Visual storytelling has become the key to attracting audiences to your business today. And unsurprisingly, many businesses have adopted this path and even reaped the benefits. Airbnb, Nykaa, Lenskart, and Mamaearth are classic examples of this trend.
However, this also means the number of digital assets they need to manage every day has risen exponentially. It’s common to find creative and marketing teams constantly struggling to find, share, edit, and manage digital assets. This is where a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution comes into play.
It is a centralized system to store, organize, retrieve, and distribute digital assets in an efficient way. But how exactly can you use a Digital Asset Management system for your business? The blog answers this question by taking you through 13 different DAM use cases applicable to today’s businesses.
Business Use Cases for DAM
DAM systems cater to a wide range of business use cases, streamlining various aspects of asset management and contributing to overall organizational efficiency. Here are 4 such use cases:
Marketing and branding asset management
Instead of focusing on core creative and marketing activities, teams often spend most of their time sifting through folders and trying to locate the right content for their digital campaigns. This drastically reduced their productivity and prevented them from focusing on other mission-critical activities related to selling.
A DAM system eliminates the above bottleneck by offering a centralized system for asset management. It allows for easy retrieval and distribution of assets by leveraging AI for better organization and search.
ImageKit, one of the leading DAM systems in the world, centralizes your digital files and offers a browser-based UI for uploading, retrieving, and sharing assets. Here is a real-life example of how a popular brand used ImageKit to streamline its marketing and branding asset management activities.
Lenskart, India’s leading eyewear brand, wanted to offer a high-quality digital experience to cater to their growing consumer expectations. They adopted ImageKit as their main Digital Asset Management solution to handle their product catalog and main asset management activities. By offloading their entire image optimization and transformation processes, they could focus more on building their core Ecommerce capabilities while relying on ImageKit for everything else related to asset management. You can read the complete case study here.
Improved brand consistency and better customer experience
Brands interact with customers across numerous channels, including social media, websites, mobile apps, etc. Ensuring a consistent brand message and experience across all these channels requires seamless access to marketing materials.
This is certainly not possible without a centralized hub like digital asset management software that offers unobstructed access to digital assets for all the approved stakeholders. DAM systems also ensure that every team member has access to only the latest and approved versions of brand assets. This considerably reduces the risk of your teams using outdated and incorrect assets. Let us understand this capability of DAM with an example.
Curtsy, a C2C marketplace, uses ImageKit to manage their assets and streamline related workflows. Here are the different ways in which ImageKit helped maintain brand consistency for Curtsy:
- Transformed Curtsy’s media assets to fit into a standard layout across different platforms.
- Enabled Curtsy to create personalized templates for its users to access in real-time so that all user-generated content is uniform in nature.
- Allowed Curtsy to utilize custom fonts for the dynamic text overlaid on templates to ensure further consistency in branding.
Related reading: Curtsy used ImageKit to provide perfect media experiences across devices and platforms
Streamlining communication and workflows
When information flows seamlessly among your team members, decisions can be made promptly. This prevents delays in planning and executing marketing and sales campaigns. DAM systems offer a collaborative environment for your teams to communicate with each other and work on projects simultaneously. It creates swift feedback loops so that teams can make quick adjustments to assets before they are published.
ImageKit breaks down communication silos resulting in smooth workflows and accelerated project timelines. It achieves this through collaboration features like user access management, media collections, version control, and shareable asset URLs.
Accelerated time-to-market
No matter what industry you are in, competition is fierce today. And only those brands that can bring products, campaigns, and content to market swiftly can stay ahead of the curve.
DAM tools are the key to expediting your time-to-market as they considerably reduce the time spent on asset management activities like uploading and accessing digital media. They facilitate quick collaboration and offer easy edit capabilities so that your team doesn’t have to depend on other platforms to complete these activities, further saving. This capability of DAM to accelerate time-to-market is best explained by the below real-life scenario.
Noon, the Middle East’s leading Ecommerce platform, took anywhere between two to three days on average to put their products live on their website. This is a high turnaround time for a competitive industry like Ecommerce. That’s when they migrated their image management and optimization activities to ImageKit’s DAM platform. ImageKit’s advanced optimization features, native integration with existing cloud storage, and ability to identify duplicate images helped Noon bring down their turnaround time to just 3 minutes.
Related Reading: Noon optimized its image workflow and turnaround time using ImageKit
DAM use cases for internal teams
DAM systems streamline operations across various organizational functions. Undoubtedly, it has emerged as an indispensable tool for the following internal teams:
Design and creative teams
Design and creative teams are under constant pressure to produce more assets. DAM systems offer a scalable solution for managing this increasing demand for digital content as it can facilitate automation of several aspects of the creative workflow, such as content creation, file conversion, approval processes, and distribution.
DAM software also allows content creators to easily repurpose existing assets through advanced features like styling and positioning controls, contrast stretching, image sharpening, etc. These capabilities allow designers to focus more on the creative aspects of their work while leaving the operational aspects to DAM.
Marketing teams
Historically, marketing teams have relied on creative teams to make even minor adjustments to the marketing content. For instance, to reformat images to suit different marketing channels, there would be back-and-forth emails and chats between the designer, the marketer, and the approver. This would often result in unwanted delays in executing the final campaign.
