Why Printers Should Care About Digital Asset Management
Why should you, as a print provider, care about the topic of digital asset management?
The answer: Because marketers care about digital asset management.
For any print provider looking to land large enterprise accounts, you have to think like a marketer, understand their needs, and proactively offer value-add services that address those needs. To be a complete marketing solution provider, you need to consider ALL types of marketing assets, not just print, and not just physical.
What Is Digital Asset Management
Digital asset management platforms, also known as DAMs, make it easy for an organization to store, access, track, and distribute digital files quickly and efficiently.
These platforms serve as a central repository for the digital assets an organization uses for marketing, sales, branding, etc.
The benefit of DAMs over something more open-ended like Google Drive is that they are designed for the unique needs of large organizations and enterprise companies. Like other types of online business platforms, DAMs usually consist of portals, users who can access the portal, and admin users who control user permissions and portal contents.
Types of Digital Assets Commonly Hosted On DAMs:
- Images
- Logos
- Text Documents
- PDFs
- Videos
- Presentations
- Creative Working Files
Explaining the Rise Digital Asset Management
As the digital transformation of all industries continues to increase, the way companies manage their digital assets has become increasingly important. Digital-based forms of marketing have exploded in the past decade, meaning digital assets are playing a bigger role in the work of marketers.
In addition, companies across the world are doing more and more of their collaboration remotely. This means that regardless of what type of work is being done, there is a need for new tools to streamline the distribution of digital files that are an essential part of day-to-day operations.
This is especially true for large brands and enterprise companies whose workforce is likely spread across many locations and contains a complex hierarchy of organizational members. For companies like these, handling the storage, access, approvals, and usage of a constantly growing collection of digital assets is. a challenge.
This is the challenge that digital asset management platforms have been developed to solve. Consumer behavior and expectations continue to drive market trends towards rapidly evolving, creatively rich, personalized multi-channel campaigns. Performing well at this requires that brands have a constant stream of new creative content being produced, distributed, approved, and utilized. Doing this quickly while also enforcing hierarchal rights and permissions is nigh impossible without a dedicated solution.
Today’s digital asset management solutions solve a host of pain points for brands in marketing-heavy industries who require quick turnarounds on marketing campaigns. They make it easier to ensure brand consistency, control access and permissions to company files, measure and record digital asset analytics, and reduce the chance of content going unseen, unused, or lost.
The Competitive Advantage of Offering a DAM
The main draw of using a digital asset management platform is having one centralized, branded, an online resource to handle the management and distribution of digital marketing collateral.
Sound familiar? It turns out that DAMs and Web to Print solutions share a lot of overlap in terms of functionality, purpose, and user base. Marketers need quick and easy access to marketing materials of all types. Digital Asset Management platforms cover the digital side of their needs and web-to-print handles physical goods.
This is exactly why innovative printers and web-to-print software providers are offering Digital Asset Management as a bundled part of the complete web-to-print experience. This gives the end marketer could even more centralization, convenience, and control over their marketing supply chain.
The competitive edge of being able to offer digital asset management as a value-added service to your clients is not to be understated. The importance that the biggest brands and print buyers today place on all-in-one solutions is only growing.
Digital Assets are part of the Complete Marketing Catalog
Traditional marketing and digital marketing are not two separate worlds but as two halves of a whole. Offering digital asset management as a part of one’s value-added services is a great way for printers to be seen by prospective clients as complete marketing solution providers.
Digital assets are not the whole store when it comes to providing a complete marketing solution to a client of course. There are countless ways to diversify your offerings, create new revenue streams, and win more of your client’s marketing spend.
That said, digital assets are only going to become a bigger part of the work of marketers and brands as time goes on. And thanks to the fact that some web-to-print solutions include a digital asset management module as part of their complete solution, it doesn’t even have to be a substantial undertaking for printers to start offering digital asset management to their clients.
So, if you are now or in the future looking to migrate your business to a new web-to-print solution, take the importance of value-added services like digital asset management seriously. The more a printer embraces aspects of marketing solution services other than print, the more they will set themselves up for long-term success.
Learn about Propago’s Digital Asset Management features.
