Are you ready to make 2023 the best DAM year yet?
Are you ready to make 2023 the best DAM year yet?
There are so many considerations that factor into selecting new software. After all, you’re making a considerable investment in your organization. Therefore, you want to weigh who will use it, their technology needs, and even what the ramp-up process will look like as you implement and learn your new solution.
If you’re on the hunt for the best DAM (that’s digital asset management to you) software solution, you may have already done quite a bit of research and asked a lot of questions. Indeed, the average sales cycle for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions is between 3 and 6 months.
But you’re not just anybody. You’re a DAM professional, and you know many options on the market today. The secret to finding the right solution lies in knowing what you need, what your team requires, what your operations are, and how your new technology aligns with your current digital ecosystem. Here’s what you need to know.
Step One: Organise yourself systematically
When starting your search, it’s time to get organised. To find the right fit, you need to understand your team’s needs fully now and in the future. Not just for one team or a few team members – but for your whole DAM team. This understanding allows multiple stakeholders to have a say in what features you’ll need and what system will work best for your organisation. Don’t forget people like your system administrator, who will be integral in integrating your new DAM into your workflow.
Identify Use Cases
What outcomes are your team after, and how can these solutions help you achieve them? Consider about common DAM system use cases and note what’s most important to your operations. You’ll want to identify the team needs for your organization, as well as the features to address these needs. Use cases may include:
- Filtering content into a single system
- Eliminating redundancies and features you don’t need
- Sharing and publishing brand content
- Integrating your martech stack
- Repurposing high-performing content
- Tracking content efficacy
- Unifying your content workflow
- Bringing products to market faster
- Launching into new E-Commerce channels
Take note of your Must-Have features & functionalities
From these use cases, you can start to pinpoint the capabilities you just DAM well cannot live without. These may be very basic, like organizing your content, or more specifically, like integrating your company’s individual workflow. Popular DAM features include:
- In-depth search functionalities
- An open API framework to foster integration
- Configurations for permission and access control
- In-app conversion of images
- Zero code needed for automation
- Mapping of metadata
- Analytics at the whole asset level
- Support for multiple file formats
By comparing your use cases and the features you know you’ll need first, researching the DAM systems will be much clearer, and you’ll be able to select the best system for your team.
Step Two: Evaluate the software solutions in more detail
Now it’s time to start evaluating solutions to discover which is right for you. With so many DAM system options available, it can be overwhelming until you remember that you only need the features applicable to your operations.
Researching solutions & comparing features
Once you know what your team needs, researching different systems with their varying DAM capabilities will be much straightforward. First, however, now is the time to get going – and see the features you’re looking for in action. After all, just because a vendor offers a particular feature, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will function the way you want or need it to.
Keep in mind every system can provide some value, but you’re looking to see that the system you choose is indeed the right fit for you and your team so you can do your best work. So, how do you go about this?
One way would be to include the use cases you send to vendors in your request for proposal so that you can evaluate each vendor, rating how well their features suit your unique use cases.
Another tip: Sort the capabilities you’re looking for by preference level so you can better discern which features you can’t live without and which ones you might be willing to let go of if you find the right DAM for your most preferred functionalities. Also, be sure to read reviews as you go through your research. Not only will this give you better insight into how each DAM system performs, but it may also give you some inspiration for how different organizations make the most of the system within their operations. You may find some great ideas!
Keep an eye on the whole investment
Choosing a new DAM system is not a decision you can make in one day or even a few weeks. But that’s by design. After all, you’re making a significant investment in your organization. So, you’ll want to take your time, research, and look deep into all the features and functionalities to find the solution.
Step Three: Make the Best DAM Choice You Can
Now comes the hard-but-exciting part: Making a choice.
As you evaluate your options, be sure to request demos so you can see how your new DAM will perform. For example? LAGO by Comosoft is one solution you’ll want to see in action to fully understand just what all it can do for you.
LAGO isn’t just a DAM. Instead, it’s a multichannel marketing platform that integrates DAM and product information management (PIM) functionalities, plus an entire host of features that can transform your marketing production capabilities to take your operations to a brand new level.
