Is your business ready to lead a successful digital transformation? One thing we can all agree on is that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to leading your business into a digitally-savvy future. However, no matter which path you set your business on, you likely won’t find success without a digital asset management platform. In this article, we’re going to cover the following:
- What is digital asset management
- What problems/challenges can you solve with a digital asset management platform
- Tactical steps to get started with a digital asset management platform
What is Digital Asset Management?
Digital Asset Management is when you store, organize, and enable the more efficient use of assets by managing them online; as opposed to physical hard copies, for example. A Digital Asset Management Platform is the tool you use to manage your assets online, things like your logo, tagline, company messaging, and all of your content like photos, videos, PDFs, audio recordings, and articles. You’ll often hear the phrase “single source of truth” because a digital asset management platform becomes the go-to place to find anything and everything for your entire organization. It’s one central hub where everyone can access at any time, from anywhere, and find the information they seek.
Local Marketing Challenges Solved with Digital Asset Management
When you and your team can implement and leverage a digital asset management platform, you’re able to solve a few critical problems that naturally arise in the scope of work.
Increase Efficiency
For starters, you won’t have to worry about teams duplicating their efforts in creating new content. Also, having a digital asset management platform enables that content to be shared across teams easily and efficiently.
Tell a Consistent Brand Story
Each team within your business will be able to share a more consistent brand story because they’ll be telling the same story, not their own versions because they’ll have access to the same document that outlines what to say and how to talk about the company to prospects, customers, friends, etc.
Save Time
Now, think back to when you had to find a document that was created months or even a year ago. You know it was something that was emailed to you, but you can’t remember exactly if it was something you had downloaded and saved to your laptop or had printed out a hard copy, but you need it now and quickly. How long do you imagine you would spend looking in your inbox history to locate that specific email? What if that email was deleted? Now, imagine if you had one place to go and find all past documents that you could filter and search for something specific. That’s the time-saving power of a digital asset management platform.
Maintain an Active Online Presence
The other key obstacle digital asset management helps you overcome is the notion of consistently creating and sharing content across your online presence to maintain an active presence. Recency is one of the major local search ranking factors search engines like Google use to score your online visibility. When you have your content, such as before and after photos of a completed project or a brand story video, uploaded to one place, it makes it all that much easier to take that content and publish it across the web at once, without having to sign in to each individual platform and post manually. That’s the power of an all-in-one local marketing platform that includes a digital asset management component.
So to recap, when your business leverages a digital asset management platform, you’re able to:
- Become more efficient by eliminating duplicate and unnecessary work
- Empower your employees to tell a stronger, more consistent brand story
- Reduce the time it takes you to find a particular piece of information
4 Tactical Steps to Get Started with Digital Asset Management
It can be overwhelming to begin your research on finding the right digital asset management platform for you and your business. There are a lot of factors to consider, such as cost, accessibility, and usability.
- Pricing tiers/Plans — Does the vendor offer a variety of plans for different business needs? For instance, do they use pricing tiers for small business, medium business, and enterprise-level organizations? What will it cost to customize the software with applications not included in a specific plan?
- The total cost of ownership — What are the fees and costs associated with onboarding, training, and implementation? What about continued support after the initial installation? What will be the cost of future upgrades? Also, does the software use any third-party add-ons that will add to your total cost?
- Accessibility — Can you access your local marketing software, regardless if you are in the office or the field? Does it offer a consistent experience across different web browsers? Does it smoothly operate on desktop, mobile app, and offline?
- Look & Feel of the software — Is the software easy and fun to use? Can you get what you need quickly? The user experience of your local marketing software will influence its adoption by your business. It also affects how quickly new team members can be onboarded.
- Customizability/Flexibility — Can you structure and customize your local marketing software to fit your workflows? Can it be easily integrated with your existing tools and programs? You don’t want a platform that requires a complete overhaul of your existing digital infrastructure.
- Transparency – Is the vendor upfront about all the costs associated with their software? Do you have the tools to judge if their platform improves your local marketing strategy efforts? Do they deliver the performance and support they promised in their pitch?
With all of this in mind, you can begin your discovery journey with confidence.
- Step 1: Create a list of your needs — Decide what digital asset management features your business absolutely needs (as well as a wish list for things you want, if your budget allows).
- Step 2: Research options and read reviews — Finding a reputable platform could save you a lot of time and uncertainty. Ask around. Visit forums and user groups and listen to what they have to say about the software and their relationship with the vendor. Read through both the positive and negative customer reviews to get a sense of the benefits and possible sticking points.
- Step 3: Test drive platforms — This is an opportunity to test if the digital asset management platforms are as good as advertised and if it will meet your business marketing needs. Also, it gives you a sense of how effective the vendor’s onboarding process will be, what kind of training they provide, and understand how easily the platform will integrate into your current workflow.
- Step 4: Make a decision — After you have some first-hand experience with the digital asset management platforms, you can narrow your choices down the top options that would work best for your business. Compare the different features, what types of services the vendor prioritizes if they offer any discounts or bonuses, and how your overall experience dealing with them has been like. From there, make your final choice and move forward with implementation.
Consider an All-In-One Local Marketing Platform
While there’s no denying the benefits that come with utilizing a digital asset management platform, it’s only the tip of the iceberg compared to the benefits that come with utilizing an all-in-one local marketing platform.
Surefire Local provides the industry’s most complete marketing platform designed to help small and medium-sized businesses attract lifetime customers, grow revenue, and broaden reach in their local markets. The Surefire Local Marketing Platform™ helps locally-focused businesses of all sizes remove digital roadblocks hindering growth, gain insights, and take action to attract and engage customers through measurable, multi-channel marketing.
