DAM vs. BAM: What's the difference, and which one is right for your business?
94% of marketing teams struggle with managing their content creation processes.
Meanwhile, just 28% of marketers believe their organization has suitable software to manage and share content with their audience.
The same sorry tale is also being told by brand-focused teams.
84% of B2B marketers said brand awareness is their top goal.
At the same time, Only 54% of businesses have a B2B brand program in place.
It’s clear that there’s a disconnect between the goals of an organization and the resources put in place to help them get there.
If you’re a content or brand professional who can relate to these sad statistics, then don’t worry, help is on hand in the shape of a DAM or a BAM.
Ok, so we’ve piqued your interest, but you’re probably keen to know - what exactly is a DAM, what is a BAM, what is the difference, and which one should you choose?
Here at Digizuite, we’ve got you covered - introducing the ultimate guide to DAM vs. BAM platforms.
Table of Contents:
DAM - Digital Asset Management
BAM - Brand Asset Management
Key differences between DAM and BAM
DAM vs. BAM: Choosing the right platform for your needs
How Digizuite supports digital asset management
Conclusion
FAQs
DAM - Digital Asset Management Platforms
Digital asset management platforms can be used in a number of different ways by online businesses.
So, to kick things off, allow us to set the scene and give you a little context, using B2B Enterprise Manufacturing as an example.
You won’t be surprised when we tell you that 90% of B2B companies have shifted to a virtual sales model, post-COVID.
With at least 20% of B2B buyers now willing to spend $500k+ in an entirely digital setting, the stakes have never been higher for sectors like B2B Enterprise Manufacturing.
The challenge, though, is that B2B Enterprise Manufacturing companies tend to have a highly sophisticated infrastructure to manage their digital assets.
This often includes:
Complex product portfolios
Many and different routes-to-market
Many offices worldwide
Many customer and distribution channels
So, in order to stay competitive in the world of virtual sales models, it means that these companies are going to need a process to manage an unfathomable number of product images, as well as all of their other digital assets, across their entire infrastructure.
This - amongst countless other potential examples - is where digital asset management, or DAM for short, can help
What is DAM?
DAM - short for Digital Asset Management - is a business process designed to help organizations control all of the digital assets for their website and omnichannel marketing strategies.
Using DAM as part of your content production and management workflow will give you full control over how your digital assets are used - reducing the margin for error, improving the efficiency of your content-focused teams, and enhancing the customer experience.
What is a Digital Asset?
A digital asset is any type of media or content that is stored in a digital format and used by an online business as part of its platform or marketing campaigns.
Examples you’ll already be familiar with include things like:
Images,
Videos
PDFs
Audio files,
Messaging content
Other examples you may not have considered include things like:
CAD/CAM files,
Design Files
AR / VR content
360-degree imagery
3D
What is a Digital Asset Management Platform?
A Digital Asset Management system, also known as a DAM platform, is software that is designed to help you organize, store, and distribute your digital assets.
At its core, a DAM system will allow you to group your assets into categories for easy organization, tag them with metadata so you can search for them quickly, and control access to make sure your content is only seen by the right people at the right time.
DAM platforms also help you to streamline your processes and workflows around asset management, so you’re always using the most up-to-date approved content.
On top of all that, they make collaboration between internal and external content-focused teams a breeze, so everyone is on the same page at the same time - without any wasted effort.
DAM Platform Key Features & Benefits
The most sophisticated digital asset management platforms will boast several enterprise-grade features that will transform the fortunes of any content or marketing team.
To get you started, we’ve put together a list of six essential features you should demand from any DAM platform.
Centralized Storage: DAM platforms provide a secure, central storage hub for all digital assets - helping your team stay organized and dramatically reducing the risk of lost, misplaced, or underutilized assets.
Metadata Tagging: Because you’ll be storing thousands of assets, you’ll need to be able to search for them quickly. Tagging your assets with appropriate metadata will not only make them easy to track down, but also give your team a snapshot of information on things like usage rights, version numbers, and creation dates.
Version Control: Because no asset remains in place forever, DAM systems can help you maintain a history of asset versions, so you and your team can track changes in real time - and even revert to previous versions should you ever need to.
Access Control and Permissions: There will often be times when you need to restrict access to certain content. DAM platforms can give you granular access controls, so that only authorized users can view, edit, or download specific assets.
Search Functionality: Once you have stored all your assets in one central place, you’ll still need to be able to find what you’re looking for - and quickly. DAMs have built-in search features to help you find your assets in seconds.