With DAM systems in place, this dependency is eliminated as marketing teams can make all such minor edits on the fly. This means the right message always reaches the right people at the right time. In addition, DAM systems provide valuable analytics and reporting on digital asset usage, such as stats on country, device, IP address, referrer, and more, to optimize the experience for all your users.
Branding teams
The branding team is singularly responsible for ensuring the quality and consistency of brand-related content. To achieve this, they need uninterrupted access to brand assets, such as logos, audio files, fonts, graphics, product shots, videos, etc. At the same time, they also need to ensure that every other team in the organization has access to recent and approved creative files.
A DAM system helps in this regard by offering a unified repository for all kinds of assets and acting as a single source of truth for all needs related to brand assets.
Developers and IT teams
DAM systems come with two core capabilities that make the lives of developers and IT teams much simpler. First is asset versioning, which allows team members to track changes to assets over time. So, if there ever was a situation where developers had to roll back to previous versions of their application, this feature would help them.
Second is the integration capability of the DAM solution with other platforms. This means developers need not write additional programs to pull data from DAM to every new application they are building.
DAM use cases for external parties
DAM systems can easily bridge the gap between your team and external parties without compromising on efficiency and security of assets. Here are two such scenarios where DAM is useful:
Sharing assets with clients
If you are a marketing or design agency, effective communication with clients becomes incredibly important. A DAM system enhances client communication and engagement by providing a secure and organized platform for sharing assets. For instance, DAM systems enable clients to provide feedback directly on the shared assets. This interactive feedback loop reduces communication gaps, accelerates decision-making processes, and ensures that the final deliverables align with the client's expectations.
Secondly, clients can benefit from the transparency of version histories within DAM systems. This feature enables clients to track the evolution of creative projects, review changes made during the design process, and ask the team to revert to previous versions when necessary.
Sharing assets with agency partners and collaborators
When it comes to sharing assets with third-party vendors, influencers, collaborators, and freelancers, security is often the biggest concern for organizations. What if they misuse the content they are privy to? What if they access content from one of the client’s folders? To prevent such situations, many brands end up transferring only the relevant files to the vendor’s own database. Two separate databases mean any future changes to the original asset will not be reflected in the vendors’ version of assets, resulting in inconsistencies.
DAM systems completely eliminate the above situation by providing granular control over access permissions. You can selectively share assets with agency partners and collaborators right from your DAM. This means they not only have access to the relevant files, but the chances of brand inconsistencies are slim due to no file duplications.
ImageKit offers features like watermarks, private images, and URL signatures to fully secure your assets while sharing with third-party stakeholders. You can also set your URLs to expire after a specific time to reduce unauthorized hotlinking of your file.
Industry-specific DAM use cases
Though DAM is industry agnostic and anyone who wants to streamline their content management and brand management activities can use it, these three key industries benefit the most from DAM solutions.
Ecommerce
Ecommerce is a visually driven industry. The presentation of products plays a key role in attracting and retaining customers. At the same time, brands have to launch new products at a rapid pace as time-to-market in this industry directly affects competitiveness. Both these requirements mean brands have to deal with a vast array of media on a daily basis, and that too with great agility. This is where DAM systems help. They can expedite the process of launching new products by providing a streamlined workflow for creating, reviewing, and distributing product visuals.
For instance, ImageKit offers image transformation features like DPR transformation, automatic background removal, etc. This allows E-commerce brands to deliver stunning and uniform product visuals, thereby enhancing customer experience. The platform also offers bulk upload, another critical feature needed by the industry, as it saves hundreds of hours for product management teams.
Further reading: Digital asset management for Ecommerce: A complete guide
Media & Entertainment
In the media and entertainment industry, besides frequent management of assets, proper rights management and licensing are critical. Some DAM systems allow the attachment of licenses, terms of use, and permissions to a digital asset. This reduces the risk of legal issues associated with unauthorized content usage. This is also one industry where frequent feedback from different teams is common. This is to make sure that the final output is perfect and consumable by the audience.
DAM improves collaboration between teams via real-time feedback and version control features. DAM systems also help in accessing and managing historical assets. This is particularly important for the media and entertainment industry which often relies on past content for inspiration.
Travel & Hospitality
The travel and hospitality industry often uses high-definition content to showcase destinations, accommodations, and experiences in the best possible way. Such media tend to be large in terms of file size. Storing huge volumes of media files can be resource-intensive. DAM systems provide a cost-effective and scalable solution to store, organize, and retrieve high-resolution images and videos. These systems optimize storage space through compression and smart categorization, eliminating the need for extensive physical infrastructure and large upfront investments.
For instance, ImageKit lets you set the default image compression level in the dashboard to suit your business requirements. You can also selectively apply lossless compression on WebP and PNG images using the corresponding URL parameters.
Parting thoughts
Our DAM use case guide proves that the benefits of DAM systems are endless, and they cater to a variety of needs of an organization. Whether empowering design teams with centralized asset management, enhancing marketing campaigns with brand consistency, or fostering seamless collaboration with clients, the use cases of DAM are as varied as they are impactful. ImageKit is one such DAM solution that lets you unlock the full spectrum of benefits discussed in this post.
By adopting ImageKit in your business, you make a strategic move toward operational excellence in digital asset management. To start your journey with ImageKit, create an account now.