6 Essential DAM Capabilities Enterprises Need to Scale Content in 2023 (and Beyond)
A lack of content consistency and process, silos, poor workflow management and lost data, documents and assets are just some of the underlying issues that enterprises face when producing and distributing their content.
However, many enterprises still rely on tools like DropBox, Google Drive and traditional media libraries to handle their content.
To be able to scale alongside the volume of content that enterprises are producing, they should look to more robust tools like digital asset management (DAM).
Why?
Because these tools take “media library” to the next level - serving as a single source of truth for all content operations.
How?
It sits as part of the enterprise content supply chain between content creation and distribution.
And as it interconnects with all systems related to content and asset management…
…It enables the enterprise to accommodate the challenge of syndicating, transforming, and distributing an ever-increasing volume of digital assets into the correct format for the right channel - perfecting the omnichannel experience.
But when it comes to choosing the right DAM system, which specific capabilities should an enterprise be looking after?
In this article we take a look at the core DAM capabilities and the 6 advanced capabilities that enterprises should be considering when choosing the right DAM solution for their company.
Table of contents
Core DAM capabilities
6 essential DAM capabilities enterprises need
Customer story: CommScope
Conclusion
What are core DAM capabilities?
Asides from just being a central hub for all company assets, most modern DAM platforms should include the following core capabilities:
> Enables management of rich media assets
> Facilitate the collaboration during the creative process
> Usage and user rights
> Easy asset retrieval through AI and file search
> Curation and file-access
> Distribution of assets
But for enterprise-size companies specifically - which capabilities are needed to get content operations up and running smoothly?
6 Essential DAM Capabilities For Enterprises
According to Gartner, DAM capabilities belong in three categories — basic, intermediate, and advanced.
What’s the difference between them?
Basic DAM capabilities entail features like divisional deployment or simply collecting and making content assets ready for use. Intermediate capabilities consider features like regional deployment or self-management access control.
Advanced DAM capabilities are the ones we highlight below - features that enterprises should be on the lookout for, just due to the nature of enterprise companies themselves.
Global and multilingual deployment
Enterprises are almost per definition global.
By supporting multilingual deployment, the DAM system can unlock operational efficiencies.
Most enterprises have hundreds if not thousands of employees within their marketing department(s) - responsible for the production, management and distribution of marketing collateral to multiple stakeholders.
What usually is the case is having to deal with multiple teams located across international borders.
By using a DAM with global and multilingual deployment capabilities, you can easily market the right products in the right language and context by directly uploading your assets to one central location, with the same access for all employees.
What does this mean in return?
That all employees, no matter location or language, are equipped with the right marketing collateral to ensure the same, consistent global messaging.
Integrations with core business processes and systems
Enterprises are prone to have more applications and systems.
In fact, the average enterprise uses almost 400 applications to manage their daily operations and activities.
Enterprises therefore require more integrations - often more customized - to and from the DAM system.
Having a DAM system that efficiently manages all the integrations that an enterprise needs on a daily basis is key.
Why?
Because friction between processes, people and systems significantly impacts speed. By integrating custom apps and industry-leading software right into the DAM system can help enterprises reach faster time-to-market.
With Digizuite DAM, it’s never been easier to support changing business needs (both in the present and the future) due to its low-code, standard embedded UI, drag-n-drop automation engine, SDK’s and open API’s.
This toolbox enables you to exchange data with any 3rd party system of your choice, and it also enables the enterprise to modify the standard options or create added integrations that fits your needs.
Automated and real-time multichannel content distribution
Enterprises often have more channels and a much more complicated route-to-market.
Think third-party intermediates, sales forces, retail, which requires strong omnichannel experiences.
Today, many enterprises manage digital content in siloed digital libraries across departments and geographies.
The result is prolonged time-to-market, poor customer experiences, human-made error and risk of bottlenecks during M&A - just to name a few.
Enterprises should therefore choose tools like DAM with the capabilities to unify all content across channels in one integrated best of breed platform that all users can access both simultaneously and seamlessly.
By using DAM as the heart of the content supply chain, it can help you reach more channels, efficiently deliver personalized and rich content to all the relevant end-points, ensure faster time to market - as well as ensure that your teams use a lot less time creating, managing, and repurposing the content.