Integration Capabilities: The best DAM platforms are able to seamlessly integrate with other tools in your tech stack. This could be your website content management system, design software like Adobe CC, or even CRM software like Salesforce.
Supporting all asset types including 3D visualization: There is a growing demand for effective digital asset management across various departments, covering everything from CAD files to AR/VR content. 3D visualization is becoming integral to the entire product development process, from concept to the final photorealistic presentation on e-commerce platforms.
DAM Use Cases & Examples
To give you an insight into how companies use DAM systems, we wanted to share some use cases from our customers to demonstrate how a digital asset management platform could work for you.
Processing content at scale
Volvo Trucks has to watermark and edit 23,000 images a month for their parts website - before using a DAM, this was all done manually.
Transforming content workflows
M/I Homes generates up to 2,000 new images every week - which used to take their content team all week to upload before switching to a DAM, and now takes minutes.
Brand consistency across all channels
Lonza manages more than 35 websites across 30 countries - which used to be driven by a painful mix of Sharepoint sites, Dropboxes, and shared network drives fraught with issues. Now, with a DAM, they have streamlined processes and consistent brand experiences across all their channels.
Why Do Companies Need a DAM?
Generally speaking, as your company grows, the amount of work needed to run it scales as well.
This growth means that the jobs that used to be manageable by just one person, or organized using generalist tools like spreadsheets and network drives, suddenly require a more considered approach to stop them becoming bottlenecks in your business.
While scaling issues can affect your whole organization, your content teams will feel these growing pains more than most.
As your collection of digital assets grows, it’ll become increasingly difficult for them to keep everything organized without a dedicated system to help.
Failure to give your team the right tools will likely lead to ‘content chaos,’ as well as missed opportunities for streamlining workflows, improving collaboration, and creating a consistent and cohesive experience for customers.
What are the Benefits of Using a DAM?
There are many benefits to using a DAM within your organization, but some of the key ones to look out for include:
DAM benefits:
Increase productivity - uploading and editing tasks can now be automated
Reduce duplication of effort - one set of assets for the entire team to use
Boost brand consistency - approval workflows keep every asset on point
Find content faster - with centralized storage, tagging, and advanced search
Enhance security and access - with robust digital rights management controls
I Already Have a CMS, Do I Need a DAM?
Your website may already operate on a CMS like Sitecore or Umbraco, which helps you to manage web content - like posts, pages, and website structure.
Content management systems like these excel at managing web content - but they’re no match for a dedicated DAM platform for handling a wide range of digital assets.
You don’t have to choose between the two, though. The ideal solution is to integrate your CMS with a DAM so you have the right tools to do the right jobs for your organization. The same applies to e-commerce platforms like Shopify or CRM systems like Salesforce.
So, by now, you should be clear on what digital asset management platforms can do for your business - but we also promised to tell you about BAM systems, so what are they?
BAM - Brand Asset Management Platforms
81% of consumers need to trust a brand before considering buying from it.
This requirement means that your brand identity - the way it looks - needs to be on point at all times, especially in the hyper-competitive world we live in today, where prospects can find another brand to buy from in just a couple of clicks.
The trouble is that as businesses like yours continue to improve their online presence and double down on marketing, making sure your brand identity stays consistent across all channels can be incredibly challenging.
BAM platforms meet this challenge head-on and are specifically designed to help streamline the brand management process - ensuring your brand identity can remain consistent and gain users' trust across every touch point.
What is BAM?
BAM, or Brand Asset Management, is the process used to control digital brand assets within an organization.
The primary purpose of BAM is to regulate the access, organization, and distribution of brand assets. The BAM process does this while ensuring that you always meet brand guidelines - to guarantee a consistent brand experience.
What is a Brand Asset?
A brand asset, or digital brand asset, refers to any element that forms part of a brand’s visual identity or messaging.
Typically, these include all the things you might expect, such as:
Logos
Images
Brand colors,
As well as other brand-related items like:
Fonts
Templates
Videos
Style guides
Messaging guides.
What is a Brand Asset Management Platform?
So, by now, you’ve probably realized that a BAM platform is the software that will help you manage your brand asset management process.
Specialist BAM systems can store, organize, and distribute all your brand assets from one central location.
Having everything stored together in a BAM platform means your team can always access the latest versions of branded assets. This centralized approach ensures that your customer only sees the most up-to-date iteration of your brand identity.
