Businesses of all sizes are working with more assets and data than ever before. Often, these assets are stored in multiple places like Dropbox, local hard drives, servers, flash drives, etc., making it difficult — if not impossible — to find what you’re looking for.
Couple this with sharing content on multiple platforms — including your website and social media channels — and it’s near impossible to manage your content and keep track of which assets are the most current, and which ones are approved for each individual channel.
Sound familiar? Then you need a central source of truth — a DAM content marketing hub.
What is a DAM content marketing hub?
In essence, this is a digital asset management (DAM) system that’s capable of handling all of your digital assets in an efficient, controlled way. When your DAM becomes your one central repository, you have a central source of truth where you’re able to share the right content, with the right people, at the right time — anywhere in the world.
When it’s up and running, DAM is able to handle all of your assets, feeding all digital/web properties with share links, embed codes, embedded collections, and more.
If you’re a small- or medium-sized business, a central source of truth like Smartimage might be the perfect fit. It’s the lite version of DAM, which is perfect when you don’t have too much “heavy lifting” involved with assets.
Larger businesses typically have more robust needs, which are better served by the Widen Collective, DAM software that provides many more tools like Portals, connectors to popular file sharing tools and incredible analytics to see how your assets are performing across the web.
Real-world examples
Before implementing a DAM system, many of our clients struggled with the same problems:
Which files should we trust if they’re stored in multiple locations?
Which videos, logos, images, and graphics in cloud storage are up to date and legally safe to use?
If we integrate cloud storage with our marketing automation tool, will email marketers use the right content?
Our sales team can’t easily find the neat video that our email marketers sent to prospects. They ask someone in marketing to email the file over. That marketer, a.k.a. “the finder of stuff,” often spends HOURS hunting down the file — instead of doing his real job.
These are just a handful of typical issues that can be addressed and solved by having a DAM central source of truth. It can share data (i.e., integrate) with cloud storage, web content management, product information management, marketing automation, and other systems that rely on visual content. With its governance controls, DAM could give that sales team access to the video they need almost immediately, and ensure any non-approved footage remains behind closed doors.
And, when someone updates an asset in DAM, it will AUTOMATICALLY update everywhere it’s been embedded. How’s that for a central source of truth We call this concept “1 internet, 1 file,” otherwise known as C.O.P.E. – Create Once, Publish Everywhere.
Have questions?
Get in touch with us anytime to find out more about Smartimage. Or, check out our Features page to learn more about our DAM-lite software.
The post Powering the visual web with a central source of truth appeared first on Smartimage.