Where Does Your Content Begin? Making a Case for DAM

I recently had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the Henry Stewart DAM conference in New York alongside one of Velir's partners, Acquia. As my first Digital Asset Management (DAM) conference, it was great to hear from top brands like Netflix, Kraft-Heinz, and Boeing on how DAM software plays a critical role in delivering leading customer experiences, organizing tens of thousands of omnichannel assets, and facilitating efficiencies in work across teams that are using assets for multiple different efforts, campaigns and more.

While at the event, I started thinking more and more about how the majority of content conversations that I am in begin with and center around content management systems (CMS) or digital experience platforms (DXP). Now, don’t get me wrong, these technologies are absolutely critical to delivering digital experiences that meet and exceed customer expectations, but if you have a content problem – whether it be creation, organization, or management – is a CMS/DXP the right place to start when trying to solve that problem?

Your website is just one of many channels where you need to publish your content. Chances are you can create an asset once and give it legs on multiple channels like email, social, and your website. However, if you create or store that asset solely in your CMS or DXP media library, that content is living in a silo. Teams without access to your CMS will never know that asset exists and will be forced to create something new, raising the likelihood of brand inconsistency and honestly wasting time and resources to re-create something from scratch when there was an asset there the whole time that could have been reused.

A DAM is your digital filing cabinet – a tool that allows you to keep assets organized, filed according to a system that makes sense for you and your team, and most importantly, findable to anyone who has access to the filing cabinet. Even better, with a filing cabinet, you can have keys, so you can control who has access to those files (whether the whole cabinet or certain drawers), but everyone knows that the filing cabinet is the source of truth when looking for assets. It's the place to go. Nowhere else.

So, where does your content begin?

When you create content, you should be thinking about all of the places this content can live. If your team is struggling to maintain control and organization of assets, but you are only thinking about a redesign or CMS investment, putting a DAM integration or investment on the back burner, please rethink that approach.

Think about it this way – if you are going through a website redesign, you might create 500 new assets for your new digital experience. These could be hero images, downloadable assets like reports, headshots, etc. If you are to upload these to your CMS, where can other teams access these fresh assets? If you don't integrate with a DAM as part of your CMS project, you may be doing double the amount of work because you will have to move those 500 assets into a DAM at a later date, reconcile taxonomies with what has been implemented in the DAM, re-tag content, potentially remove duplicates… just to name a few of the tasks.

So when you are thinking about overcoming content challenges your teams might have, ask yourself, where does your content begin? Is your CMS/DXP the only tool that can help with managing content? Or is there an opportunity to bring in DAM software to help you build a strong content foundation outside of your CMS to break down silos, reduce duplication or work, and accelerate time to market for campaigns and marketing efforts with advanced searching, filtering, findability, and central storage for all teams and content creators?