Why Should You Integrate Your CMS With a DAM?
Your CMS and DAM should always be the two most significant marketing technology components, especially if your company pays a lot of attention to marketing. Additionally, the ability of CMS and DAM to work collectively always has an impact on the level of productivity of the digital marketing department. Therefore, if you are still concerned about integrating your CMS with a DAM, this article should point you in the right direction.
What is a DAM?
A digital asset management (DAM) system plays a significant role in creating content for social media campaigns. This system is essential in organizing, collaborating, and distributing visual media from a single central directory. A DAM system helps your company reduce internal restrictions and improve consistency across various channels by offering you a central source of truth for all of the company’s visual content.
DAM system allows you to manage all types of digital files within the organization. In fact, you can use DAM to perform many functions, such as sorting, resizing, and formatting files. A DAM also enhances the security of your digital media. However, a DAM may not offer an excellent platform for publishing the way CMS does. That is why it is always essential to have them work collectively.
What Is a CMS?
A content management system (CMS) can be considered the foundation upon which all your online business activities are based. A CMS allows you to publish, change, and remove posts from your business websites. For instance, it offers a platform for all blogs, business websites, and eCommerce activities. Generally, a content management system is the basis of web designing, editing, and administration of blogs and websites. The system comes with templates and WYSIWYG building units that allow you to set up a website effortlessly. A CMS is capable of managing content based on texts. Accordingly, it is SEO compatible and features robust tracking and search capabilities.
On the downside, CMS is not appropriate for media functionalities. As much as it can store digital media, A CMS is limited in storing, searching, and sharing digital media content.
What Is The Difference Between CMS And DAM Systems?
Companies nowadays rely heavily on websites as marketing platforms. This calls for actions to keep with constantly advancing technologies. CMS and DAM systems offer business solutions to help companies keep with technological changes. However, DAM and CMS provide different solutions and are designed to serve various purposes.
Since digital asset management and content management systems deal with managing digital content, identifying differences between them can be challenging. Accordingly, both platforms can work together, making it even more confusing. However, they have notable differences, as explained below:
The first difference between a DAM and CMS lies in functionality. A content management system (CMS) is a platform that allows you to manage your digital content. On the other hand, the digital asset management (DAM) system is considered a link between the designer and the marketer, allowing the two to operate effortlessly.
Additionally, DAM and CMS differ in the type of content they manage. For instance, a CMS allows users to publish media on blogs and websites. You can use CMS to sort digital content before publishing them. In contrast, a DAM sorts contents in medial file format.
Lastly, a DAM is designed for content management. You can use a DAM system to sort and organize media files. On the other hand, CMS is designed with repository capabilities, making it easier to create content. With a content management system, you do not have to download content from an external source.
Steps Involved That DAM Will Enable
Every website requires content and a DAM is the first platform to find it. The following steps are involved finding content from a DAM system and onto your website:
-
Browsing the content in a digital asset management system.
-
Choosing the content you want to use.
-
Getting permission to use the content.
-
Downloading the content.
-
Editing the content into the right format.
-
Publishing the content on your website.
A DAM system allows you to perform these processes.
Benefits Of Using A DAM With Your CMS
You can always leverage technology solutions to improve your business. This is what digital transformation is all about and why you need CMS and DAM systems. Here are the benefits of integrating a DAM with your CMS.
1. DAM enables dynamic asset distribution
The most important marketing principle is to know what customers want. However, you may find out that your website is dynamic while your web pages are static. When this challenge arises, the answer is always to create dynamic content.
Dynamic content allows you to switch your posts according to what you know about guests. However, not all digital asset management systems are capable of doing this. Accordingly, you need to organize your content to make it dynamic. A DAM system allows you to create a client profile for relevant posts.
2. DAM keep your assets straight
Some websites are hard to navigate, especially when it comes to media libraries. This makes finding an asset a challenge. In this case, people are more likely to re-upload what they want since they cannot access it in your library, which can be frustrating.
Additionally, the layout of your media library, along with tagging issues, makes it hard to search for an asset when the need arises. It is also hard to get the most out of your digital library.
That is where a digital asset management system comes in. A DAM system can be integrated with CMS, making it more manageable to find assets when needed.
3. DAM can help create a single source of truth
Assets can be duplicated, making it difficult to keep your content straight. You need a SQL database to store data. However, there is also the need to find a way of accessing the data for various uses. That is why you need a DAM.
A DAM system allows you to upload assets, tag them, and track them for future marketing campaigns without compromising their usability. Accordingly, you can do all these without sacrificing any underlying database if you have a DAM system.
4. A CMS is excellent at publishing but bad at storage
A content management system makes it more manageable for non-tech users to publish content on your website. Accordingly, it offers a platform to design and format content according to your requirements. However, CMS is not always excellent when storing digital content that accumulates rapidly due to targeted marketing efforts.
With all online marketing campaigns, storing assets in a CMS library can become shaky. However, with an integrated DAM system, you can attach relevant metadata to every media file, making it easier to keep and search.
Additionally, your business may need to generate assets that are for marketing purposes. This is way more manageable with a digital asset management system than a content management system.
5. DAM enables you to leverage your institutional memory
The current business environment is about data, and every company has a large amount of data. All the data sets are stored in different forms, such as emails and templates, and they are valuable to the organization because they form the basis upon which operations occur.
However, such data present a challenge, especially when it comes to leveraging it for the benefit of the organization. Since data is stored in multiple channels, finding a way to use it most productively can be daunting. However, if you integrate a DAM with your CMS, you get the solutions to your problems.
For instance, a DAM system allows you to store essential assets, while a CMS offers a platform document processes used. Since you can document processes and search them easily, using any piece of information becomes natural.
6. A DAM vastly increase your rate of publication
You need to create content at a high rate to satisfy customer needs. That is how you become more competitive and successful.
Luckily, a DAM integrated with a CMS makes it more manageable. A content management system allows you to publish content rapidly, while a digital asset management system offers a platform to organize your content.
Conclusion
If your business values marketing, then your digital asset management system and content management system should be an essential part of your marketing efforts. Moreover, the ability of DAM and CMS to work together has a significant impact on your marketing team’s overall productivity. This means that you need to utilize the two platforms together if you want to reap their combined benefits.
About the author
Rithesh Raghavan is the Director at Acodez, a Digital Agency in India. Having a rich experience of 15+ years in Digital Marketing, Rithesh loves to write up his thoughts on the latest trends and developments in the world of IT and software development.
Related Insights:
