These days it seems marketers are always being tasked to do more with less. You’re under pressure to meet your organisation’s commercial goals but can’t grow your team’s headcount. So, how do you achieve more to fight the squeeze? A digital asset management (DAM) platform could be the answer.
Unlock efficiency in your team
Content is the lifeblood of marketing for any business – whether that’s photography, video, design, brochures or other digital assets. But no matter how compelling your content is, it’s useless if you don’t manage it efficiently. Remember those hours spent hunting down an image from last year’s campaign, anyone?
DAM platforms have long been used to store, organise, find, and distribute content, with brands like Journey Beyond and Ramsay Pharmacy choosing to manage their content with industry leader Canto.
In a recent ‘Introduction to DAM’ webinar, Freddie Rumsey, Canto’s ANZ lead explained that “most people are aware of storage solutions, but a DAM like Canto is much more than that, it is a single source of truth for all your content. You can centralise all your file types, preview them, add and edit metadata, control your file statuses, then easily push out content. It’s an efficiency tool where the entire organisation can find content easily, get it to market faster, and mitigate any risk in terms of consent”.
But how exactly can a DAM platform unlock the hidden efficiencies in your marketing team? Here are some examples.
Outsource your organising
Let’s admit the reality for many organisations: your content is spread across different computers, clouds, servers, suppliers, and other locations that (whisper it) you may not even know about. Even more organised businesses spend considerable resources manually uploading, filing, sorting, and updating their content.
It was a problem known only too well to Troy Schindler, senior graphic designer for Ramsay Pharmacy, which has 60 community pharmacies and 40 hospital dispensaries. “We have staff all over Australia, so some of our staff were on different servers. We had logos and images on one server and all the artwork on another server. It was always a laborious task to find anything. Whenever someone from another part of the business requested a logo or any of the approved brand images, we had to search in multiple places just to make sure we were getting the right ones,” said Schindler.
But a huge growing mass of unsorted files is light work for an AI-powered DAM platform, which is like having a team of content organisation pros at your beck and call. Using automated metadata tagging and organisation, including Smart Tags, smart albums, and facial recognition features, a DAM solution turns your content into an efficient library.
Schindler explained how Canto helped solve Ramsay Pharmacy’s content chaos: “Before Canto, our process was just an email request asking for a logo, product image or something from a photoshoot. Now that everyone has access to those photos, they can just log in and download it themselves”.
Scale your content
Once a DAM platform has helped organise your business’s content with pace and precision, it can help break the cycle of poor productivity by speeding up your day-to-day workflows.
Australia’s largest experiential tourism business, Journey Beyond, found a range of benefits from introducing Canto, which helped Creative Manager Jordan Davidson and his team scale their content.
“There are a lot of great features, but personally, my number-one is the video trimming feature,” said Davidson. “I do a lot of video edits, and sometimes you just need a few seconds of footage to fill in a spot. It’s super handy to be able to download a 5- or 10-second clip from a longer video instead of the whole thing”.
This is just one example of the super-helpful, time-busting functions in a DAM platform – with others such as AI Visual Search enabling you to simply describe what you want to find using natural language, and the platform instantly retrieves relevant photos and videos.
Do more with less
Every organisation has different needs, and a different tech stack to meet those needs, but the impact of an AI-assisted DAM solution can be realised by all. And with fewer than a third of marketing professionals using an AI-powered DAM platform according to a recent Canto survey, you could also find it gives you the competitive edge. Who knows, very soon, doing ‘more with less’ can become a reality.
