Crafting a DAM Adoption Strategy with People, Process, and Metrics
Digital asset management (DAM) can reduce the review cycle time by 57%, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Content excellence requires attention to three essential areas: people, processes, and measurement. We have learned from content leaders that a core team is necessary, including owners, IT teams, approvers, data and analytics experts, ambassadors, and librarians to support your DAM’s processes, from content creation and approval to production, distribution, tagging, and tracking. Measurement focuses on critical areas throughout your DAM’s evolution.
People: Building the right team
Crafting a DAM strategy starts with putting the right team in place.
Ambassadors are your voice, support, and the people who, in a nutshell, own the implementation of the strategy. Typically, the ambassadors should be decision makers, such as brand leads in the countries. The key factors in selecting ambassadors are their profile and ability to convince and bring the message to their team.
Librarians play a crucial role in the implementation of the DAM strategy. This role maintains the digital asset management system and ensures it is properly organized, cataloged, and managed. They also help with the taxonomy of content, making it much easier for contributors to use and reuse content.
Approvers are also essential to the process. An effective DAM strategy requires approval process mastery so that all individuals involved understand and support the plan.
Process: Understanding the content value chain
Building an effective DAM strategy requires a strong foundation of content excellence across the content value chain. Content excellence intersects with many different functions of the business, and its foundation lies in multiple types of activities. The first step is to identify each activity involved in the process.
Once you identify individual activities, evaluate the relationships between them. For example, content planning and editorial activities are essential for ensuring the content aligns with the organization’s goals and objectives. During content creation, approval, and production, teams ensure that the content meets the required quality standards, while content distribution plans reach the target audience effectively.
In addition to the activities themselves, it is also important to consider the processes, resources, and organizational structure involved with each. An efficient DAM strategy requires a deep dive into these related areas to ensure that they support the activities involved in the content value chain.
Metrics: Driving DAM to maturity
As your DAM matures, so will your metrics.
The right approach starts by ensuring your DAM contains the right content. Measuring the content volume per country and assessing whether the global and local teams are in fact using the content are strong indicators you have high-quality content in your DAM.
The next step is to measure DAM adoption and usage across teams. Every quarter, content leaders shared details about teams’ content usage and reuse. By taking this approach, they incentivized their organizations to use DAM more effectively and learn from others’ successes.
As the DAM matured, they shifted away from measuring the content volume and toward content reuse. The ultimate goal is to foster reuse, decrease cost and time to market, and accelerate speed. Measuring reuse sets the right foundations for the next stage toward content excellence, which is Modular Content.
Preparing for Modular Content
Whether your company is at an advanced stage of DAM adoption or not, you are focusing on a holistic objective toward streamlining the creation, review, and distribution of content at scale.
Similar to the process of building a DAM, developing a successful Modular Content strategy takes time. Content leaders are establishing the building blocks for Modular Content early on, and are focused on the long-term value.
Hear more from Almirall on the benefits of setting the right foundations for DAM and modular content.