Editorial
Digital asset managers have to embrace both sales and marketing. In effect, they have to sell their DAM solutions to their end users.
So how can we translate marketing concepts to the implementation of Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems and strategies?
Well, marketing to your customer begins with an understanding of your customer profile. Stakeholders or users of digital asset management systems are customers in their own way.
So start by defining your customer for your digital asset management system. Knowing your audience is the first step towards use and adoption.
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No one is going to use and adopt your DAM system without an awareness of its existence, and knowing who you are trying to target can help you more accurately market towards them.
Defining Your Customer Profile
You can use a variety of tools, including surveys, analytics and interviews, to identify your customers.
Surveys
Start by asking a variety of questions, including:
- What department your potential or existing customer works in
- Their primary use for DAM
- Team size
- Types of assets most commonly used or needed
- Years at the company
- Number of direct reports
Analytics
Having analytics code installed or embedded within your DAM system is key for understanding all sorts of things about your customer.For example:
- How long does your customer stay on your site?
- What is the user flow through you site?
- What types of browsers, operating systems or devices do your customers access your DAM with?
- What are the most common keywords the customer utilizes?
- What is the interaction rate or conversion rate for each type of customer?
- What geographic region do your customers access the DAM from?
- What items get the most clicks on specific pages inside the DAM?
Interviews
Much like rolling out a survey to your customers there is a lot of great qualitative data you can gather from in-person interviews. The added bonus to doing interviews is that you can probe further with follow-up questions.
Craft a DAM Mission Statement
Having a scope or mission for your system is important as well. Why does it exist and what is the high-level goal of having it?
A mission statement can help you clearly define the scope of the system. For example, is a system only for works-in-progress assets?Or perhaps it is a system only for final finished assets?
Maybe it is a system meant for the enterprise meant to encompass externally-facing marketing assets, internally facing collateral for employee training and knowledge, and items that contribute to the institutional memory of the organization.
To be clear, if your mission statement for your DAM is something along the lines of: “The mission of the Company XYZ DAM system is to preserve and house enterprise marketing collateral for employees of Company XYZ and allow them to collaborate more efficiently in the digital work environment,” then the latest images from the company christmas party probably don’t belong in the DAM. A step towards this type of governance is explicitly defining the mission.
Marketing Your DAM
Once the customer and mission have been defined then you have a foundation for creating and deploying marketing campaigns aimed at driving the awareness and ultimately use and adoption of your DAM system.
Some key action items you can focus on after defining who your customer is and what your DAM mission statement is include marketing activities that you would like to implement. The great news is that almost all of these activities do not require any form of budget whatsoever.
Sponsorship
Internal stakeholder sponsorship, especially from high-level figures such directors and vice presidents could be the equivalent of taking out an ad for your company at a professional sporting event. That could be an exaggeration, but think of the weight of authority that is lent to an entity when someone signs off on it.
If that person has clout, then they lend it to your cause by extension when they endorse you.
Storytelling/Case Studies
What better way to celebrate the new group you just on-boarded than to do a case study and share it with the rest of the organization?
Say sales had a problem that they were never able to operate efficiently in the field because they didn’t have access to specific sales collateral that was, at one time, only stored on internal servers.
If you can find a way to help them solve this issue by giving them access to these documents through a cloud DAM system where they can find and access the materials they need, that could be a big win, and one worthy of sharing.
It may trigger other departments in your organization to suddenly see similar use cases or problems in their own work that the DAM system could help solve.
Email Newsletter
An email newsletter is an opportunity to share quick tidbits like new features of the system or even things like the most popular assets for the month of October. It could even be a report that communicates the availability of a new brand toolkit or a new marketing campaign that launches soon for the next season.
Company Intranet Blogs
If your company has an intranet, see how you can contribute or get featured. Can the administrators link to your your DAM? Would they be willing to let you advertise your DAM on the home page for a limited time?
Social Networks
If your company has any sort of enterprise social network or collaboration platform, try marketing the DAM there. If you can have a page for it, do that as well. Make sure to list key information there such as contact information and the mission statement in the about section.
Wikis or Knowledge Bases
Because so much information in an organization is tacit and not necessarily written down, a knowledge base or a wiki site can be an opportunity to record this information for others to discover on their own.
Outreach Booth
Here’s one you may not have thought of before: Design a booth and do outreach in your organization for a day.
Ideas include setting up a table, decorating it and giving away branded collateral for your DAM like handy supplies that people are always needing. If money is tight (or non-existent) you could make a velcro cutout that includes the support email, phone number and web address for the DAM system.
If you’ve got a small budget, it could be worthwhile to invest in a notable prize and do a raffle. You can give people entries to the raffle if they sign up for your newsletter or complete their first login to the DAM. Have a sign-up sheet and ask people to write down their name and email address.
You can later use this information to send them information and updates about the DAM or perhaps to add them to the system if they are not already on-boarded. This is an almost entirely free marketing event that will guarantee DAM system visibility.
Think about what makes you want to stop at a booth also. Do they have treats or maybe a cool sticker you like? Maybe you can offer a magnet with an often used DAM-pun that might not be funny to you anymore, but is a novelty for new users.Think about what grabs your attention and makes you want to stop and talk to someone for a moment and go do that.
Posters, Flyers and Desk Drops
A cheap way to market your DAM system would be to hand-make some posters or perhaps print out some fliers or desk drops. Because this event could entail a big time commitment from your end, especially if your organization is particularly large, you might think about a tiered approach (i.e. Desk Drops that remind specific teams they’ve been invited to participate in training sessions on the morning of the day they are scheduled to attend.)
You could reserve posters for communicating that a new system is coming and hang them up around the building. If you’re lucky you have a designer friend that can help you execute your vision to make these posters, desk drops or flyers super eye-catching and memorable. If not, hopefully you can add one more hat to your repertoire — design guru.
Love Your DAM
There are so many more ways you can advertise your DAM system and get it the attention, use and adoption it deserves. Be creative and don’t be afraid to fail.
Part of marketing is finding out what works and what doesn’t work, and experimenting will allow you to fine tune your successful choices and weed out the unsuccessful ones.
Finally, don’t forget that in all these types of marketing activities you should be on-brand with your message, your mission and the call to action should clearly be defined for each marketing event.
After implementing these different methods of marketing your DAM you may find things that worked and things that did not work. Measure your results and repeat what works.
Taking the pulse on usage statistics pre-marketing will provide some hard before and after data to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. While the ultimate goal may seem like it’s just use and adoption, you’re also spending time on communicating the value of your DAM system which, ideally, leads to increased use and adoption inevitably.
Title image by Jessica Ruscello
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