Not worth a DAM?

Getting all your brand assets into a single, easily accessible system is one of the most effective ways to help you manage your brand. This kind of solution is called a DAM - Digital Asset Management solution, also known as an Image Library or Media Library.

What does a DAM do?

A DAM provides online secure storage and retrieval for all the digital files associated with your brand. This can include; images and photographs, documents and presentations, video and animations, brochures and banners. These files are organised into a structure which can be searched, browsed and filtered. Files can be downloaded or used in other integrated systems.

Benefits of a DAM

Why should you go beyond your current set up? How can a DAM help your team and your organisation?

Here’s 7 reasons why along with some useful statistics from recent research (see end of post for sources).

Single source of truth

A DAM gives you a centralised and secure ‘single source of truth’ for people to access assets. You don’t need to manage multiple locations for assets or try to remember what goes where. Consolidating into a single system can also save you money on licences or software support as you are just paying for one system.

Reduce time managing requests

Using a DAM means that people always know where to go to find the most up to date assets. The DAM will have a visual interface and metadata about each asset making it easy for people to find what they need. No more back and forth with endless emails asking you which is the right asset to use or worse, asking you to source them.

Minimise compliance risks

DAM systems can manage asset governance so that people can only use assets that have the correct usage rights. Expiration dates on assets mean they can’t be accidentally used with potential legal consequences. You can rest assured that you are meeting compliance requirements.

Improve brand consistency

Using a DAM improves your brand consistency overall as you will get a big picture overview of how your brand is represented across your assets. You can remove media files that are off-brand and make sure all available assets are creating a coherent and consistent identity and voice, amplifying your brand.

Improve content creation ROI

A DAM will help you maximise the investment you make in content creation. That marketing asset you out-sourced to a designer can be easily found and reused across your organisation, rather than being designed again from scratch. Each time it’s downloaded the ROI increases.

Free up your creative team

Even better, if your DAM has content creation capabilities (like BrandStencil) then new content can be created from templates accessed from the DAM without needing any support from the marketing team or design skills. This frees up your team to do what they do best, design beautiful and compelling creative content.

Measure to make better decisions

Your DAM should record all activity in the system so you can monitor the effectiveness of your brand assets. These insights help you decide where to focus your ongoing efforts in your brand and asset development, ultimately saving valuable time and resources. At its simplest you should know which assets are popular, what’s not getting used and who are your power users.

Sources for statistics in this article

* The State of Digital Asset Management 2023 - Demand Metric & Brandfolder
** 2021 Brand Consistency Report - Marq

Are you ready for a DAM?

If you think you need to give a DAM we’d recommend you evaluate your requirements and current set up to help you choose the right system. We will be following up with another article on how to do that.

Templates + DAM = BrandStencil

BrandStencil’s platform has DAM functionality built in as well as brand templates for content creation. If you are currently using a shared drive or cloud based file storage for your brand assets BrandStencil could be a good fit for your needs. Using BrandStencil can save you costs as you pay for a single platform. We are continuously developing new features to improve the DAM so if there’s something specific you want to do and you aren’t sure our DAM provides it, let us know.