BAM systems can help brand-focused teams work more effectively, but the real advantage they offer is the ongoing maintenance of brand consistency - to ensure consumers can trust your brand.
BAM Platform Key Features & Benefits
Now you know a little more about brand asset management and what a BAM platform is, let’s take a closer look at the key features and benefits you can expect from a BAM system.
BAM benefits:
Brand Consistency: One of the most significant benefits of a BAM system is that it will ensure your brand's marketing materials meet your brand guidelines and appear consistently across your omnichannel marketing initiatives.
Pre-approved Templates and Assets: By storing and managing everything centrally, you can create a definitive library of pre-designed assets for your team to use. This central storage will create ongoing workflow efficiencies for your team, saving them time, but also minimizes the risk of them using old or off-brand materials in their work.
Brand Guidelines Enforcement: Instead of having someone in place to be a brand ‘guardian’ or brand ‘watchdog’, to enforce brand guidelines on all assets and content produced by your organization, a BAM system will do this for you - automatically. Compared to a human-driven brand compliance process, which can be slow and create bottlenecks, a BAM system can quickly flag any inconsistencies, saving time and money in the long run.
Collaboration and Approval Workflows: A BAM system isn’t autonomous, and it isn’t down to just one person to control it, either. BAM platforms are at their best when they’re enabling teams to collaborate on brand projects. Typically, this collaboration is supported by features like feedback capture, annotation options, and approval workflows - making the entire process painless.
Access to Logos, Colors, Typography, etc.: If you’ve ever tried to find the ‘latest’ version of a logo on your company SharePoint or needed to understand which style guide you should be using, you’ll know how frustrating poorly organized brand collateral can be.
Luckily, BAM platforms can give you and your entire team access to the latest versions of all the brand elements you need - without any guesswork - keeping everyone on the same page every time.
Use Cases for BAM Systems
By now, you may be thinking about whether a BAM system is right for you and your business. To help you with that thought process, we’ve put together a number of common use cases where brand asset management systems can be particularly useful.
Marketing Agencies:
If you operate a marketing agency, then working with multiple clients and multiple brand identities can become chaotic - quickly - without proper organization. A BAM platform could help you manage each client’s brand identity effortlessly without any overlap or confusion.
Franchised Businesses:
If you run a franchised business - for example, a fast-food chain restaurant or car dealership - you’re going to want to make sure all your franchisees use your brand identity appropriately and responsibly.
Managing everything through a BAM platform will help you to ensure that every campaign, location, and promotion, is executed properly against your central brand guidelines. This will prevent potential damage to your brand and help to enhance results for your franchisees.
Companies with Strong Brand Identity:
Another common use case for a BAM platform is to help companies who have a strong brand they want to protect, potentially across multiple products. For example, Microsoft has 40+ brands to manage, just as part of their Microsoft 365 offering.
By using a BAM system or platform, these brand-focused companies can safeguard their core brand identity and easily manage the rollout of sub-brands and complementary brands as they expand and diversify over time.
To summarize, BAM, or Brand Asset Management, systems are an essential part of maintaining a consistent brand identity across multiple channels, products, divisions, or locations.
They provide a way to easily control your entire brand asset management process, including the ability to collaborate, authorize, and enforce brand guidelines on digital assets associated with your brand’s identity.
Key differences between DAM and BAM
As you’ll see from the Venn diagram we prepared, there is more than a little shared commonality between the features you’ll find in both DAM and BAM platforms.
That said, there are several differences too, which we can broadly break down into 4 areas:
Focus: DAM platforms concentrate on the organization, storage, retrieval, and distribution of a wide variety of digital assets (images, content, videos, and more). Meanwhile, a BAM platform is purely concerned with ensuring brand consistency across all platforms.
Users: Digital asset management platforms are used by anyone who is managing a significant number of digital assets - or needs access to them - generally, this is a large number of users spread across internal content teams and external providers. On the flip side, a brand asset management system is really only used by people tasked with overseeing brand identity within the company - which tends to be a far smaller number.
Functionality: As you’ll see from our lists in the Venn diagram, whilst the core functionality has some overlap, DAM platforms and BAM platforms differ in terms of the specialist functionality they offer. This is because they are designed to do different jobs.
Integration: DAM systems tend to be much more integrated with the rest of the tech stack in your organization. Often, DAMs will integrate with countless other systems, including Content Management Systems, CRMs, and Product Information Management systems. In contrast, a BAM system might only integrate with a limited number of marketing and design tools.