Additionally, LAGO offers:
- Secure user access to digital assets from any web browser
- Integrated image selection for better marketing communication
- Collaborative workflow tools to stay connected
- Automatic substitution of updated/replaced assets in any active media campaign
- Tracking of digital and branded assets for effective brand marketing
Tips on Decision-Making
Making the right decision can feel challenging – especially when you want to come up with the best possible solution to serve your organization to the fullest. Some thoughts to help in the decision-making process?
- Identify all the possible options and anticipate possible outcomes for each one
- Consider the needs and wants of your entire team and how they will be impacted
- Understand the long-term impact on projects, on each department, and your company
5 Good reasons why marketing teams need a DAM system
5 Good reasons why marketing teams need a DAM system
Digital Asset Management, or DAM, is nothing new. Originally developed in the 1990s, DAM was a response to the rapid growth of digital image volume and the increasing difficulty users had finding individual images. For example, a name that the original file creator typed in might have made perfect sense to them but might be obscure to others who needed to use it. Worse still, many versions or updates to a single image might increase the likelihood of finding and using the wrong one. By saving time and reducing the potential for error, DAM systems promised order and efficiency for companies with growing libraries of images, illustrations, and even videos.
The first DAM solution, Cumulus, was introduced in 1992 by Canto Software. Despite the name, it was not a cloud-based or network solution but an application for individual Macintosh computers. In addition to tracking a file’s metadata, it also generated and stored a visual thumbnail of the image for easier visual identification. Since then, Canto and many other developers have expanded the scope and capabilities of digital asset management, vastly improving database capabilities and migrating their systems from purely local installations to the cloud.
Without a reliable DAM system, graphic artists can spend up to thirty percent of their time looking for the right image. This means that for everyone involved in marketing, from merchandise planners and production managers to graphic designers, DAM is not a “nice to have.” On the contrary, it is essential to every retailer’s bottom line. Here are five good reasons why every marketing team needs DAM.
1. Assets Are Easy to Share But Hard to Discover
In the age of social media, we’ve all learned how easy it is to share images and videos, often with URLs, attachments, and file transfer services like DropBox. But that convenience comes at a cost. A simple exchange between two people gets incredibly complicated for larger teams and departments. Without DAM, as assets multiply, those with campaign deadlines have a more challenging time finding that needle in an ever-growing haystack.
2. Files With Multiple Owners Can Create Version Chaos
Very often, an image may go through multiple revision cycles by several different photographers and graphic designers. As a result, every product shot could have dozens of different versions circulating throughout the marketing department. Without a robust DAM system to keep versions organized—and ensure the most current one ends up in the final catalog or web ad – the chances of costly production errors increases exponentially.
3. Inconsistent or Unapproved Brand Assets Are Costly
Retailers in today’s highly competitive market must ensure that their multichannel campaigns resonate with their current and prospective customers. To do so requires visual consistency not only with the retailer’s brand but also with that of recognizable consumer products. An off-brand look can make a shopper look elsewhere, costing millions in lost sales. Similarly, licensed images, for example, often require a rigorous approval process that includes license verification for period, purpose, and medium of use. Without an effective DAM system to monitor consistency and licenses, a graphic designer can easily inadvertently use an unapproved image, jeopardizing relationships with the manufacturer, or face legal consequences.
4. Disconnected Systems and Workflows Slow Production
By themselves, DAM systems cannot support every aspect of retail marketing operations. They are essential but only a part of a total workflow solution. For example, retailers rely heavily on product information management or PIM systems to track literally thousands of individual SKUs, often using data supplied by hundreds of separate manufacturers. In addition, there are separate databases for product pricing (and regional or promotional price variations), inventory, and sales history. Unless DAM, PIM, and other systems are integrated with purpose, marketing teams will waste enormous amounts of time putting all the pieces together. They will not have time to create effective campaigns for an ever-increasing array of channels and their regional variants. Comosoft’s LAGO system is uniquely positioned to combine all these data sources and put their combined data at the disposal of marketing managers and graphic designers.
5. Collaboration Is More Important Than Ever
Finally, as retailers grow larger and more complex, the need for collaboration is growing faster than ever before. Marketing departments must collaborate with manufacturers, multiple internal departments, and decision-makers within the company. The review and approval cycles must be maintained across various channels and regional variations. A powerful DAM system integrated with PIM, collaborative proofing, and web-based approval makes such collaboration a practical reality.
