Digital Asset Management (DAM) is an investment, much like any other software. Obviously, companies interested in purchasing a DAM solution want to know what kind of return they can expect on such an investment. The answer lies in leveraging a DAM's capabilities with your specific business workflow to maximize its potential. Several factors can have an influence on the return on investment (ROI), including operational efficiencies, technical enhancements, monetary savings, improved marketing efforts, and increased competitiveness. It all depends on the incremental gains you achieve within your overall business processes.
When you evaluate which DAM you want to introduce to your team or organization, there are tangible and intangible factors to take into consideration. These factors directly influence your ROI, affecting both productivity and opportunity costs.
In order to accomplish efficiency and effectiveness in achieving your business goals, the DAM system you are going for should be flexible and versatile enough to reflect organization specific structures and workflows. For example, abundant metadata can enhance the way assets are categorized significantly so that they become searchable to serve any re-use purposes. Having easy sharing capability with internal as well as external collaborators such as freelancer photographers, partners, and resellers who don’t even need to hold access to the system, will bring instant results in productivity at no cost.
In due time, you’d want a solution that grows with you. Cloud-based DAM systems are the main player here as the benefits are cost reduction, increased speed, global scalability, accessibility, and distribution of assets. The best one would provide security guarantees, global infrastructure, third-party integration, backup solution, and storage redundancy.
Even though the nature of a SaaS product is the pay-as-you-go principle, additional costs (initial import or additional set up costs, for example) are often involved. Look for all-in package or at least go for the providers who set out their pricing transparently. Always ask for additional costs from the respective support team of the software solution you are choosing.
For the sake of business continuity, support should be robust and always there for you. A few DAM system providers will charge you for the on-going support and some will provide it for free. Clear this out before buying the package. A feature-rich DAM without the full support will be very difficult for you to maintain without a power user in-house, who has expertise in that field. Without the necessary on-boarding, the learning curve of a DAM software can be steep and demanding a lot of your resources. DAM providers who offer free on-boarding would save you tremendous time and effort, but also prevent unnecessary troubleshooting, which will directly affect your ROI in a negative way.
Learning a new software requires time and energy. For us, ease of use is vital. User-friendly UX and simple navigation make it easy for the users and team members grasp the tool quickly so they can start increasing operational effectiveness fast. Difficult or complex tools require trained staffs to use them well, which won’t be the case in companies who are just introduced a DAM. An intuitive DAM with ease of comprehension will help everyone who will use the software as well as those who will be indirectly using it for shared content. You don’t want to invest extra time and energy to learn again a new tool, the tool should help us not vice versa. The teams are likely to use that particular software more and stick to it for a longer time.
Things will be easy for you and your investment will go in the right direction if you choose the DAM solution provider wisely. Crosscheck the DAM with the above-given parameters to filter out your choices.
List up what matters most critically for your organization that can help your team to shorten time to market hence achieve your business goal quickly. The marketplace is full of DAM solutions with loads of features. You need to look for the one fitting your unique needs, which will be the most ROI-generating tool for you eventually.