DAM Stakeholders - Marketing
December 4, 2023 •Antra Silova
This is the 2nd article in our 3-article series on DAM Stakeholders - the people that will be the users, directly benefit from, or be directly involved in implementation, management of your solution, such as Marketing team, Creative team, and IT. In our first article we looked at needs and wants of your IT Department when selecting a DAM. Today’s focus – marketing team. What does a marketing team need from a DAM?
Why should you consider DAM stakeholders in your DAM selection process?
The solution you choose is only a part of the equation of the success of your Digital Asset Management software. To pick the right DAM solution, you need to gather a squad of key players from different parts of your company – DAM stakeholders.
These should be folks who'll actually use the system and know the ins and outs of specific situations. This crew, made up of in-house pros and leaders, will craft a plan to steer the process of collecting info, picking a vendor, rolling out the system, and making sure it lasts. It's your go-to group for making DAM decisions!
DAM STAKEHOLDERS: Marketing Team - CMO, Head of Marketing, VP of Marketing, Marketing Manager, Brand Manager
Marketing department is responsible for driving marketing revenue by attracting and retaining customers. From crafting a compelling brand identity to conducting market research, they are responsible of how your business is perceived. Content creation, both online and offline, falls under their domain, ensuring effective communication with your audience.
In the digital landscape, they manage your online presence, making sure you're not just seen but also heard. Whether it's launching new products, analysing data for insights, or generating leads, the marketing team is at the forefront, translating business goals into strategic and impactful campaigns.
They're the storytellers, creating narratives that resonate with your audience and build lasting connections. In essence, the marketing department is the engine that propels your brand forward.
The digital asset management initiative is often born in the marketing department, although other departments – IT and creatives, are also known to be initiators and supporters of DAM projects.
When selecting a DAM solution, your Marketing Department's must-haves
- Staying on brand
- Improving collaboration
- Efficient usage of assets
- Streamlined digital asset lifecycle
- Avoiding liabilities
Staying on brand
A consistent brand builds a reliable image, reassuring customers and forming the basis of loyalty. Beyond visuals, it creates an audible brand voice, making your messaging instantly recognisable in the noisy marketplace. It's not just a visual appeal; it's the assurance of a consistent and positive customer experience.
By centralising all your digital assets – from logos and images to videos and collateral – Canto ensures that every team member is working from the same visual library. Marketing managers can breathe easy, knowing that the latest brand assets are readily accessible and that outdated materials are a thing of the past.
Each Canto instance comes with included Style Guides feature, allowing for creation and easy distribution of your brand’s styles: logos, colours, typography, etc.
Canto's version control and collaborative features eliminate the risk of conflicting visuals, fostering a seamless workflow. Whether it's the marketing team designing a campaign or the sales team pulling together a presentation, everyone taps into the same source of truth. This not only saves time but, most importantly, guarantees that every customer touchpoint reflects the consistent and polished image of your brand.
Brand Portals included with your Canto subscription allow to easily customise each Portal to your needs, including different brands you represent, events, departments, global teams, etc.
Improving collaboration
Team collaboration is essential for your marketing team to optimize workflows and get results. DAM acts as a central hub for all your creative assets, teams are able to collaborate on and update content more easily and efficiently and distribute it across multiple channels easily.
Canto makes collaboration with internal and external teams easy. Upload Links let your externals upload assets to Canto, after that you can review which assets to move to Main Library.
Private Workspaces in Canto allow select users to collaborate on a project in private. When finished, assets can be moved to the Main Library for others to view and access.
Canto allows team members to work together on assets in real-time, whether it's reviewing, editing, or approving. Comment and annotate right inside the file. Tag people you’d like to get feedback from.
Efficient usage of assets
Efficient usage of digital assets means strategic and streamlined approach to managing, accessing, and using digital assets for maximum impact.
For marketing teams, this efficiency encompasses several key elements.
Firstly, it involves organising assets systematically within the DAM platform, ensuring easy retrieval and minimising time spent searching.
Secondly, it's about enforcing version control and maintaining a centralised repository to guarantee brand consistency across various channels.
Thirdly, it includes facilitating collaborative workflows, enabling team members to seamlessly share, review, and approve digital assets.
