Using a Digital Asset Manager in Hospitality

July 18, 2023

Hospitality industry players—everything from hotels and restaurants to casinos and cruise ships—generate enormous data daily. When analyzed, organized, and stored correctly, that data becomes a goldmine of awesome digital assets that boost your marketing, growth, and decision-making.

Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to do it and ends up struggling with poor digital asset management and asset sprawl. How can you manage vital content effectively?

By taking advantage of comprehensive digital asset management (DAM) solutions, of course! It makes it possible to leverage your assets effectively.

In this article, you'll learn how a robust DAM tool can help you with hospitality brand management and take a big step toward becoming an industry leader in your hospitality niche.

Challenges With Digital Asset Management in the Hospitality Industry

The main problem with digital assets in the hospitality industry is the poor volume-to-management ratio. In short, each business generates vast digital assets, but only a few have the right tools for storing and using them.

Such niches as food and beverages, travel and tourism, lodging, recreation, hotels, and event planning suffer from an inability to leverage their assets effectively.

Key challenges associated with digital asset management include:

Ongoing changes in marketing trends and dynamics: Poor asset management leads to using outdated materials, confused clients, and inconsistent branding efforts (e.g., inconsistent menus or outdated business information).
Lack of time: Basic or limited DAM tools make finding relevant information difficult. This causes businesses to overlook important assets and use irrelevant data for critical business decisions.
Absence of centralized location: Unorganized data and assets appear from many different sources. If not managed properly, they remain disorganized and siloed.
Reputation management: Inconsistencies with digital assets make it impossible to arrange proper online and onsite reputation management.

Without the right approach to creative asset management in the hospitality industry, providing exceptional and personalized customer experience becomes nearly impossible. With 20% of customers willing to pay 20% more for personalization to enhance their experience, lack of proper DAM becomes a severe issue that could lead to lost market share.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, companies with the right DAM tools made a big jump forward.

For example, TripAdvisor took advantage of Brandfolder collections to help restaurants communicate their ability to arrange takeout and delivery during lockdowns. They also leverage Brandfolder to provide TripAdvisor badges and ratings so businesses can demonstrate them digitally.

How Do Most Hospitality Endeavors Currently Manage Assets?

The majority of the challenges mentioned above stem from inadequate digital asset management. Maybe you’re too pressed for time to reevaluate how you manage your marketing assets. Meanwhile, technologies are changing, and competition is taking advantage of new tools.

The old ways of doing things simply don’t cut it anymore. Let’s take a look at how you might manage creative assets now (and a solution to change for the better after!).

Asset siloes

Digital assets are in different places, including in-house servers, employee smartphones, home computers, and cloud storage. Such asset segregation makes it impossible to find the necessary information quickly. For example, a tour manager can't gain access to updated tour prices and misinforms clients.

Meanwhile, files are becoming bigger and bigger (e.g., 4K and 6K videos are the new norm), so storing a lot of them in one location is no longer easy.

Duplicate work

Since poorly organized digital assets are hard to find, many companies do the same work twice. This slows down operations and leads to inconsistency. Duplicate work creates twice as many opportunities for human error.

Basic tools

Many hotels and tourist agencies rely on simple DAM tools like Google Drive or Dropbox to store their assets. While this solves the centralization problem, these tools need more features to help businesses leverage assets and provide a personalized customer experience.

Large industry players that use top DAM tools achieve excellent centralization and personalization results. For example, large hotel chains like Marriott use their assets to provide a unique experience based on location but still maintain brand consistency across all branches.

In the food and beverage industry, P.F. Chang's used Brandfolder tools to streamline hospitality brand management and ensure consistency across 300 locations in 23 countries.

DAM Benefits for Hotels

Every piece of data can turn into a valuable digital asset, from guest information to promotional materials. By leveraging a comprehensive DAM tool, a hotel can reap significant benefits, including the following.

All digital media in one place

Brandfolder lets you keep all your brand collateral within a centralized location, including media collected from client interactions such as user-generated content. This centralized hub makes accessing and managing entire collections of marketing and branding materials effortless. Moreover, the platform's best-in-class and intuitive user interface makes it easy to onboard and encourages internal users to swiftly adopt the platform.

Final, approved assets

Streamline your asset management with Brandfolder's centralized platform, which makes it easy to update all assets within the entire database simultaneously. This ensures that all employees can access the latest information, even when changing the price list or making other modifications. Using Smartsheet's streamlined workspace, you can minimize confusion and improve customer satisfaction.

Additionally, by applying expiration dates to temporary materials such as guest invitations, you can avoid mishandling and improve your promotional strategy, decision-making, and client interactions. You can also track your audience's usage patterns and preferences to identify power users, allowing you to make informed decisions on asset creation, adjustment, or removal.

Property Images and video management

Say goodbye to the hassle of manually tagging your images and assets. Our system automatically assigns relevant tags to your media, simplifying your search experience. All images and videos are in one centralized location, giving your sales and marketing team immediate access to on-brand material.