How?
By orchestrating data from different sources such as your ERP system, product information system and other relevant enterprise technologies before you distribute them to your social media, website, e-commerce sites or distributor channels.
When this is all completed, you can use content analytics to harvest data back into the DAM to understand exactly what worked and what didn’t (helping you improve for the future).
Integrate with enterprise security and access control system
Not only do enterprises typically struggle with managing all their media content and files, they also struggle with security breaches.
And for those enterprise companies with higher amounts of assets, there is a much higher risk for a security breach - 32% of the world’s largest companies deal with CMS breaches every single week.
Enterprises also have more complex risk and brand compliance needs across locales and divisions requiring audit trails and robust asset reporting.
Which means that it's imperative that enterprises implement the right DAM tools that come with the capabilities of seamlessly integrating with their security systems and access control systems.
Furthermore, DAM systems like Digizuite come with an added layer of security by:
Authenticating DAM users with single sign-on (SSO) and active directory
Sharing access with partners, contributors, distributors and resellers by country or by folders within the DAM platform
Making a report that shows all assets and the users who can access them
Restricting access, removing or blocking users instantly
AI-driven identification, tagging, and editing for assets
Since enterprises have exponentially more content (in different volumes and varieties) - the need to control this content becomes exponentially more important.
That’s why enterprises should choose digital asset management tools that include automated bulk editing workflows and AI-driven tagging capabilities, as it yields even higher benefits for these types of companies.
Benefits like increased efficiency, less bottlenecks, less time spent sifting through multiple shared drives looking for that one photo no one seems to find…
In addition, DAM takes the raw files crafted through the process of creating content and adds on even greater context through efficient tagging and data governance.
DAM also manages workflows from different departments, collects information from systems such as your CMS or PIM system, and maintains the one master file in one central repository that all users of an organization can access and edit.
Deliver end-to-end digital rights management and licensing capabilities
Lastly, enterprises should choose DAM systems that are able to deliver end-to-end digital rights management and licensing capabilities.
Why?
Because as enterprises deal with more stakeholders and units needing access to content, they also are more at risk for their content being misused or accidentally getting into the wrong hands, etc. Which naturally calls for more asset security.
Digizuite DAM enables this level of security by assisting both remote and in-house workers use content that is in line with regulatory compliance (which is particularly of interest to those enterprise companies in the life sciences sector, navigating in one of the most regulatory industries in the world).
DAM will also ensure rights management thanks to its metadata engine, so that you can efficiently add the dates of expiry to content, as well as rights owner, sponsor and source.
Adding on, every marketing employee in the enterprise has what they need as you can delegate rights to digital assets based on a users’ job authority and/or roles.
What you’re left with is the ability to prevent the costly errors of distributing the wrong content. In addition you enable a much faster time-to-market - from the creation to the distribution of content:
Customer story: CommScope
CommScope - an international provider of communications technology solutions - has played a major role in designing, building, and managing the most advanced net- works in the world.
And with more than 25,000 employees across more than 130 countries, CommScope fulfills its mission of “shaping the networks of the future” on a massive, global scale.
In the spring of 2019, CommScope acquired ARRIS (which recently had bought another company called RUCKUS) and needed the help of a tool in order to help merge three businesses and brands.
With the DAM solution, CommScope’s technical and marketing teams have been able to:
Maintain brand integrity throughout the entire process by efficiently managing all brand assets
Effectively merge what was three different companies and brands
Cut down on time without having to use more mundane or limited tools
Conclusion
In order to not fall behind on their content efforts, enterprises need to look to tools like DAM that helps them create, manage and distribute their content in the best way possible.
But the critical takeaway is that most enterprises should go for a DAM system in the advanced category, and look for DAM capabilities like:
> Global & multilingual deployment
> Integrations with core business processes and DID systems
> Automated and real-time multichannel content distribution
> Integrate with enterprise security and access control systems
> AI-driven identification, tagging and editing for assets
> Deliver end-to-end digital rights management and licensing capabilities
Want to learn more about how your enterprise can benefit from a tool like Digizuite DAM?
Book a demo today to learn more about how a DAM can help you reach your growth ambitions.
