What will our new normal look like? Many journalists are predicting what the new world might look like and how it might effect our working lives. Not surprisingly, digital tools like Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems that have helped us to work more efficiently in the office, will become even more valuable in a remote, digital world.
Here are 4 ways that DAM systems can help enable your marketing teams to work better remotely:
1. Access your content anywhere anytime
Working remotely is the new normal for most creative teams. In the past, open artwork files such as Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Sketch, or Illustrator packages were often left with the creative agency for safekeeping and future edits. Now that we’re working remotely, your creative teams are likely comprised of both internal and external creatives who all need access to the same files for collaboration, sharing, and distribution. Why not make them centrally accessible? Your creative operations will benefit enormously from the efficiency of having a centralised brand hub for storing, searching, repurposing and delivering creative content. That centralised brand hub is a cloud-based Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. If you have one at your company, now is the time to leverage that technology to improve productivity.
Forbes observes that working remotely has pushed all of us to widen our comfort zones and pick-up new technologies that help us work from a distance with more ease and efficiency. Working remotely can be stressful, especially when technology is confusing or difficult to learn. But if your company has selected one of the many great DAM systems available on the market with an intuitive user interface, you may find that more users are now adopting the system, asking questions about how they can get more value from using the system, and singing its praises as a tool that is helping them through this frustrating period. This is accelerated change management driven by need! According to Accenture, digital working is likely to get easier as companies adopt new technologies and reduce the hassles of going virtual.
And don’t forget, a DAM can be used for more than your customer facing communications. You can use your DAM system to provide secure access to internal communications teams who need a self-service content tool.
2. Repurpose, Reuse and Reduce
Have your creative content budgets been slashed? Are your producers, videographers, photographers, actors, and other content creators in the lock-down as well? Have your events been cancelled or postponed?
Now is the time to find cost savings wherever you can. Your creative teams are not only great at creating new content, but they are also very clever and can adapt well to all sorts of challenges. Sometimes a good challenge fuels creativity. With budget cuts and creative production teams working from home, consider reusing or repurposing existing content, dig through your existing brand imagery or licensed stock imagery collections to find those images that still have value, and reduce the need (and cost required) to create from scratch by redesigning existing content.
Your creative teams should be able to find everything they need on your DAM system – images, audio, video, reusable clips, icons, illustrations, editable InDesign, Photoshop, Sketch, and Illustrator files, and any other content you’ve had the foresight to manage in your DAM. Not only that, but a well managed DAM will have clear rights information on each asset telling the person who discovers it what they can and cannot do with that content. The combination of content, accessibility, and rights information will enable you to repurpose and reuse content while saving on costs.
3. Collaborate globally
For many of us, our offices have gone from quick chats and group collaboration over cups of tea to 100% virtual engagements overnight. As Newsweek reports, this means that teams need to step up their communication, especially if they’re going to collaborate productively. How can we collaborate efficiently in large remote teams working with large creative content files, like open artworks or film footage?
To the relief of all of our teams, having a DAM system means we’ll be able to collaborate in one platform and avoid the long, confusing email threads we all dread! Collaborating on content with remote teams is made easy, quick and clear with a DAM system in place. Your teams can use a DAM system to share content amongst themselves or with delivery teams and dynamically update content within those collections. If your company has been forward thinking, your DAM may already be integrated with your delivery channels such as your CMS, your social media channels and your marketing automation tools.
As messaging and communications need to be quickly adapted while businesses respond to the pandemic, efficiency and speed is critical for creative teams to deliver content. With new versions regularly replacing older versions, you need a place with one source of the truth to avoid confusion or worse, incorrect versions going out to your clients in communications. A DAM system can help your teams collaborate on content in one shared area and ensure that you’re always working on the most updated version.
4. Easy project on-boarding for new team members
Future predicts an increased transition of companies to favour the flexibility of temporary and part-time workers over full-time employees. In most businesses, when a new team member joins a team, it may take them 2-3 months to get up-to-speed with project or organisational knowledge, find all the latest version of working files, and meet all levels of collaborators on various projects.
However, if businesses are pushed to adopt digital transformation at an accelerated rate during COVID-19, then we will be able to work all-digital at a global scale. This is where the DAM really shows its value! A DAM is an online globally accessible centralised database for all content related to any projects or campaigns. This centralised, easily accessible system allows all team members, whether new or familiar with the project, to find, share, and reuse the right project content. Many companies are prioritising investment in such scalable, secure, and efficient infrastructure to ensure business continuity and knowledge management once markets reopen.
Some DAM systems may also have the functionality to serve as your review and approval workflow tool (or perhaps your DAM has been integrated with a CMP or MRM system). In this case, your DAM is the best way for new staff members to step into the creative workflow at any stage, review comments and previous approvals, and get up-to-speed on the progress of the project without requiring lengthy instructions from other team members. And best of all, your new team member will be working on projects across teams and departments without the distractions of our typical siloed working practices.
To learn more about how my clients are leveraging their DAM system with remote teams, please contact me through LinkedIn or via kristina@jamesa48.sg-host.com.