Putting It All Together
Modern marketing teams must make the transition from isolated, legacy systems to a centralized DAM, closely integrated with PIM and other essential data sources to endure. By doing so, merchandise planners, production managers, and graphic design teams will be able to scale their operations to create multichannel campaigns that are tailored to each region and demographic. Comosoft LAGO is preciously such a solution.
LAGO enables marketing and product planners to use their data to plan effective campaigns—using a data-connected whiteboard application and other tools. It then conveys those planning decisions to graphic designers using our Layout plug-in for Adobe InDesign to create visually compelling campaign materials using the most current data from their integrated DAM and PIM systems. It also allows them to create separate versions of each piece without having to “reinvent the wheel” for each version. Finally, the results of a campaign – down to the success of an individual featured product – can be tracked and used to plan the next effort.
Digital asset management is an essential building block for any modern marketing department, but it cannot stand alone. When integrated with other critical business systems, it can power a successful multichannel presence for the twenty-first century.
How PIM and DAM are essential to Retail E-Commerce success
How PIM and DAM are essential to Retail E-Commerce success
E-commerce is here to stay. No one can argue that we’re ever returning to a predominantly brick-and-mortar retail experience. Even before the pandemic supercharged the trend, ordering products and services online had become the norm for millions of shoppers. The real questions are: How does the e-commerce experience inform retail marketing and advertising strategy? More importantly, what tools will help retail marketers and advertisers succeed across multiple channels?
The key to both questions is in the use of product-related information. By that, we mean not just the attributes (e.g., size, color, or weight) of each SKU but also how customers experience it. The good news is that e-commerce can provide this information – loads of it – if only we can learn how to use it well.
Retail Moments of Truth
In June 2011, Google’s Managing Director of U.S. Sales, Jim Lecinski, published Winning the Zero Moment of Truth, a free eBook that rocked the marketing world. In it, he highlighted the importance of a customer’s online behavior – long before becoming aware of their need for your product. This revelation was a new twist to Procter & Gamble’s version of Retail Moments of Truth, which roughly goes as follows:
- The First Moment of Truth is when a customer first sees a product on a shelf or online.
- The Second Moment of Truth is when they purchase and use it.
- The Third Moment of Truth is when they provide feedback, preferably positive, share their experience, and hopefully become fans and promoters.
Lecinski asserted was that feedback from the Third Moment ultimately ends up as part of the vast universe of social media posts, reviews, photos, and videos that would-be customers inhabit every day. People learn about a product and its reputation through deliberate searching or random interactions with family, friends, and online connections. From that awareness, that “Zero Moment of Truth,” they eventually decide to buy – or not.
E-commerce accelerated this phenomenon, making it easy to tag a product with star reviews, comments, and photos that populate not only e-commerce websites but also the labyrinth of social media. Such a flood of product-related data is both an opportunity and a challenge for retail marketers to channel that feedback into campaigns that increase e-commerce and traditional sales.
Product Information (and Product Experience) Management
Traditional Product Information Management (PIM) systems are the central data repository of everything related to an individual product. The data comes from both the product manufacturers and the retailers who sell their goods, who may not always agree on metadata convention or what to label each field. But the retailer’s eventual goal is to have a complete and consistent view of all the variables for every SKU. Therefore, the PIM system should also be related to price, inventory, forecasting, and even customer loyalty databases to efficiently manage each item’s sales and marketing process efficiently.
Of crucial importance to marketers, the PIM system should also be connected in a meaningful way to a robust Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. This system is the repository of potentially public-facing digital content for each product, such as photos, vector images, and videos. It can even potentially contain user-generated images and videos related to their experience with a product – especially if the retailer’s e-commerce site collects and readily shares information provided by the buyer.
To be sure, all this data (including digital assets) must be curated honestly before inclusion in a production workflow. However, when they are, such data can become meaningful marketing information, part of a process known as Product Experience Management (PXM). As Lecinski and others have shown, customers prefer to buy products with which they have some connection. That identification can be greatly significant when a product’s data and digital assets include images, text, review results, and other relatable data that help the marketing team fine-tune the relevant advertising.
Going Full Circle
Of course, all this does not happen by accident. Once a product’s public-facing data (including customer-provided and customer-influenced text and images) are in the DAM & PIM environments, they must be managed in a marketing production system and ultimately used to direct specific, multichannel campaigns. This process is the role of Comosoft’s LAGO solution.
