Digital Asset Management creates competitive advantage for online retailers

The saying ‘survival of the fittest’ holds truest to how businesses rapidly changed their strategy in the aftermath of the pandemic. One such shift that stood out and ruled the roost has been the move from physical to online. As a result, we can see the landscape of industries changing drastically to suit the increasingly digitised world.  

With a huge shift towards the online realm, more so in the last few years, brands have had to produce exponential amounts of content, and marketers worldwide had to adapt to the sudden change. They are juggling more content streams than ever before, teams are struggling to find the right asset, launch campaigns on time, as creatives are stuck doing redundant and trivial tasks like finding, resizing, re-exporting creative asset formats. Organisations leak time and resources while trying to balance speed and efficiency with brand consistency. Navigating this asset sprawl has led to a hunter-gatherer way of life.  

Thankfully, technology has allowed us to adapt and develop the tools necessary for our growing brand. This evolution led to the growth of digital assets and content marketing, and for most companies Digital Asset Management or DAM systems have become an essential to survival.

Enter digital asset management 

With today’s smarter technology, content creators can do what they are meant to do, while DAM becomes the central source of truth for all brand activity. As your digital asset library grows it keeps the brand up to date and in use through better asset organisation capabilities, search capabilities, sharing across teams, and easier feedback collection. This in turn scales digital marketing campaigns, all while maintaining brand integrity. At the end of the day, it means no more off-brand or out-of-date assets, nondescript folder names that no one has access to or incessant repeat requests from across the organisation. What this means is the intuitive user experience for search and discoverability, creative impact, faster speed to market, and optimised collaboration between teams. For brands, it helps build brand equity and market success. 

While DAM creates and manages content throughout the entire content lifecycle, it routes rich media assets to a Content Management System (CMS), which primarily displays content to the public. Softwares for digital asset management, in turn, helps repurpose and even manipulate digital assets by cropping, editing, or manipulating the metadata of assets. AI-based DAM solutions also add features such as smart media asset recognition, tagging and cropping among other features. The significant benefits of integrating such solutions include simplified search mechanism, enhanced asset organization, improved hosting and workflow management.

DAM – The key to a competitive advantage in e-commerce 

In today’s fiercely competitive e-commerce landscape, websites are required to constantly improve user experience and provide customers with relevant offerings. A key component of e-commerce marketing is its media. Specifically, product images and videos that demonstrate, inform and generate engagement. For modern businesses, digital assets are valuable commodities that need to be strategically leveraged. This is particularly true for e-commerce businesses that rely on multiple teams and vendors for digital assets.

With the explosion of digital content and as more join the e-commerce landscape, good DAM software is vital for brands that want to scale their business and build a loyal customer base. Modern DAM tools allow for e-commerce marketers to distribute the most accurate content. It also helps reduce the time spent by teams in mundane marketing and promotional task allowing them to solely focus on the business. DAM systems also help in reducing error margins in terms of using incorrect images, branded materials, or off-brand templates being used. Thus, as and when new products are added to the brand platform, marketing teams can ensure that each of their assets is used to their full potential and thereby ensure future success.

Rahul Nanwani

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Rahul Nanwani is the co-founder and chief executive officer of ImageKit