4 reasons why your DAM is more important than you may think it is

When it comes to building your marketing stack, there’s a good chance that your digital asset manager (DAM) will not be the first thing that you think of, but we’re here to convince you that it deserves a little bit more attention. From brand consistency to speed of production, your DAM will impact every aspect of your marketing team and processes. So choosing the right one is vital.

Research shows that the average marketing stack includes 18 different pieces of software, several of which are often dedicated to, although not specialized in, the same task - managing images and digital assets. Using multiple software providers for the same task not only increases cost and wasted resources, but also leads to greater confusion, inefficiency, and errors.

So, it’s time to ditch sharing images via email or putting assets in unnavigable cloud storage providers and switch to a platform that actually helps you to do your job more efficiently. Not convinced yet? Let’s take a closer look at 4 reasons why your DAM is more important than you may think it is.

Fully integrated marketing stack

The first argument is the simplest. Marketing teams spend a considerable amount of their budget and resources building tech stacks that are fully integrated and work seamlessly with each other. Yet, surprisingly, this approach often stops at one of the most important steps: handling images and digital assets.

Marketers will often settle for a ‘good enough’ approach that sees them stash images away in their cloud storage provider and share images with each other via email or messaging services. It works. Sort of. But it doesn’t deliver that fully integrated approach that they’ve strived so hard to build across the rest of their marketing stack.

This means that every time they need to find an image they first need to figure out where it’s stored and then search through dozens, maybe hundreds, perhaps even thousands of files to find the right one. From there, they then have to export this asset to their email marketing software, design software, CMS, or wherever else it is needed. This becomes even more complicated when the image needs to be shared with multiple colleagues, not all of whom will have access to the same cloud storage files or email chains.

All of this can be solved with a DAM that offers full integration with the rest of your marketing stack. It might seem like a little issue, but using one piece of software as a single source of truth for all of your images can make your life a lot easier and help to avoid costly errors when it comes to new campaigns and updates.

Take Raster’s Figma plugin, for example, it ensures that every image is always available to your team as they transition from the ideation stage of a campaign to the final design. There’s no confusion over where the most up-to-date images are stored and the collaboration process is improved through the integration with your other marketing and design tools.

The move away from monolithic and legacy software providers has allowed marketers to choose a best-in-class approach to their entire tech stack, but this starts to fall apart when elements are overlooked and integration is impossible.

Almost all of your campaigns will involve images, so your DAM should be at the heart of your marketing tech stack. The return on investment will be huge and the benefits will be felt across your marketing team.

Brand Consistency

Let’s talk a bit more about those costly errors that we mentioned earlier on. Marketing teams are now faced with the challenge of launching more campaigns across more channels than ever before.

As marketers, we’re all obsessed with creating more touchpoint and ensuring that we’re present in every channel that we can find our customers and leads. But more campaigns and more channels mean more assets…and that can be a problem.

Without the right DAM, that can make it even harder to find the right image, impossible to put in place consistent approval processes, and an increased chance that a mistake is made somewhere along the line.

From sharing an out of date image, to posting something that doesn’t meet brand guidelines, overcoming the challenges of brand consistency requires the right tools.

The first step is choosing a DAM that makes it easier to store, tag, and find images. With Raster, our AI-powered tagging feature means that you can automatically tag images as they’re uploaded and our AI model can be customized to tag images to your specific requirements.

The single source of truth approach means that there will never be any confusion over where to find the latest image and every user will get access to the most up to date version of every image. Raster’s collaborative tools even mean that two users can simultaneously work on the same image without any risk of damage, confusion, or lost work.

Speed of production

By now you can probably see where the benefits are when it comes to speed of production. Choosing the right DAM that not only makes it easier to find the right images, but impacts your overall efficiency when it comes to launching new campaigns.

From the very start, having a single platform to store your images on simplifies things for your team. Having a DAM with advanced tagging features makes uploading and storing new images significantly faster and less painful.

A more efficient tagging process means that you’ll be able to find the right image more easily and get to work on your next campaign faster than ever before. But the benefits of a DAM go beyond that.

A DAM like Raster comes with built-in editing and collaboration tools that mean that many tasks can be carried out in the same place that you store your images.

Built-in collaboration features also make it easier to share images internally and externally, alert colleagues of actions that they need to take, leave notes and feedback, and even assign granular user roles as part of the production process.

Carrying out all these tasks within the same platform makes things faster and more efficient, but it also increases engagement and makes it easier for your team to do their job to the best of their abilities.

Not only will the right DAM significantly shorten your creative lifecycle, but it also reduces the amount of time wasted on fairly manual tasks and allows your marketing team to focus on more critical elements where their skills and expertise can really shine.

Scalability

Whether you’re a startup or an enterprise sized company, scalability in your marketing team and software is crucial. We all want our next campaign to the bigger than the last one and no one wants to have to switch software providers every time they experience some growth.

From a DAM perspective, this means that you want to choose a provider capable of storing an ever-increasing number of images, that allows you to easily provide access to new team members, and that is future-proof when it comes to technological improves both within the DAM industry and the rest of your marketing tech stack.

We should be able to win you over with the argument that onboarding new team members doesn’t require teaching them how to navigate a maze of folders and files, but the benefits only continue from there.

With Raster, you get access to a platform with no storage limits, no user limits, and that is on the cutting-edge of technology when it comes to image management and editing. Suitable for everything from a pre-revenue startup to a global enterprise giant, our tools and features will not only not hold you back, but actually help you to grow.

Raster

Hopefully we’ve already convinced you that you need to put a bit more thought into your DAM of choice, but we’ve now reached that stage in the article where we need to sell you on why Raster is the right DAM for you.

We’ve mentioned some of the features and benefits and explained why it’s suitable for companies of all sizes, but there are still some features that we haven’t really touched on.

Our AI tagging system is only the first step in our commitment to providing our users with access to the very best technology and most powerful features on the market. For far too long, the DAM industry has been somewhat stagnant and not developed at the same rate as other elements of your marketing stack.

The main goal of Raster is to provide users with a DAM that delivers the same quality of user experience that they get from the rest of their tech stack. From cutting edge features to seamless integrations, we’re committed to building a product that best serves your needs.

Now. And in the future.

The best part? You can get free access to Raster and start using all of our features today.