How organised and efficient is your team? Even before the challenges and opportunities posed to the retail sector this year, teams had to manage huge volumes of digital content.
From imagery to video, from design files to presentations, from documents to spreadsheets, the number of files and folders that we save, organise and share is ever growing. Despite the accelerated success of many online retailers this year, managing this bulk of content threatens to slow teams down and hinder their performance, no matter how talented they are or popular their brand.
What is digital asset management and who uses it?
Digital asset management (DAM) software is being widely adopted in the sector. It’s a solution to help consistently store digital assets in a secure, central location so they can easily be found and shared.
This technology empowers team members – as well as approved external parties – to help them quickly find tagged files, saving long searches or taking up the time of colleagues to track down what they’re looking for. With many team members now working from home, this has never been more important. It helps everyone spend more of their time focused on action that really matters to the business.
Why is it proving effective in retail and ecommerce?
DAM technology has evolved from being installed on computers “on-premise” by IT teams, to being cloud-based. This has opened up the benefits of the software to new and fast-moving businesses, as well as established brands, who prefer the more agile and affordable software-as-a-service approach.
With the latest DAM, your team members – plus your suppliers, partners and agencies – can securely access, save and share content through their web browser, wherever in the world they’re based.
While many businesses, departments and teams have gotten used to internal shared servers or services like Dropbox and Google Drive, DAM software requires everyone to save files in the same secure way, to be discoverable by others. It also uses the likes of Amazon Web Services to offer ample storage capacity that can scale as you need it to.
If you’re considering DAM, here are three of my top reasons to try it:
1. Make it faster and easier for everyone to store, search and share files
Being able to find content instantly, by being able to search for keyword tags, or with the help of facial recognition to find all imagery of a specific person, can help you to hit the ground running when storing, searching and sharing files. It’s especially helpful if you have new team members. Integrations and plugins for Google Chrome, Microsoft Office, Adobe, and more, mean everyone on the team can work quicker and be sure they are accessing the latest versions of files.
2. Provide appropriate access to third parties
It may not be appropriate to grant full access to a shared drive or folder to a third-party, like a contractor or agency, but neither is it sensible to have to regularly split files into multiple folders. With DAM, admins can allow an approved individual or team access to only the files you require them to have. This is great for confidentially planning the launch of new product ranges or sales promotions. Need a branded portal for your site for media to access imagery and other brand assets? DAM can do that too.
3. Get started quickly
DAM platforms are designed to make the migration of your existing folders onto their platform a pain-free process and to ensure you’re better organised right away. Uploading from a shared server or desktop to your DAM platform is fast, and if your team uses services like Dropbox, Box or Google Drive, you can easily sync these folders quickly too.
When your content is organised, your team is organised. Ensuring you have a team that works smarter and can perform at its best, is arguably just as important as your brand, product and pricing strategies.