DAM vs. BAM: Choosing the right platform for your needs
Before you select any new software system or platform for your business - whether it’s a DAM, BAM, or something else entirely - you need to understand the problem you’re solving and the processes or workflows you want to adopt.
Once you’re clear on the specific needs of your business, it’s time to choose a system.
We understand that there can be blurred lines between what a BAM and DAM could do for your company, but really it all comes down to what you need to achieve.
If you are solely focused on making sure your brand looks consistent across every channel and touchpoint on the internet, then a BAM platform might be right for you.
However, if, above all else, you need to manage vast quantities of digital content, then a DAM platform is the way forward for you.
How Digizuite supports digital asset management
If you haven’t already guessed, we know a thing or two about digital asset management thanks to our own Digizuite DAM platform.
So, if you’ve decided that a DAM system is right for you and your organization, then let’s take a moment to briefly look at how Digizuite can help you deliver content experiences at scale.
Using Digizuite for digital asset management enables you to:
Bring all your marketing content together in a centralized library of assets.
Search for the exact content you need - fast - with enhanced search capabilities.
Customize assets for each channel by proportion, resolution, and asset format.
Develop advanced workflows to help internal & external teams work smarter.
Orchestrate data from across your organization for multi-channel distribution.
As if all that wasn’t enough, Digizuite also takes care of digital rights management (DRM), localization, system security, and role-based user rights, as well as handling rich and immersive media like CAD, AR, VR, and 360-degree images - all while scaling with your enterprise.
If you want to find out more about how Digizuite can support your digital asset management initiatives - then arrange to speak to a specialist, we’ll be happy to help.
Alternatively, if you’re not quite ready for a demo, our DAM resources area is jam-packed with ebooks, whitepapers, and webinars for you to explore.
Conclusion
We’ve talked in depth about the differences - and similarities - between DAM and BAM platforms.
Both are powerful tools that can dramatically improve the way your company presents itself online.
Ultimately, though, the type of system you choose will depend on the problem you’re looking to solve in your business.
If your main priority is making sure that your brand identity looks consistent across every one of your channels and touchpoints on the internet, then a BAM platform could be worth considering.
However, if, above all else, you need to manage vast quantities of digital assets, and streamline your content workflows, then a DAM platform is the way to achieve that.
Want to learn more about how a digital asset management platform could transform the way you work?
Digital Asset Management FAQs
Q: What are online assets?
A: Online assets - also known as digital assets - is a catch-all term for media content that is produced as part of a marketing campaign or strategy and is accessible online. Because of the valuable role they play in a marketing and business context, online or digital assets should be carefully managed - particularly as a company scales.
Q: What are types of digital assets?
A: Digital assets can cover a whole host of online media content used in a marketing context. You’re no doubt familiar with examples like images, videos, audio, and PDFs - but digital assets can also include more advanced forms of media, including AR, VR, and 360-degree images. Basically, any content you produce as part of your online marketing efforts can be classed as a digital asset.
Q: How much does a digital asset management system cost?
A: Investing in the management of your digital marketing assets with a dedicated DAM platform is something that every company should take seriously - especially as they scale up into omnichannel campaigns. Pricing can vary depending on the features you need and the number of people who’ll be using the system. Check out our pricing page for more information.
Q: What does DAM stand for in marketing?
A: DAM is an acronym that stands for Digital Asset Management. This is the process of centrally storing, organizing, version controlling, personalizing, and distributing online marketing content. It helps the entire organization stay on the same page when it comes to which digital assets to use and ensures that your prospects are consistently seeing the most relevant content during their buying journey for a seamless brand experience.
Q: Is Dropbox a DAM?
A: It’s fair to say that Dropbox is probably the most well-known name in the cloud storage space. However, whilst it has earned a solid reputation as an effective tool for file storage, organization, and access control - Dropbox is not a DAM, and it lacks almost all the features that make DAM systems essential for marketing content management and distribution. These specialist DAM features include advanced functionality like channel customization, localization, digital rights management, metadata tagging, and workflow integration, which are essential for digital marketing initiatives at scale.
Q: Is Google Drive a DAM?
A: As with Dropbox, Google Drive is also synonymous with cloud storage and file sharing. It is fully capable of enabling you to store, organize, and share your documents, but it wouldn’t be effective as a DAM. The features that make Digital Asset Management systems so powerful for online-focused marketing organizations - including metadata tagging, workflow integration, channel customization, localization, and digital rights management, are not available in Google Drive. Put simply, it’s not the right tool for the job compared to a dedicated DAM platform.