalities for supporting the data model taxonomy are sufficiently strong enough to efficiently structure large volumes of assets.
Is the answer ‘yes’?
Great!
You can move on to testing the next use case.
Is the answer ‘no’?
Work with the vendor and let them educate you a bit more. If you experience little to no improvement, take that into your DAM evaluation.
USE CASE 2:
Test the Ability to Conduct Bulk Retiring or Renewal of Content
Imagine the following scenario:
You are making a change to your logo and need it updated across all channels.
You would want to test for:
To what extent you can pull it from the DAM and make it change everywhere else, locally and regionally
The ability to set up your business rules for retiring or renewing content in bulk and how to get an action like the above done
In the end of this testing, you need to ask yourself:
Do you trust the DAM to enable you to achieve organization-wide brand consistency and compliance?
As you continue evaluating, you’re getting closer and closer to choosing the right vendor that has performed best across soft factors and use case testing.
Case study:
How M/I Homes Uses DAM To Empower The Omnichannel
M/I Homes, Inc. is one of North America’s leading builders of single-family homes, having sold more than 100,000 homes (and counting).
One of their biggest needs is that their marketing teams (both at the corporate and regional level) are equipped to deliver powerful marketing collateral to their customers, for two reasons specifically:
To keep them consistently invested and
Maintain customer trust in M/I homes during the home building process
Which means a spike in new content, and in particular lots of new photography which needs sufficient storage and management.
Which calls for a central source to store everything so that they weren’t left with ten different crops and ten different versions of the exact same asset.
Having Digizuite as the central management hub for all these images helped M/I homes significantly reduce project timelines and the uploading and processing around each photo - which normally would have taken them a week to now only a few hours.
Conclusion
In order to ensure the best possible implementation of a DAM system in your organization, you need to make sure the buying process goes as smoothly as possible.
We’ve outlined five steps in order to successfully drive the buying process:
Understanding the business needs and buying process
Using case mapping
Identifying vendors and early vendor engagement
Engaging in vendor demos
Conduct real user case testing
It’s important to always keep in the back of your mind that the buying process is just the means to reach the end goal - which is an organization-wide adoption of the DAM.
Meaning one thing’s for certain…
You need to get people excited about what is coming as early on in the process as possible.
If you succeed in doing that, you have come a very far way in ensuring broad adoption of the DAM.
Interested in learning more about how your organization can benefit from Digizuite DAM?
Contact us today and book a demo here.
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