Businesses that provide imagery for their products are more likely to sell them online. The challenge is that vendors require different types, sizes, and portals in which to deliver your assets.
If you’re not using Digital Asset Management (DAM) software today, you are likely getting by with a combination of home-grown business processes and disconnected tools and databases. You may struggle with file types, sizes, and managing where they’re stored, along with which files have been sent to what vendor—and when. These manual processes are resource-intensive and costly.
Before determining if you need a DAM solution, you need to evaluate your current state and how implementing a DAM system will impact cost reduction and sales growth. Here are ten reasons to consider adding a DAM solution to help your business thrive:
At some point, most businesses begin to realize that they are solving their digital asset management challenges with people rather than with solutions, and that this approach is unsustainable.
Producing digital assets is not an option; it is a requirement. Creating, quality-checking, publishing, and sharing digital assets without the help of DAM software is complex, costly, and will take more resources than you have available. This is especially true if you have thousands of products sold through multiple reseller channels.
How can DAM software help?
DAM software is designed to automate many time-consuming tasks:
How can DAM software help?
Digital assets play a critical role in sales and marketing—especially when it comes to eCommerce. If your products are missing digital assets, your business is losing sales. It’s that simple.
With digital assets in multiple disconnected systems throughout your business, the task of determining which products are missing digital assets is complex.
Are these challenges slowing you down?
How can DAM software help?
When digital assets are stored in disconnected systems, you can’t access them when needed, resulting in possible lost sales. Often it leads to new assets being created, leading to duplicates and inconsistent quality.
Lack of accessibility also means search is limited—people can’t search and locate the assets they need.
How can DAM software help?
When digital assets are in disconnected systems— departmental databases, networked servers, individual computers, storage hard drives—implementing, monitoring, and enforcing security and backup is difficult.
Creating digital assets is an investment and, considering their importance in the sales and marketing process, these assets need to be secured and backed up regularly.
How can DAM software help?
Businesses that sell through distributors and retailers must format and send digital assets to all their resellers on a regular basis—sometimes hundreds of different resellers that may each have different requirements for their digital assets. Sales suffer if resellers do not have up-to-date digital assets for all the products they sell. It’s not hard to imagine how labor intensive this process can become, often requiring multiple full-time personnel.
How can DAM software help?
Determining which assets need to be produced, followed by actually producing and publishing them is a lengthy process. After this is complete, you still need to send the assets to your internal systems (e.g. catalog and eCommerce) and your reseller network (customers).
The quicker you get your assets into the sales and marketing process, the sooner they can generate value for your business. If there are multiple resources, departments, disconnected systems, and non-automated workflows involved in the digital asset production process, the time to market for your digital assets will be long and costly.
How can DAM software help?
Digital asset metadata is data that is embedded in the asset itself (e.g. Exchangeable image file format [Exif] data) or associated directly to the digital asset through manual entry or automated upload (e.g. description, ownership, modified date, tags, keywords).
Digital assets without metadata are not really assets at all. They are simply a rich media or electronic file—nothing more. Examples include a product image and brochure, an audio, video, and graphics file, catalogs, banner ads, and animations. Digital asset files that do not have metadata associated with them are difficult to search for and manage; their effectiveness in the sales process is limited, adding little value to the business.
With digital assets scattered throughout the business in disconnected systems, it is often difficult to implement metadata standards. Assets have varying degrees of complete and quality metadata attached, making these assets difficult to manage, search, and share.
How can DAM software help?
The quality of the digital assets you produce matters when it comes to the sales and marketing process. Placing workflows to control the quality of the digital assets and implement standards to enforce consistent quality standards is paramount. This is not a simple task when digital assets were produced at different times by different groups within the business.
If your business has thousands of product images that were captured by multiple groups, you can’t ensure consistent quality. Adding inconsistent image quality to the same reseller’s sites and catalog does not promote a recognizable brand experience, nor does it help drive sales.
How can DAM software help?
Many businesses struggle with duplicate assets because their systems aren’t connected and cannot be efficiently searched. Users are unable to locate the digital assets they require, so they assume they must create them. The net result is that the business has more than one copy of the same assets in its various data repositories. Duplicate assets increase storage requirements, are inefficient to search, and are difficult to manage.
How can DAM software help?
There are many ways a DAM system can help businesses, leading to increased sales and less effort from your team. Having a system in place is essential in today’s digital world, where eCommerce is the preferred purchasing method and buyers expect a large variety of images.
To learn more about how implementing a DAM system can work for your business, visit www.epicor.com/DAM.
Patrick brings over 20 years of experience in product image production, with a primary focus on the Automotive Aftermarket sector, most notably through work with Visual SKUs. Throughout this time, Patrick has played an active role in industry associations, contributing to the development of best practices and standards for digital asset formatting, production, and distribution. Recently, Patrick has taken on the position of Manager of Content Development at Epicor, continuing a commitment to excellence in digital content strategy and execution.