Moreover, efficient usage means leveraging metadata and tagging to enhance searchability. It’s a strategy that not only optimises processes but also enhances creativity, collaboration, and overall marketing effectiveness.
And finally, archiving or retirement when assets become outdated.
Canto’s AI Visual Search means you can avoid manual tagging altogether – AI will find images for you just from your language search input.
Otherwise, Canto offers AI-generated auto tagging feature – Smart Tags to reduce manual work for your marketing team. In addition, keywords, metadata, description, and usage rights are all customisable and searchable fields.
Collections feature allows to create collections to group related assets, regardless of their folder location. This is useful for assembling assets for specific projects or campaigns without altering the original folder structure.
Canto’s version control keeps track of changes to assets, providing clear history of edits, and ensuring everyone is working with the latest version.
Share assets in branded Portals to any audience – internal or external. Share directly to most social media platforms. Create a streamlined review and approval process with Canto’s Workflows feature. Furthermore, Canto offers many in-built integrations to your favourite martech tools.
Streamlined content lifecycle
A streamlined content lifecycle refers to an optimised and efficient process of managing digital assets from creation to retirement.
This involves organised asset creation, meticulous categorisation within the DAM platform, easy retrieval, collaborative editing, and eventual archiving or retirement when assets become outdated.
With Canto, it’s easy to set asset expiration dates and move assets to Cold storage to archive when they become outdated.
For your marketing team, streamlining and automating content lifecycle means shorter time to market and improved ROI.
Avoiding liabilities
The last thing a marketing team wants to deal with is legal issues stemming from unauthorized use of digital assets. Key strategies for marketing teams include data protection and copyright regulations.
Canto provides easy setting of Usage Rights and Permissions. Clearly define and manage usage rights and permissions for each digital asset. This ensures that only authorised users can access and use assets, reducing the risk of unauthorised usage and potential legal issues.
Have your model release forms or other licensing documents visible next to main files with the Relate files feature. That way all information on particular photo shoot will be accessible and viewable in one place.
Digital Rights in Canto are searchable. The robust search capabilities in Canto, driven by metadata and tagging, enable users to quickly locate assets and access information about usage rights. This facilitates easy verification and adherence to legal constraints before utilizing assets in campaigns.
Canto allows administrators to set granular access controls, determining who can view, edit, or download specific assets. This feature enhances security, ensuring that only authorised personnel can handle sensitive or restricted materials.
What your Marketing Department would love to have
- Usage analytics
- AI features
- Video Management
- Support and training
Asset usage analytics
How can your CMO measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts? Seeing and understanding how your digital assets are used is a valuable information. It lets your marketing team to focus on what resonates most with content users.
By identifying frequently accessed assets and user behaviors, marketing team can tailor the content strategy to better suit the needs and preferences of its clients.
These metrics allow your organization to assess the value of each asset – aiding in new asset creation, curation, and retirement strategies.
Canto’s inbuilt reporting provides insights in asset usage, including – top downloads, sharing reports, search terms, and others.
If you’d like to dig deeper, connect Google Analytics to your Canto platform and see in-depth asset usage reports, underperforming assets, platform traffic, and more.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) features
AI capabilities can enhance asset organization, automate tagging, and provide smart recommendations, saving time for the marketing team.
Canto’s AI Visual Search is a step ahead of the now commonplace AI tagging features. With AI Visual Search your marketing team can get away without the metadata, using simply a natural language search to allow AI find matching images and videos. Contact databasics to learn more about Canto’s AI Visual Search.
Video management
Managing the ever-growing video content should be on every marketer’s mind these days. Video Preview, Playback in Canto allow for quick assessment of video content without the need to download or opening other apps.
Video Transcoding, Transcribing and Conversion are additional capabilities of Canto that are very useful to marketing teams working with videos and distributing through different channels and devices.
Streamline your video content distribution with Canto Video Embed which allows to easily embed videos to websites, blogs, or other online platforms.
Vendor support and training
Solid support and training program are something your marketing team will appreciate while onboarding, as well as receiving ongoing support as needed.
Databasics provide personalised onboarding plans to fit everyone’s needs, as well hands-on support in Australian time zone.