You can control user access by setting permissions to prevent unauthorized access. With Brandfolder, media preview is available to all users before download, saving time for everyone involved.

By sharing a link, you can share your assets with third-party vendors, such as event planners and caterers. You can also set access levels to ensure security so they only view assets that are relevant to them.

Robust digital campaigns

Digital assets are essential for a successful digital marketing campaign, and brand managers must effectively manage them. Brandfolder organizes and stores your assets to ensure fast access and simple organization.

This helps streamline brand awareness and ultimately save costs on comprehensive tactics. Using Brandfolder, hotels can ensure their marketing campaigns meet customers’ needs and resonate with diverse audiences.

Overall, for hotels, DAM has an extremely high ROI. Besides streamlining your brand awareness and marketing efforts, it reduces repetitive work and ensures brand integrity. This way, you have more time to spend on revenue-generating tactics. Simply put, it’ll pay for itself. In fact, Brandfolder customers have realized $1.13 million in benefits over 3 years with payback in less than 6 months.

DAM Benefits for Restaurants

Brand consistency and asset management are especially important for restaurants and other food and beverage industry players.

Today, 84% of diners look at a restaurant's menu online before going there in person. Meanwhile, almost 80% of people browse restaurants’ websites before choosing one to dine at.

Your digital assets are integral to maintaining a strong brand and bringing diners to your digital and offline doorsteps. Here’s how a DAM helps you leverage them.

Managing menus and food photography

Brandfolder's DAM tools allow you to manage all media, including menus and food photography. You can store and organize all these assets to make them readily available to marketing teams across your locations.

If you have multiple locations, the menus may vary. Using a centralized digital asset management system, combined with share links, CDN links, and content automation can significantly aid in creating assets at scale while maintaining consistent branding across different platforms. This ensures that creative content remains uniform, enabling the ability to update content according to the needs of localized markets.

Your clients are your best ambassadors. They create useful user-generated content (photos, videos, reviews) that you can use for marketing campaigns—but only if you can keep this content managed and centralized. Brandfolder allows you to tag all media and organize it in one location to leverage it for high-quality social media campaigns.

Top-notch brand consistency

Brandfolder grows with you as your restaurant expands, adapting to meet your evolving needs. Maintaining brand consistency becomes increasingly challenging as you open new locations, but a powerful DAM system can help. With Brandfolder, you can keep all your assets organized and centralized, and automate content management for your hospitality business, ensuring consistency across locations.

In addition to exceptional asset management solutions, Brandfolder offers Brandguide, an invaluable feature that enables you to publish and share brand guidelines with anyone accessing your DAM content.

DAM Benefits for Event Planning

Event planners rely heavily on digital assets to ensure the success of their work. When the backbone of your planning strategy is in top shape, you can stay ahead of the competition and provide a personalized experience for your clients. This is only possible with proper asset management.

Since the variety and volume of event-related assets are among the highest in the industry, basic tools can't get the job done. That's where a comprehensive DAM system comes in.

Creating presentations

Event planners often face challenges when it comes to creating presentations, including using outdated or low-quality assets. Fortunately, Brandfolder addresses these issues by allowing users to set asset expiration dates to provide brand integrity and store assets according to quality standards.

Additionally, the platform offers a video editing tool that enables existing recordings, such as product demos or promo ads, to be utilized for presentations. Couple this with Smartsheet, and you can collect user-generated content like McLaren Racing did. They use it to keep fans engaged on their platforms even after the event has ended.

Sending assets to clients and designers with a simple link

The sharing feature is one of the most exciting parts of a robust DAM system. When you need to get assistance from designers or demonstrate content to clients, you can easily share assets with a few clicks. Meanwhile, creating custom sharing links ensures these recipients don't damage your assets or accidentally share them with the wrong users.

Managing event photos and videos

Dumping hundreds of gigabytes of photos and videos in your Google Drive or any other basic DAM tool leads to asset waste. Studies show companies waste 21 cents of every media dollar spent because of inaccurate targeting and lost customers.

The main reason is poor digital asset management.

Brandfolder allows you to leverage all valuable photos and videos for marketing, presentations, and brand awareness efforts. By incorporating QR codes into your assets, you can easily customize and localize your marketing efforts for events in different regions.

With this DAM, you can avoid duplicates, outdated assets, and low-quality content. Every piece of content is customizable and able to be personalized to resonate with every customer.

Choose DAM Tools That Work for Hospitality

Not all DAM tools are created equal. One can work well for retail digital asset management, while another is great for manufacturing. When it comes to the hospitality industry, you need a DAM solution with a wide variety of features that address your specific pain points seamlessly.

Brandfolder provides comprehensive DAM tools with a TON of capabilities designed specifically to streamline hospitality brand management.

The best part is that you can choose specific features that apply to your business and avoid paying for functionality that doesn’t impact your business. Meanwhile, Brandfolder is highly scalable, so it grows with your company, allowing it to stay on top of its game.

Want to learn more? Book a free demo today!