LAGO coordinates practical DAM and PIM assets and data for each SKU and gives the marketing team a strategic overview of a product’s value to a campaign. This data includes traditional factors such as profit margin, inventory levels, and regional availability. But it can also have meaningful user experience data, such as a product’s popularity in certain parts of the country or among certain demographics. Based on this knowledge, marketers can select the best products for a campaign, including regional or demographic variations. LAGO can automate the creation of product catalogs and other marketing material, including multiple variations and digital output for e-commerce sites and mobile apps. Best of all, it gives marketers the tools to evaluate the results of a product’s inclusion in a campaign.
This is next point is where the process goes full circle. By collecting user experience data at the e-commerce site (the Second and Third Moments of Truth), a retail marketer can, in turn, use that data profitably. With the tools provided in Comosoft’s LAGO, they can create e-commerce campaigns that coincide with the “buzz” surrounding any product (the Zero Moment of Truth). In a world where e-commerce rules, it’s the secret to success.
Why brochures are valuable
Why brochures are valuable and how your retail chain can simplify their production process
Retail chains continue to rely on printed and digital brochures when it comes to distributing their advertising budget, as these are still one of the most valuable and reliable ways to reach consumers.
Why are brochures so valuable for retail chains?
Research shows that weekly circulars are still a key driver of shopping decisions. In fact, according to a Brandspark 2020 U.S. Shopper Study:
- 66% of consumers study circulars, promotions, and discounts before they go shopping
- In 2020, 87% of shoppers read circular the same amount or more than they did in 2019
- 74% of shoppers consulted their grocery print circulars in search of lower-priced specials
According to the September 2020 Shopper Behavior Monitor Survey of 1,000 primary household grocery shoppers:
- 30% of respondents were using digital store sales flyers ad digital coupons even more than they were earlier in the pandemic
- 27% of respondents said they used store sales flyers more often than during the beginning pandemic
- 28% said they were using digital coupons more often
The brochure production process
When it comes to creating the most promotional leaflets, design is crucial. In addition, retailers need to create multiple versions of the brochures. These are additional factors in an already complicated process.
For example, at a large grocery chain, the production process begins with the marketing department, which is in charge of the high-level planning of the circular. Then, category managers locate offers and determine whether an advertisement should be available, globally, nationally, or in a specific region.
Next, the design team lays out the circular, including copy and pricing, to create the regionalized variants from global and national offers. Once complete, the digital files go back to the category managers to review the ads and identify any necessary corrections. The design team implements the corrections and then sends them back to the marketing team for approval.
This entire process can be particularly hectic when creating multiple versions for different regions, languages, and other demographics or if the team needs to pull product assets from various data sources.
Simplifying brochure production
LAGO retail circular production software makes the entire process effortless, from concept to production. Here’s an example of how LAGO can simplify every step of print or online circular creation:
- At the beginning of the process, LAGO Whiteboard helps the marketing department determine how much space to allocate to each page.
- The marketing department can send the page layout to the category managers via the workflow engine. They can use LAGO Whiteboard to search for each offer and then drag and drop it directly on the page.
- At the same time, category management can select whether an offer should be global or local. LAGO's version optimisation automatically synchronises global offers and takes regional differences into account.
- Once planning and version optimisation is complete, LAGO automatically converts the planning into an Adobe InDesign file with its exclusive LAGO Layout InDesign plugin.
- Designers receive a pre-planned InDesign file with all necessary information from the LAGO PIM and DAM, allowing them to create pages more efficiently and avoid errors. Once the layout is complete, a correction document is generated and passed to category management for review via the workflow engine.
- In LAGO's integrated proof module, all correction requests from category management and marketing are noted directly in the proof document and passed back to the design team. The design team can see the desired changes as soon as they open the pages in InDesign and implement the correction requests.
- The implemented corrections are displayed in LAGO Proof via the workflow engine to Marketing and Category Management for checking the executed corrections.
- With a few simple clicks in LAGO Proof, category managers can check all changes made.
- Any price or text updates are automatically imported so that last-minute corrections do not cause unnecessary stress or chaos.
Ready to see how Comosoft LAGO can simplify circular production for your retail chain?