What is an integrated DAM?

We live in an age where we decide what to consume and where and when to consume it.

Our reach is not bound by physical limitations but by how well our digital infrastructure is developed.

Businesses have started to demand that same level of convenience with a high level of control.

Our society is based on integration. Our computers are integrated with the restaurants we love, the retailers we shop with, and the places where we work.

It just makes sense that the tools we use at work should be integrated too.

That’s where digital asset management (DAM) tools come in handy and integrated ones, specifically. 

They combine convenience and control with integration and connectivity, allowing companies to search for marketing images or even get recommendations from artificial intelligence on what actions to take.

If you are hungry but aren’t sure what to eat, restaurants are happy to give you suggestions. But until recently, if you were creating a marketing campaign and couldn’t think of a perfect slogan, you were on your own. 

Unfortunately, that meant hours of searching and reading to develop the ideal five-word slogan—a totally inefficient use of time and resources.

DAMs centralize and streamline content that can be used to market products. Still, even more powerfully, an integrated DAM allows you to search and quickly access content that you might not have been aware even existed.

A good integrated DAM enables you to search for content around an idea, connect various digital infrastructures across content management systems, and balance the convenience of having images you need for your campaign available with the consistency and compliance for brand management. 

This guide will define integrated DAMs, compare integrated DAMs with regular DAMs, and discuss why integrated DAMs are so valuable.

What’s the Difference between a DAM and a CMS?

According to WPBeginner, a content management system, or CMS, is “A software that facilitates creating, editing, organizing, and publishing content.” 

TechTarget defines a digital asset management system as: “A system for organizing, storing and retrieving rich media and managing digital rights and permissions.”

CMS is just used for website and web properties while also helping you edit media content on your site. It probably has a minimal media library connected to your website’s content. 

A DAM system is used to coordinate and distribute all your media and visuals throughout your entire company. 

It, too, probably contains a library of your website’s content, but it contains so much more as well. Any media that your company has created is controlled by your DAM system.

A CMS is necessary for maintaining your website, and it does an excellent job at that. CMS contains templates for easy site maintenance and building blocks and plug-ins that allow your website to scale with your company.

CMS lacks media abilities, however. The only media library a CMS contains are the ones directly needed to maintain your website. 

While it can store images, audio, documents, and animation, its search capabilities are limited, and it has limited artificial intelligence technology. DAMs, however, especially integrated DAMs, offer so much more functionality.

What is an Integrated DAM?

A digital asset management solution is software that manages digital content while also being integrated as a more comprehensive marketing system solution. It centrally stores and contains digital content while ensuring brand compliance and consistency. 

When appropriately used, an integrated DAM will store, categorize, organize, search, find, and distribute your entire company’s digital media. It is a one-stop shop for managing your company’s media assets and maintaining brand consistency. 

A digital media asset can take many forms, including:

• Documents: Any digital files related to a marketing campaign.
• Images:  Photos, videos, clipart, rich media assets, or animations used by the company.
• Audio: Media files like recordings of music, speeches, or jingles created by the company.
• Graphics: Any computer-drafted image belonging to the organization.

A proper DAM solution makes your asset management efficient and optimizes the creation of creative marketing projects. An integrated DAM system creates a central location for all digital marketing materials and assets, and ensures asset consistency through automated updates and control of a single brand voice. 

This gives your users a more consistent customer experience and gives external audiences a solid idea of your organization’s values.

An integrated DAM solution helps your marketing team to find new content and leverage or repurpose older content, reducing unnecessary costs and duplication of content with its intelligent search systems. When one social media error lives forever, it’s essential for any organization to have a system that helps control your messaging even as your digital transformation scales.

The best DAM systems not only maximize your brand’s value but automate much of the monotony of your workflow, things like expiration dates for licensing and setting security levels for media, so your marketing people can concentrate on their core competencies and not spend their time inefficiently. 

Integration with analytics can also show you how your marketing is doing in real-time.

When media is stored across platforms, there’s duplication that wastes storage and deletes files that waste creative ideas. A cloud-based DAM provides a single source of truth and integrates your brand’s assets across all platforms so that creative teams can collaborate no matter where in the world they are. 

Furthermore, as all the work takes place on one platform, people can brainstorm even when they aren’t on-premise in a central location and receive immediate feedback.

How are Integrated DAMs Different from Regular DAMs?

Businesses think of their DAMs as the one place where their brand identity is stored, which is true of any DAM, but an integrated DAM is more than that. 

An integrated DAM can pull information from editing apps like Adobe Photoshop that works in your campaign. It can suggest making edits in Illustrator that will polish your message.  

An integrated DAM doesn’t just store and organize your assets; it allows you to incorporate assets and software INTO workflows, automation, and campaigns. 

It tells the story of an asset and provides visibility along with analytics. Most importantly, having your DAM integrated makes your company future-ready.

Connectivity just makes sense. Your marketing team doesn’t work in a vacuum, and neither should their tools. Ordinary DAM systems are great but integrate your DAM system with your image editor, social media accounts, and customer support software. 

Watch your marketing team take your business to new heights.

Why are Integrated DAMs Important?

Most users agree that easy to integrate components needed to be part of any good DAM system. 

Integration between your DAM and your social media account, your CMS systems, your CRM accounts, and your identity management system are just some of the integrations that can expand your marketing potential across your entire business structure.

According to studies done by Grand View Research, integrated technologies are going to be a must for any company that wants to grow. In addition, the requirements for a scaled workforce, increased IT importance, and infrastructure management is going to grow to the point where integration is critical to success.

Integration between our tools and our data is just built into how we think in our current society. We experience these integrations in our everyday lives and will expect them as part of a marketing team at work or as consumers of a business’s media. 

Integrated DAM systems are not a luxury. They are a necessity for growth.

What are The Benefits of DAM Integration?

DAM software integration has various benefits, including:

• Integrated searches: An integrated search system aren’t just looking for solutions to problems on your own network but on an integrated network giving you a greater chance to find a personalized solution that works for your company.
• Customizable asset organization: Your media information can be organized the way you like across your platforms, so it’s available to everyone who needs it.
• Ensuring a consistent voice: DAM integrated systems give you a consistent brand voice across all your platforms, not just in marketing but on social media and in business correspondences as well.
• Allows creation and collaboration from anywhere: Integrated systems allow for a fully hybrid workforce and will enable them to brainstorm, collaborate, and help teams create marketing campaigns with the same tools, no matter where they are in the world.
• Immediate distribution: Ideas for a marketing campaign can be spread across multiple platforms at once. You can be debuting your new slogan on your website as it goes live on your social media feed and as your customers see it in a targeted advertisement.

How Welcome can help

Decluttering inboxes, joining meeting after meeting, going through back-and-forth (and back again) reviews and approvals…

Marketers spend 75% of their time on such “work about work” instead of actually…working, ideating, creating, testing, analyzing. In other words, doing the work that made them want to become marketers in the first place.

With Welcome, marketers can finally spend more time on what they love and what’s most important: bringing game-changing products to market. How?

Well, firstly, we’re not some generalized task management software company trying to appeal to marketers. Welcome is specifically for marketers. 

We’re the brand that understands how complex launching campaigns and content can be…and we’ve designed our software accordingly.

Ready to give it a try? Get started with a free account today!