Opening the DAM: Reducing Silos for Better Workflow

Content is at the heart of customer experience. It entices people to engage with your brand and ultimately make a purchase. As the demand for dynamic, relevant content continues to increase, so does the importance of creating and managing it efficiently. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is often viewed as its own island, with a natural focus on centralizing and streamlining content. However, DAM is an integral piece of a much bigger concept – centralized content should be leveraged as the driver for more efficient workflows, and as part of the solution for reducing silos within organizations. Knowing the DAM market is poised to grow by roughly $12 Billion throughout the next four years (accelerating at a compound annual growth rate 22.05%), it’s imperative that this spend does not create yet another silo of stranded company assets, resulting in wasted time and spend, when these assets could have been easily leveraged across the business to help create a seamless experience.

Why is DAM so hot? While there are plenty of overt benefits, like making it easier for teams to find and access content, these benefits are just the tip of the iceberg. When you go a little deeper, you see that DAMs can help bridge the gap between teams and departments, which often develop their own working styles and unique processes, and sometimes even leverage their own tools in order to get work done. Silos result in segmented flows of information, and therefore diminish value. Having a centralized platform that integrates your tech stack, consolidates workflows, and streamlines communication helps mitigate these challenges, preventing teams and departments from losing information across different platforms. That said, having a centralized platform without a plan for enabling the full lifecycle of content, from creation to approval to distribution, is a significant oversight. The right people and processes must be in place in order to leverage DAM to its fullest potential.

While we usually consider DAMs from the perspective of the creative team, considering content challenges from other viewpoints, like from those of the operations team or the customer, sheds a different light. Let’s zoom in on the workflow piece. IBM defines a workflow as a system for managing repetitive processes and tasks which occur in a particular order. In the context of asset management, there is wide breadth which includes everything from drafts, edits, integrations, collaboration, and approvals. If assets are taken out of this governed process into an ad-hoc workflow, there can often be value found in the short-term but at the cost of the long-term, when the asset inevitably becomes stuck outside of the lifecycle that would have maintained it.

More efficient workflows drive alignment between teams and stakeholders, which leads to more productivity. The combination of automations, integrations, and workflow management capabilities results in reduced silos and less time wasted.

Navigating cross-functional workflow processes is what allows us to execute on deliverables in a timely fashion, and ultimately deliver and uphold an excellent experience. Below are three areas of focus that help power the process.  

1. Automate. Automate repetitive tasks and tedious workflows so that teams can focus on what matters. For example, Brandfolder has the capability to identify logos and faces, so when there are multiple assets that need to be identified, updated, and/or removed, it’s done automatically by the platform, allowing teams to focus on more strategic initiatives. When our partner McLaren changed their driver lineup, they were able to simplify the cut over of all driver related social media content everywhere, all at once.
2. Delegate. Who says you have to do everything yourself? Combining digital asset management and collaborative workflow management capabilities creates substantial efficiencies within and across teams, making it easier to identify areas where you can delegate, and help your teams and stakeholders quickly manage workflows at scale. Delegating what should be managed by the property destination team versus the centralized content team empowers the edge by choosing the final image from within a curated library of approved options.
3. Enable. Sales and Marketing teams collaborate on mission critical content, and having a DAM in place enables them to distribute valuable, high-converting assets, like datasheets and customer success stories, with ease and speed. Having access to customizable campaign kits and asset collections empowers Sales and Marketing teams to ensure brand consistency and deliver timely production, all while maintaining compliance.

As companies across industries continue to shift towards more dynamic workflows, it’s important to consider different perspectives, both from within your organization and through your customer’s eyes. When organizations can’t deliver the right experiences to the right customer at the right time, the impact can be severe. Leveraging a modern DAM, wrapped in an integrated workflow, can help ensure an excellent experience — one that is cohesive, consistent, and timely – by increasing efficiencies internally and reducing organizational silos.