DAM That Was Easy – Digital Asset Management with Acquia

As someone who has been in the digital customer experience space for a while (no I won’t age myself in this post), it's always interesting to see how market trends and pressures shift MarTech priorities across organizations. Whether it’s the battle of best-in-breed vs. full-suite solutions, headless, or the ever-growing need for customer data platforms (CDPs), there's no shortage of ongoing discussions about what marketing technology you should invest in.

One topic that has come up a lot recently is digital asset management (DAM). As major players in the MarTech space continue to expand their portfolios to move in the market, we're seeing more and more tech providers investing in a digital asset management (DAM) system beyond their traditional web content management system (CMS).

It makes sense when you think about it. When they're looking to get a better handle on their content, brand assets, and digital channels, most organizations turn to their CMS or digital experience platform (DXP). They embark on a journey of a website redesign or refresh to ensure they're delivering engaging and effective digital experiences.

While ensuring your organization has the right CMS or DXP to support your business goals, audience needs, digital assets, and marketing teams is important, it's only one piece of the puzzle.

Why a CMS or DXP Isn't Enough and You Need Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software

Given my years working with clients, I can confidently tell you that a content management system alone won't solve your content challenges. Yes, a CMS or DXP helps organize your web-focused content and digital assets and can strengthen your brand's digital presence. But it doesn't provide the basis for the ongoing growth, success, and scale of your brand assets.

To create successful content marketing across your digital channels, your organization needs to have a strong foundation of brand assets that live outside the web so you can scale your content needs appropriately.

Imagine this, you have a web team, a social team, an email team, and a paid media team. Each one of these marketing teams is looking for various content and digital assets to use on their dedicated channels. If each team is siloed, then they may be reproducing the same digital assets and putting brand guidelines and brand consistency at risk. Now if these marketing teams were storing and managing digital assets in a single, central location like a digital asset management system, they would all have a place to look for the approved assets they need. They could reuse the same digital assets across channels and lighten the burden on other teams to create net new content that conforms to brand guidelines. There's no need to reinvent the wheel when you have a central repository of digital assets that all your creative teams can use.

Because the content experience is the customer experience, your organization needs to have a sound content foundation to not just ensure brand consistency across digital channels but to measure the effectiveness of your digital assets and share those learnings across your entire organization.

Acquia's Digital Asset Management (DAM) Solution

When Acquia acquired the Widen digital asset management solution back in September 2021, they expanded their product portfolio to assist teams with streamlining their digital asset management and usage, helping to break down team silos and jumpstart content velocity for creative teams.

Now called Acquia DAM, this cloud-based digital asset management solution provides marketers with the ability to organize, store, and distribute digital assets such as images, videos, documents, audio files, and other media assets.

The Benefits of Acquia's Digital Asset Management Solution

Acquia's digital asset management solution offers several benefits to your marketing teams that help streamline their workflows, enhance collaboration, and improve your overall marketing effectiveness including: 

• Centralized digital asset management for visibility across multiple creative teams, marketing teams as well as internal and external stakeholders.
• Increased brand consistency and brand management by enforcing brand guidelines through version control and access to the latest approved digital assets.
• Improved collaboration with roles and permissions that allow marketing teams, creative agencies, and internal and external stakeholders to have a single source of digital asset truth.
• Analytics and insights into digital asset performance, usage, and engagement metrics.
• Copyright and usage compliance to avoid legal issues related to improper asset permissions.
• Workflow automation to accommodate digital asset review and approval processes in a centralized location.

One of the positive side effects of investing in a DAM solution like Acquia DAM is that it also shortens the runways for your sales and marketing teams to personalize digital experiences. Let's admit it, one of the biggest hurdles to personalization is content and having the variations you need for each audience segment. To get to the point where your content and marketing teams can match personalization expectations from consumers and deliver consistent, engaging content for your digital channels, your marketers need to start working in synergy, not in silos. This will increase content engagement with less effort because your creative teams can combine and reuse content. Acquia DAM helps your teams achieve these efficiencies with your digital asset management (DAM).

Acquia DAM offers a comprehensive set of features that benefit you by improving asset organization, collaboration, brand consistency, and overall marketing efficiency. It empowers your marketing teams to work more effectively, ultimately leading to an enhanced brand presence, increased customer engagement, improved marketing performance, and streamlined personalization.

Looking to get your digital assets under control? Let us help! Reach out and we'd be happy to discuss how Acquia DAM will make your digital asset management (DAM) easy.