5 ways Digital Asset Management (DAM) Contributes to Retailers’ Bottom Line

Whether you are a single specialty shop or a national grocery chain with dozens of brands and thousands of locations, you have to deal with a crushing number of product images, branding, descriptive and technical content, supply chain metadata, and marketing materials such as graphics, documents, video, and others (there are always ‘others’).

There will be a point where manually accessing all of your file folders, with unique naming conventions, on your networked hard drives will slow your time to market to a crawl. This is when you need to invest in a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. Here are five ways DAM contributes to your bottom line.

Increase Brand Consistency

More often than not a Digital Asset Management solution is adopted because your day starts far too often with the question: ‘Where are the current logo files?!?’ When you are a retailer, you are not just enforcing the consistency of your brand. You are responsible for putting every one of your producer partners’ best face forward as well. If you have an out-of-date service mark, icon, or lockup, it not only undermines their brand, it undermines yours as well.

Refines Product Information

A sure sign of when your DAM solution is on the road to maturity is when your business processes require communication between solutions up and down your Digital Supply Chain. The first point of integration is often between your DAM and your Product Information Management solution (PIM).

Your brand has a voice, and that voice is in the product naming conventions, normalized descriptions, romance copy, and technical specs, regulatory compliance verbiage organized by the taxonomy of your PIM. 

Like a game of soccer, your DAM and PIM pass content back and forth, with one being the source of truth for the media and the other for content. These truths move the ball towards the goal: closing a sale with your customer.

Streamlines marketing workflows for print

As you direct the marketing for 100 stores in your regional Home and Garden Center chain, each one sits in its own part of the metro, in its own state, and its own zone on the USDA spring planting map. Each of these factors can determine the content you select for your weekly sales circulars, environmental signage, product sheets for your staff. 

ERP and CRM Systems upstream from the DAM determine what products are in every store, and what products are targeted to just a few stores. Your DAM is the staging ground with the product media, related metadata, as well as design templates for those sales circular ad blocks and end-cap signs. Using workflow tools, this content can be rendered as print-ready PDFs outputted from your branded templates to your local print vendor or store office print center.

Adds flexibility to online content delivery

Online content can include e-commerce, Point of Sale (think self-check-out or fuel pump screens), mobile apps, and social media. You might be preparing to launch a Co-op digital campaign with one of your product providers across several of your store brands in several cities or states. 

Practically speaking, if there are five kinds of breakfast cereal positioned in four of your store brands and posted across at least three social media platforms, there will be at least 60 digital files for your campaign. Using the workflow capabilities of your DAM along with layout templates, you can render these assets in minutes AND track them through their lifecycle from start to finish.

Hyper-personalized programming for 1:1 consumer experience

Loyalty programs, targeted mailers, lifestyle publications are each customer-centric channels that rely on the combination of customer shopping preferences, product information, and digital assets. 

Each of these channels uses content from your DAM, PIM, and CRM, curated with business rules to determine the best content served to specific customers of your business.

When your engaged consumers click through your digital content they will hit a product landing page in your e-commerce solution. They will be presented with DAM product images and branding optimized for their device. They will read PIM-derived product specifications and romance copy. Your e-commerce engine will present pricing for their preferred store and delivery options.

Retail is a fast-moving space, and you need sources of truth across your digital content supply chain to be responsive to changes in your market segments. DAM empowers you to do more with more. Integrations between your DAM and business systems such as PIM, CRM, ERP, print, and digital platforms enable an efficient and accurate content presentation to your customers, empowering them to buy from you with confidence.