How To Build a Digital Asset Management Business Case

You’ve come to realize it: Implementing a digital asset management (DAM) software is the best way to build your brand and grow its digital presence.

As marketing channels multiply and customer touch points evolve, marketers and creatives are finding it harder to navigate through a growing clutter of digital assets, in an effort to deliver the right content to their target audiences.

While digital assets are the lifeblood of your brand, they can quickly become painful to manage. As internal teams continue to use byzantine folder structures, they waste time trying to find the asset they need. Digital files are out of date, mishandled or disorganized. Important things get lost.

In short, it can quickly become one confusing mess.

Now if only you can convince the company’s decision-makers and stakeholders to invest in a DAM solution.

In this post, we’ll get ahead of the requests you’re likely to receive for executive buy-in with a single solution: Build a digital asset management business case.

Five Things to Think About When Building a Business Case for a New DAM System

When building a digital asset management business case, it’s important to keep in mind that while the benefits of a DAM solution may be obvious to you, that may not be the case with marketing and creative stakeholders in your company. This can be especially true in an enterprise environment. After all, they have their own priorities and concerns to think about. With all that in mind, if you want a tailor-made look at what DAM can do for teams across your brand, book a demo with an expert.

It’s your job to convince them that using a DAM will not only be good for the organization, but for everyone involved.

Top DAM concerns include:

• How will DAM implementation impact ROI?
• Will it disrupt workflows across the organization’s different departments?
• Will we be able to win staff over to adopt the new technology?

All the above concerns are valid. And you need to address them each in your business case for DAM.

Some format considerations A digital asset management business case can take a variety of formats — digital or analog. For digital, you can use Microsoft Word, Google Docs or a similar platform. You can even send one in the form of an email. If you prefer non-digital, you can write your business case by hand on a whiteboard, flip chart or blackboard.

Consider your audience and how they prefer to receive information. Whichever format best relays your message and meets the level of hesitance from its recipient is the way to go.

With that, let’s get to it! Here are the steps you can take to build a digital asset management business case your bosses can’t refuse.

1. Research and Prepare

For your digital asset management business case to be convincing, you need data to back it up.

Start by gathering data on your organization’s current processes. You’ll need to seek help and support from different departments and get everything you can on workflow, operating costs, software costs, storage space, the amount of time spent in handling digital assets, and anything that will give more credence to your business case. This information will also help you get an idea how a budget will take shape.

It also helps to gather personal stories from colleagues and employees. By telling stakeholders specific stories of how employees continually struggle with access to assets, you can make them feel what it’s like to be on the receiving end of content chaos. Stories make your digital asset management business case more emotional. And last we checked, emotion is a powerful tool to drive your point home.

2. Pinpoint the Organization’s Asset Management Issues

You now have your data (and personal accounts from staff members). It’s now time to present it in ways that will make execs and stakeholders understand why the organization’s processes and systems would benefit from DAM.

Maybe there are glaring content issues that are widely agreed upon, but that doesn’t need to be the case. When reviewing any potential issues, also be sure to consider areas where DAM would simply make existing processes more efficient. The quest for organizational improvement should extend beyond gaping needs alone.

Start by putting together a complete picture of the company’s struggles with asset management and distribution. To pull this off, first focus on broad pain points then go deeper.

When painting those broad strokes, the idea is to make it clear to stakeholders that you understand the overarching issues their teams are facing.

Show them:

• How complicated it can be managing files in a growing digital assets library.
• How long it takes teams to request, find, edit, and distribute assets.
• The concerns over out-of-date, off-brand and unapproved assets being circulated.
• The time and costs involved with the uncentralized handling of assets.
• Why these issues will only increase as video and other digital formats continue to evolve.

When diving deeper, make sure that you present your data wherever appropriate and able. Don’t just pepper them with details. Ask tough questions. You can also share personal stories you’ve gathered to provide more context and lend more emotional weight to the data and figures you’ve presented.

Watch: The Top Six Ways DAM Delivers ROI

3. Explain How DAM Implementation Solves Your Challenges

By this time, stakeholders are now at least aware that there are issues or efficiencies to be gained. It’s now time to present them with the solution.

DAM can help with your organization’s content and media efforts in a variety of ways. To make it easy for your company’s stakeholders to wrap their heads around what a DAM system does to help teams collectively overcome their digital asset challenges, you can break down its benefits into five categories.

