4 Ways Remote Teams Use DAM to Manage Content Complexity
Since the pandemic, working remotely has only risen in popularity.
A recent study found that 64% of people prefer working remotely outside of the office, with just 3 in 10 choosing to work from an office.
In fact, the majority of managers, at 85%, anticipate remote teams to become the new standard in the business world.
Which doesn’t come as a surprise, as there’s a wide range of benefits when it comes to working remotely:
✔ The ability to work from a preferred location
✔ Improved balance between professional and personal life
✔ Increased financial savings
✔ Elimination of daily commuting
Although you reap the benefits, you’re also faced with a couple of challenges when adopting this way of working.
Challenges like:
Technical difficulties
Inadequate workplace communication
Difficulty in maintaining productivity
Challenges associated with diverse time zones
Which often is the result of not having a centralized location for managing and collaborating on all company assets.
Enter digital asset management (DAM) - which can efficiently resolve all of these complications.
DAM is a “single source of truth” for all your digital assets - that can help you locate necessary files efficiently and track their usage throughout the enterprise.
In addition, a DAM will also categorize files for easy searching and secure distribution, organization, and storage for necessary usage.
Which inherently boosts every single aspect of your content management and content lifecycle.
In this article, we take a look at a couple of challenges facing remote teams today and why they need a DAM in order to improve and streamline their content processes.
Table of contents:
3 challenges facing remote teams
4 reasons why remote teams need digital asset management
Conclusion
3 content management challenges facing remote workers
Digital assets all over the place
Your remote team may resort to using multiple services like a shared drive or Google Drive when there is no centralized repository for asset storage and sharing.
This can result in miscommunication and wasted time as team members spend hours searching for the correct version of an image for example.
Additionally, having numerous storage options increases the risk of losing important assets due to the difficulty in tracking and managing assets at the same time.
Inefficient communication channels due to a lack of integration
It can be challenging for teams to stay aligned and work together towards a common goal without the benefit of in-person interaction.
Picture the following scenario:
All your photos, videos and customer presentations are in one location - but what you talk about when it comes to those assets are somewhere completely different.
Say you use Microsoft Teams for conversations and then all your content is in Google Drive.
And let's say you forget about that one conversation regarding what campaign a certain image is intended for. Tracking down that conversation again can be difficult if you don't remember what it was about or even what asset it involved.
Conventional storage solutions lack strong organizational capabilities
Remote teams can face challenges in terms of locating necessary files efficiently if there is no system in place for organizing them.
Traditional tools like shared drives, Google Drive and Dropbox often come with the pitfalls of limited metadata tagging. Say you want to find an image to use for a new campaign. You can search for it by (for example) looking up the name of the asset itself.
Names are easy to remember when you have a couple of assets to manage. What if you had hundreds?
Remembering the time certain assets were created and who created them can become an impossible task - which you probably don’t have the time or capacity for.
4 reasons why remote teams need a DAM solution
1. Improve marketing and sales productivity
With DAM software, all your teams (whether they’re remote or not) can access the assets they need, when they need them, directly from one place.
That way they avoid wasting time sending emails back and forth between departments, which boosts productivity and enables them to do what they do best in a more efficient way.
The result?
Less friction, more capacity for the creative tasks, and in general makes the organization run much smoother.
Modern DAMs also come with integrations to other third party collaboration and communication tools like Wrike, Slack and Microsoft Teams.
This makes it 10x easier for all your remote workers to edit assets, approve or disapprove assets, add certain assets to projects or campaigns and in general collaborate much more efficiently.
Users can easily generate shareable links from a selection of assets, send it to a recipient via Slack, email, or any method they communicate within a team - whether it’s to a team member who works from home, a colleague in another country or an external partner.
Furthermore, a lot of DAMs come with top-notch metadata tagging capabilities. That way remote users can quickly search and find assets quicker than before.
All of your digital assets, together with the related metadata elements and values, are stored in a DAM platform. In this way, when you search for a certain file, the search term you enter or the filtering field you select will only give you images that are tagged with those specific attributes.
2. Increase brand consistency
Maintaining brand consistency is key, as 60% of customers expect your brand to be consistent across various channels and platforms.
Luckily, that’s exactly what a DAM will help you achieve.
When you implement a DAM system, it gives you full control over all your brand assets by building bridges across branding, creative, marketing and sales teams.
The second someone updates an asset it will automatically be changed for all users of the DAM - meaning that only the right assets will be used by everyone, everytime. No matter if they're remote or on-site.
Picture the scene:
A multinational retail company is getting ready for a new product launch in one of the regions that it's based in. All content is finalized and ready for distribution, however, one of the remote teams has used an outdated version of a product image.
There could be multiple reasons for this - time zone differences, lack of communication and not having one central place where all content is added and updated in real time for all users to see.
With DAM, you skip this whole fiasco and instead are equipped with the right content to go live, everytime - no matter where your teams are located.
3. Streamline content management and distribution
With DAM's automation and workflow features, it's easy to:
Share content across multiple channels simultaneously: When it comes to sharing, a DAM makes it easy for enterprises to reach all internal and external touchpoints with seamless delivery.
Scale for large organizations: With higher volumes of assets, larger enterprises need a solution that can help them expand across e-commerce platforms, web, and social media. That's where a DAM comes in.
DAM makes the task of sharing content to relevant remote stakeholders much easier and faster thanks to features like brand portals.
With DAM as the central repository of information and the brand portals function, enterprises can tailor brand experiences to different target audiences, brands, products, or use cases.
Large manufacturers (with tons of stakeholders) and retail companies can benefit from this, as they can easily manage assets by brand or product line.
Product and brand managers, especially, need a sleek interface for their regional marketers to manage their brand and/or product lines with the appropriate assets. With brand portals, you can customize the product/brand experience with colors, logos, and fonts.
4. Enable secure access rights & permissions
Another way to maintain the same level of control over content used by both your remote and on-site teams is by securing access rights and permissions.
Let's say a company receives some fresh product images from a photographer.
Not all assets may be appropriate for social media or online use. So managers or administrators may want to restrict access to certain images from the marketing team.
With a DAM, they can create user groups and hide specific folders from others, making it effortless to manage thousands of images.
With permission control in a DAM:
Only authorized individuals can view and utilize assets.
Only designated users can share assets.
Only authorized personnel can make changes to assets.
The result?
Your remote sales teams will have visibility of a new product brochure if they need it.
Marketing will be able to identify which product to update on the website if necessary.
Conclusion
With the number of remote jobs having increased threefold compared to 2020 - it's crucial that companies with remote teams make sure that they avoid the pitfalls of misunderstanding and miscommunication in regards to marketing and sales collateral.
Remote teams can benefit from a digital asset management tool as it:
Improves marketing and sales productivity
Increases brand consistency
Provides 24/7 access to all relevant content
Streamlines content management and sharing
Enables secures access rights & permissions
With DAM, it's never been easier to share assets with remote teams, partners, agencies and 3rd party suppliers.
Interested in learning more about how your remote teams can benefit from Digizuite DAM? Book a call with our sales team or try Digizuite for free.
