How to Make DAM a Part of Your Business Strategy

These assets might include images, videos, audio and podcast content, chat logs from customer interactions and a host of other digital content and data. DAM is essential because these assets may be used by any number of teams at any time to realize a set of goals that might change regularly.

It’s no secret that economic environments can and do change without warning. Companies that capitalize on the optimization and organization provided by DAM will remain better organized and more nimble than their competitors and better able to address changing markets and customer sentiments.

DAM organizes all of the data structures that have value to an organization and enables it to perform its functions more effectively. These assets could include full databases or just a few columns in a spreadsheet.

Now that we have a general definition, let’s further explore what DAM is, how businesses use it, how it can benefit organizations and what kinds of challenges to look out for.

Businesses use DAM to answer the challenges of a digital world

Businesses use DAM to organize and protect their data and to ensure it remains as useful as possible. In today’s digital world, data requires the same level of protection for the company to stay solvent and competitive as any other business asset.

Dr. Anil Chakravarthy, CEO of Informatica, says that the best companies are realizing data is everyone’s responsibility within the business. In so doing, he helps make the case for a strong approach to DAM:

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why you want to make DAM a part of your business game plan.

The business benefits of DAM

Experts anticipate substantial growth in demand for DAM-related services and technologies in the coming years. DAM could be a $6,901.6 billion industry by 2024, seeing a compound annual growth rate of more than 21% between now and 2025.

This isn’t especially surprising, given the speed with which small and large businesses have had to pivot to omnichannel selling and digital-first sales and distribution models. DAM can be the missing link in a company’s digital outreach strategy as well as the means to organize internal workflows for optimal productivity and efficiency.

Now’s the time to realize the competitive advantages of DAM and to make every effort to adopt the related technologies before competitors do. Companies with well-organized digital assets:

• Know where their data is at all times and are less likely to misplace or mishandle key data
• See their internal departments collaborate more effectively with each other
• Communicate more swiftly and effectively with customers
• Are more organized from top to bottom
• Better positioned to use next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain
• More nimble and better able to adapt to market disruptions

A few of the other benefits of DAM are:

1. DAM Maximizes Profits for the Company

DAM can help maximize profits for the company as the data is cleaned and organized in a way that enables the extraction of clear and actionable insights from your statistics. DAM makes it simpler to access and understand the detailed data points that lead to insights that reduce costs, improve productivity and increase revenue.

2. DAM improves business planning

Businesses can also boost their ability to plan for the future if they have the right DAM tools. DAM aids in ongoing data collection and analyzing on a variety of topics, including past and current demand, customer purchasing patterns, competitor activities and outside factors that might impact the supply chain.

3. DAM improves data integrity and usefulness

By using proper DAM techniques and best practices, businesses can improve the quality and usefulness of their data. Data can be the lifeblood of a modern company because it sheds light on what companies can do differently or better.

The business challenges of adopting DAM technology

While DAM is essential in modern times because of the speed with which companies are adopting new technology and amassing digital assets, there are several challenges to be aware of:

1. Having a DAM strategy

Organizations need a sound strategy for adopting DAM before making any investments in technology platforms.

This begins with determining and clearly outlining your goals. Involve stakeholders and decision-makers from every level of the company, many of whom understand daily challenges and bottlenecks better than the top brass might.

Several questions should follow as your DAM integration plan takes shape:

• What are the goals or problems we want our investment in DAM to serve or solve?
• What kinds of data are most useful for streamlining workflows and fine-tuning the customer journey?
• Where is our data located? Can it be consolidated? How regularly should it be audited?
• What is the life cycle of our accumulated data? When does it cease to be useful, and what’s the plan for safely discarding this end-of-life data?
• What are our software requirements and how will new technologies interface with our existing systems?
• What kinds of guidelines do we require for safe and ethical data handling, based on the type of data collected and national or regional privacy laws?

Again, digital assets can be anything from customer insights gathered during interactions to video content destined for a marketing campaign. Knowing what data you’ve got, where it’s located and ensuring the proper parties can access that data is the backbone of a DAM integration plan.

Once you devise your DAM strategy, there are a few other challenges that you should be prepared to take care of. They are:

2. Taking data security seriously

Data security is a fundamental challenge to discuss because, when it comes to personal or proprietary information, the last thing you want to happen is for it to fall into the wrong hands.

One of the main ways to combat a data breach is to educate yourself on how to protect your passwords. A few best practices are to never use the same password twice and to use a password manager to help you keep track of all your unique passwords.

Here are some data security bonus tips:

• Use strong passwords that are at least 12 characters or longer. Strong passwords are ones that aren’t easily guessable, like strings of random words.
• Enable multi-factor (or two-factor) authentication so that even if somebody figures out the password they still don’t have an open door to walk right into all of your private information.

3. Creating and maintaining data governance practices

Using sound data governance strategies can also help prevent any costly data security mishaps. Data governance deals with the actual handling and usage of data.

With data governance, you must decide how data is organized and protected as well as manage who can access which segments of data at which time. Partition databases and provide access credentials only to individuals with the knowledge and authorization to view and manipulate the organization’s data.

Data governance practices must also clearly spell out the proper ways to transmit or distribute organizational data, whether internally or externally. Ideally, the organization will create a kind of “data governance office”, so that there’s clear process ownership and everybody in the hierarchy knows who to ask if data problems or questions arise.

DAM helps bring order to the digital world

As you understand that data is one of your business assets, the benefits of implementing DAM and the challenges involved, hopefully you feel ready to accept the challenge. Your business will reap the rewards from using these tips and developing a complete data management system.