Cost savings A DAM can help the organization save on operational costs in more ways than one. For starters, with a DAM system, your entire organization can quickly find the right asset every time. This means creatives and marketers spend less time searching, sharing and doing simple tasks with digital assets.

Considering that teams can waste more than 520 hours every year looking for brand assets, it quickly becomes evident how the amount of time saved adds up with a DAM system in place.

There are several other common ways DAM helps lower costs:

• Reduced repeat requests for assets. DAM keeps assets from getting lost, preventing your staff from recreating assets that already exist. Recreating assets, after all, costs time and money.
• Elimination of redundant or outdated systems. You don’t need to spend resources on cloud file storage or maintaining internal systems. It’s all in DAM!
• It’s easier to reuse and repurpose assets. Since DAM enables the tagging of metadata, each asset carries information and context that allow for easy categorization and retrieval. This ensures that each asset is used for relevant opportunities, offering more value.
• Reduced legal fees. DAM’s permission and approval capabilities allow you to manage digital rights and usage restrictions, ensuring that your staff is using properly licensed media when distributing content, thus eliminating the risk of legal action.

Increased efficiency With a DAM in place, all data and files are stored in a central repository that everyone can access at a moment’s notice.

Combined with its robust functionality and integration capabilities, DAM simplifies and speeds up the process of getting an asset from point A to point B. This helps creative assemble everything in the right format and deliver each piece of any brand campaign to the right people as part of your designated workflow.

This increased efficiency, of course, helps your team of creatives and marketers deliver marketing campaigns much faster while maintaining brand voice and integrity, making your brand stand out from the competition with a consistent customer experience.

Improved customer experience A DAM serves as a central “source of truth” for the entire organization, making sure that every piece of content put out as media by your company is on-brand and the most up to date. You can even have the option of creating templates which open the door to custom, on-brand content without taking up the creative team’s time.

Thanks to metadata tagging capabilities and dynamic search functionality, a DAM solution ensures that every asset that is fed into the workflow is categorized correctly and retrieved by users easily.

This helps team members easily find the right asset for a specific marketing campaign, enabling the organization to deliver relevant and personalized content to customers at scale.

Powerful insights With a dedicated content usage and analytics tool, DAM can help track and measure the performance of each asset in use by internal teams, stakeholders, and external partners.

The insights gained through analytics are powerful. Why? Because they give the organization the information and context they need to properly evaluate the value of each asset (and inform the creation of new ones) throughout the content lifecycle.

Moreover, a DAM also helps marketing and sales teams track and measure the engagement of each asset, giving you the data and insights you need to optimize your creative strategy and content distribution efforts.

4. Propose an Implementation Strategy

Implementing a DAM solution can be scary. What if it fails? Not only will it cost the company, but it can also sour your reputation within the organization.

The goal here is to sell them on the idea that it’s going to work. Because with proper implementation, it will!

For DAM implementation to be successful, the following criteria need to be met:

• Understand your needs. What are your organization’s current challenges? How can they be addressed in ways that align with the company’s vision?
• Choose the right DAM solution. Choose an asset management tool that is tailored to your company’s specific needs. What features and capabilities will prove valuable to your use cases? More importantly, you need a DAM solution that’s easy to implement.
• Acquire reliable hands-on support. DAM deployment is a long-term commitment. And you need a vendor who can help you maximize your investment every step of the way.

For a more detailed breakdown on how to implement a DAM solution, take a look at our guide to successful software adoption.

5. Show Them the ROI

Ultimately, everything that’s been outlined here about building a digital asset management business case comes down to a clear demonstration of ROI.

To demonstrate your organization’s potential return on investment in implementing a DAM, review an existing use case for a better idea of what your band can expect.

While the results are only estimates, ROI projections can paint a picture of what’s possible, inspiring stakeholders to make the necessary investment to turn this vision into reality.

Final Word

In today’s fast-paced digital environment, a DAM solution is just the thing that can help your organization stand out from the competition.

Assets are all around us, and if you want your brand to always be part of the conversation, you need a DAM to help you manage your content lifecycle and break through the noise. We hope that this guide will help you build a digital asset management business case that paints a compelling picture of your company’s future. Schedule a demo with a DAM expert for a first-hand look at how your brand can improve with Brandfolder.