Digital agencies are in a sea-change time where they have to consistently fervor creative spark between them and their clients. From executing time-sensitive campaigns, adapting to technology faster, staying resourceful and agile to meeting clients’ rising expectations, they have to set the clock ahead of the time.
Amongst all, one key challenge is digital asset management. The systematic creation and administration of rich media assets and collaterals such as images, text, videos, multimedia content, web content and more have more significance than ever before. And, with the blend of right digital asset, processes and technology, they can deliver breakthrough results promptly for their clients and end-customers.
Digital Agencies' Challenges
- Asset Management: Organizing and managing clients’ diverse digital and rich media assets easily and securely.
- Asset Automation: Automatically streamlining asset search, repurpose and utilization for faster campaign execution.
- Better Collaboration: Coordination, and transparency while dealing with thousands of digital assets, and multiple creators and collaborators.
- Brand Consistency: Handling compliance, copyright issues, and versioning of individual digital assets.
- Personalized Experience: Improving workflow and getting deeper insights to craft personalized and engaging customer experience across multiple channels.
- Profitability: Saving time, improving operational efficiency, and reducing cost with shrinking profit margin.
According to Gartner, managing marketing assets and scaling content operations are top priorities for marketing leaders.
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The Indispensable Role of DAM for Customer Experience Strategy
How Does Digital Asset Management Help You?
A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is beneficial because it prevents creatives from straying away from basic common sense when confronted with too much digital assets and data. It also plays a crucial role in increasing digital asset value, improving operational efficiency & transparency, and boosting overall performance and ROI.
Streamline Asset Management and Improve Efficiency
- Improve collaboration and access to critical assets
- Robust metadata management with enriched information.
- Maintain brand consistency and brand integrity.
- Bring new marketing campaigns to market at a faster pace.
- Ensure better control over the brand with streamlined workflows and the creative process.
- Simplify collaboration and share and distribute assets across multiple stakeholders for faster approval.
- Ensure user rights, security, and protection.
- Easily integrate with CMS, PIM, and other systems.
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How PIM/DAM Platform Can Unlock More Values in 2022?
1. Deliver Consistent Experience
- Advanced search capabilities to facilitate discovery of assets across departments.
- Asset lifecycle, permission and rights management of digital assets for brand compliance and legal compliance.
- Optimize workflows and save valuable file management time.
- Avoid misuse of assets, eliminate duplication, and encourage re-use to ensure proper usage of assets.
- Eliminate workflow redundancies, and accelerate creativity and production cycles.
- Simplify complex technology requirement means all kinds of assets can be managed easily without expensive technology usages.
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Why Should You Integrate Your CMS With a DAM?
2. Boost Creativity and Innovation
- Address the growing volume of digital assets by automating asset management and tagging.
- Make content more dynamic with machine learning, AI, predictive analytics and content automation.
- Virtual reality and 360° preview capability for a better experience.
- Facial recognition technology for accuracy and efficiency.
- Quickly streamline different categories of images such as people, places, objects, and more.
- Make digital asset searches more prominent based on location and sentiment.
- Content localization and timed content publishing.
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3. Reduce Cost
- Save cost on using multiple technologies and applications.
- Save cost on higher different resources for different specialization.
- Easy to extend and scale without incurring a huge cost.
- Provide insights into the volume and type of usage of existing media.
- Improve marketing intelligence and measurement of return on marketing investments.
Here Are The Top 5 Free & Open-Source DAM Software in 2022
Comparison: Proprietary vs Open Source DAM
Proprietary DAM
Open Source DAM
Flexibility
Proprietary software is not available to modify, you are bound by the vision of that vendor as to how the software and its features should work, and limited in the ways you may use it.
Greater flexibility to solve business problems. It gives 100% control and customization of the DAM system with fewer integration headaches.
Integration
Proprietary vendors themselves utilize, praise and integrate open source software.
Additions and customizations are quite easy to perform. You can easily extend and scale without incurring a huge cost as you need it.
Security
Only in-house engineers and developers of the vendor take care of it.
Receive millions of helping hands from the community to fix security issues.
Maintenance and Support
Higher paid support subscriptions because of vendor lock-in.
Lower paid support subscriptions with free choice of partner.
TCO
Cannot be used without paying a license fee, and there’s vendor lock-in, representing a higher cost method of using feature-rich software.
Can be used without paying a license fee, and there’s no vendor lock-in, representing a low-cost method of using feature-rich software.
Proprietary DAM
Flexibility
Proprietary software is not available to modify, you are bound by the vision of that vendor as to how the software and its features should work, and limited in the ways you may use it.
Integration
Proprietary vendors themselves utilize, praise and integrate open source software.
Security
Only in-house engineers and developers of the vendor take care of it.
Maintenance and Support
Higher paid support subscriptions because of vendor lock-in.
TCO
Cannot be used without paying a license fee, and there’s vendor lock-in, representing a higher cost method of using feature-rich software.
Open Source DAM
Flexibility
Greater flexibility to solve business problems. It gives 100% control and customization of the DAM system with fewer integration headaches.
Integration
Additions and customizations are quite easy to perform. You can easily extend and scale without incurring a huge cost as you need it.
Security
Receive millions of helping hands from the community to fix security issues.
Maintenance and Support
Lower paid support subscriptions with free choice of partner.
TCO
Can be used without paying a license fee, and there’s no vendor lock-in, representing a low-cost method of using feature-rich software.