DAM and Content Strategy
or content is king as long as you can find it
You will probably want to schedule more time in your 2024 planner for content strategy. Sometimes seen as separate or secondary to DAM structure, content strategy can improve how your assets are organized, shared, and ultimately valued. That old “tree in the forest” video clip doesn’t make a sound if no one knows it exists or where and how to best use it.
In today's digital world, content is king. Organizations are creating and consuming more content than ever before; it is becoming increasingly important to have a well-defined content strategy.
What is a content strategy anyway? More than a list of what you and your team need to write, it’s a comprehensive plan for creating, managing, and delivering content that is relevant to your target audience and helps you achieve your business goals. No pressure! Luckily digital asset management (DAM) can be a powerful tool for supporting your content strategy.
How DAM Can Support Your Content Strategy
DAM can help you in several ways, including:
Organizing and storing your content: DAM systems provide a centralized location to store all of your digital assets, such as images, videos, and documents. This makes it easy to find the content you need, when you need it.
Managing your content permissions: DAM systems allow you to control who has access to your content. This helps to protect your intellectual property and ensure that your content is used in a way that is consistent with your brand.
Delivering your content to your audience: DAM systems can deliver content to your website, social media channels, and other digital platforms. This helps to ensure that your content is seen by the people who need it most.
Using DAM to Create and Manage Content
DAM can also be used to create and manage content, which you should factor into your digital content experience and strategy planning. For example, you can use DAM to:
Create metadata for your content: Metadata is data about your content, such as the date it was created, the author, and the keywords. Metadata can make it easier to find your content and ensure that it is used in a way that is consistent with your brand.
Version control & delivery: DAM systems can track changes to your content over time. This helps to ensure that you always have the latest version of your content and can revert to previous versions if necessary. You can store the full set of assets including the master, social, print, and web versions using the same naming structure and metadata to minimize time spent creating/recreating and finding these assets later.
Workflow management: DAM systems can manage the workflow for creating and approving content. This helps to ensure that your content is reviewed and approved before it is published on various platforms. As you grow, DAM can help your team scale your content delivery.
Measuring the ROI of DAM for Content Marketing
We are all asked to do more with less time and fewer resources. Fun! Until capitalism fundamentally changes, DAM can help you to improve the ROI of your content marketing efforts in many ways, including:
Reducing the time and cost of creating content: DAM can help you reduce the time and cost of content creation by making it easier to find, manage, and deliver your content. Measure the improvement by shortening time to market, reducing the rounds of reviews, or surveying users on increased team happiness - whichever metrics make the most sense for your purposes.
Improving the quality of your content: DAM can help you improve the quality of your content by providing a centralized location to store and manage your content, and by making it easier to review and approve content before it is published. Sometimes just seeing the content all in one place will inspire changes to make it more cohesive.
Increasing the reach of your content: DAM can help you increase the reach of your content by making it easier to deliver your content to your audience, no matter which medium they are viewing.
As I am just starting a new content role (early days, very excited to join this supportive and talented team!), I have been prioritizing learning as much as I can about the brand, the current content delivery platforms and processes, and how DAM fits into the future plans. Content strategy is a useful lens to view each facet of the company’s business goals. No matter where you are working, the DAM is one tool integral to achieving those goals together as long as you understand its role in creating scalable content experiences.