Transform “Good Enough” Digital Asset Management into a Business Driver

Image source: Adobe Stock / Alphaspirit.

Businesses leaders view digital transformation as a top priority, but often hesitate when selecting the key solutions needed to make that transformation a reality. It can be tempting to tread water when the current way of working seems “good enough,” and a wrong choice today could have wide-ranging, costly effects tomorrow. Before endorsing a new solution as a business leader, you must feel confident that the chosen path reduces costs, minimizes risk, and ideally presents new revenue-generating opportunities. It’s not only how you’ll keep the business competitive, but how you’ll propel it to the front of the pack.

At the core of this digital transformation is digital asset management (DAM). A DAM process provides your business a way to create, manage, and distribute all its digital content while streamlining workflows supporting those processes. The digital assets your business has likely include images, videos, audio files, illustrations, and documents, and perhaps other more specialized files like those for augmented or virtual reality environments.

While your organization may already have an approach for managing its assets, the marketing landscape has changed enough that your current system may be holding you back. It’s probably time to re-examine whether you’re set up for success with your asset management strategy, or whether a modernized approach to DAM could transform your marketing efforts. The key to this is understanding the business value that a DAM offers, along with the types of high-level capabilities it must include to deliver on that promise.

Let your DAM send your assets off to work for you

A DAM should put your assets to work for you, not make you work for the assets. It should be a business driver, not just a “junk drawer” where you toss assets to store and organize with little plan for reuse. A DAM should tie business intelligence to your assets, exposing the highest performing content for reuse in other channels or campaigns, with the goal of increasing customer engagement and revenue.

In addition, a DAM should reduce the time to market by helping to create experiences as quickly as possible, while simultaneously optimizing content for all channels. This increased content velocity grants unparalleled agility, and allows your organization to respond to trends quickly, provide more personal journeys, and increase the relevancy of experiences.

At the same time, a DAM must reduce costs. Instead of saddling users with legacy and manual processes, a modern DAM should leverage innovations like artificial intelligence (AI) to make sure your organization can meet the ballooning demand for more content — without requiring larger teams. Finally, a DAM must play a crucial role in eliminating the use of unapproved or out-of-date content, preventing brand damage and monetary penalties for the improper use of out-of-compliance assets.

In short, to deliver on the promise of digital transformation, a full-featured DAM should reduce operational costs, mitigate the risk of unlicensed content, and drive revenue with more personalized, relevant experiences.

Why Adobe Experience Manager Assets

With many different asset management solutions to choose from, you need to pick one that will drive your business today, while future-proofing it with capabilities to meet the needs of tomorrow. Adobe Experience Manager Assets (AEM Assets) is uniquely positioned as the only DAM that addresses every stage of the asset lifecycle — from asset creation to delivery and optimization.

We often sit down with our customers to discuss why they chose AEM Assets. One of the main reasons surrounds the ability to leverage capabilities they weren’t able to find with other DAM solutions.

First, AEM Assets includes advanced support for video, the most popular and engaging content type among consumers. Additionally, as part of the Adobe Experience Cloud platform, AEM Assets natively connects not only with the Adobe Creative Cloud applications in which your creatives build content, but also with the experience optimization tools that provide insight into identifying and monetizing your top-performing assets. These integrations make it easier and faster than ever to create content and get that content into highly relevant customer experiences. In fact, a recent IDC report demonstrated that companies using AEM Assets were able to launch their campaigns 20 percent faster.

Our customers also praise the intelligent workflow automation in AEM Assets, powered by Adobe Sensei, often stating they are able to accomplish more with a smaller team. IDC discovered that organizations that use AEM Assets increased productivity by 19 percent. We’ve heard how these intelligent workflows can automate tedium throughout the asset lifecycle, eliminating processes like ad-hoc metadata entry or manual image cropping. Customers often comment on how these efficiencies help get experiences to market faster, freeing up resources and dollars toward other more productive activities. To that end, IDC discovered organizations using AEM Assets created new assets 47 percent faster.

Digital rights management (DRM) is also a very important concern for our customers. We hear too many horror stories around the penalties and consequences of incorrect, unlicensed, or expired asset usage. Our customers rely on a number of DRM capabilities within AEM Assets to limit the company’s exposure to risk, protect the brand, and save money.

Lastly, AEM Assets was named a “Leader” in The Forrester Wave: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience, Q2 2018. This should give you the confidence that by using this industry-leading solution you are well-equipped to drive revenue, reduce costs, and mitigate risk across your organization’s marketing efforts.

Learn how your business can benefit from a DAM solution

Want to know how your current means of managing digital assets measures up? Curious about how much ROI you stand to gain from a DAM solution? Contact us here for more information.