Of DAMs and bridges: Navigating digital currents with a PIM

From traditional brick-and-mortar establishments to e-commerce giants, the infusion of digital elements has disrupted and revolutionized every facet of the commercial realm. Digital Asset Management (DAM) has cemented its place in the marketing tech stack alongside Product Information Management (PIM) as a key technology for competing in a dynamic market and meeting mercurial customer expectations.

But is an enterprise DAM necessary to facilitate commerce in today’s omnichannel environments? This depends on several factors, outlined below. 

What is Digital Asset Management?

Forrester defines DAM as “an enterprise technology platform that enables the production, management, and digital-rights-managed distribution of rich-media assets such as images, audio, and video at scale.”  DAM goes beyond just acting as a repository of digital assets, it performs the transformation of assets, layering, collections, and even using AI/ML for sorting, tagging, and classification of assets.

“DAM allows organizations to enrich digital experiences through creative and immersive content created with images, audio, and video files, which are delivered directly to the digital touchpoint or to adjacent front-office systems, such as a web content management system (CMS), enterprise content management (ECM) suite, production information management (PIM), e-commerce, and marketing automation system for experience assembly.

This allows the most engaging assets of an organization’s digital experience to be securely rendered on consumer and employee touchpoints with the highest level of optimization — improving experiences and increasing employee and customer satisfaction.”

In short, DAM makes it easy to organize, update, and deploy all the digital media and resources relating to an enterprise. For example, a brand could send a new packaging design to their printer, build up a library of videos of their products in action for sharing on social media, create a digital billboard, and store digital user manuals assigned to each product effortlessly through their DAM.

Powering Transformation with Digital Asset Management

Here are four ways in which DAMs act as enablers and accelerators of digital transformation:

1. Centralized Management of Digital Assets: Digital transformation often involves the migration from traditional, fragmented asset management systems to centralized digital solutions. A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system serves as a central repository for all digital assets, streamlining storage, organization, and access. This centralization is crucial for breaking down silos, fostering collaboration, and ensuring that digital assets are easily accessible across departments, enabling a more cohesive and efficient workflow.
2. Accelerated Workflows and Efficiency: DAM systems streamline workflows related to the creation, approval, and distribution of digital assets. By automating repetitive tasks and providing version control, DAM accelerates the content production cycle. This efficiency is vital for organizations undergoing digital transformation, as it allows teams to adapt quickly to changing market demands, launch campaigns faster, and respond promptly to evolving customer needs.
3. Enhanced Collaboration Across Teams: Digital transformation necessitates cross-functional collaboration between teams such as marketing, sales, and design. DAM facilitates collaboration by providing a centralized platform where teams can collaborate on the creation, editing, and sharing of digital assets. This collaboration breaks down departmental barriers, fostering a more agile and collaborative environment that aligns with the goals of digital transformation.
4. Optimized Customer Experience: DAM contributes significantly to improving the customer experience in the digital realm. Ensuring that digital assets are of high quality, consistent, and on-brand is essential for delivering a seamless and engaging customer experience. With a DAM system, organizations can manage and deliver compelling visual content across various digital channels, creating a consistent brand presence and enhancing the overall customer journey.

DAM + PIM: The Ultimate Combo of Data Management Infrastructure

Organizations using a PIM system can unlock significant synergies by integrating a DAM solution into their workflow. Integration bridges the gap between the two solutions and leverages their synergies to enhance the overall product experience for customers.  

PIM empowers businesses to meticulously manage and enrich product information, ensuring accuracy and completeness. When coupled with DAM, which specializes in handling rich media assets, customers gain the ability to seamlessly associate high-quality images, videos, and other visual content with product data.  

This integration not only elevates the presentation of products but also provides customers with a more immersive and informative shopping experience. As a result, sellers can leverage DAM to foster a deeper connection with customers through compelling visuals that showcase products in their best light in a way basic product specifications can’t. This combination enhances the overall brand perception, instills confidence in purchasing decisions, and contributes to a more engaging and satisfying customer journey. 

How to Find and Implement the Right DAM

Syndigo PIM customers enjoy the flexibility of using either our built-in DAM capabilities or their own enterprise DAM solution, like Adobe or Oracle. The PIM can use APIs or URLs from the DAM to recall the assets to work with them. So how should you decide on going with an enterprise DAM or using your PIM with a built-in DAM?  

If you need a DAM to mainly handle your product-related needs and to increase the appeal of your product pages, Syndigo’s built-in DAM capability is tailored to your needs. With Syndigo’s platform, these DAM capabilities are tuned to primarily support product-related requirements, used in supply chain or e-commerce outputs. Syndigo enables you to auto-link images to the corresponding products, store metadata, locales, and hierarchies, enable usage of workflows to process the assets, and can even provide analytics through integration with Azure Image Analytics. Even without an enterprise DAM, you can see the images and other digital assets along with the product descriptions in the PIM, meaning you’re able to send them for syndication smoothly and accurately.  

However, if you need a DAM for larger and broader corporate needs – like for marketing, editing HQ images, making banners and billboards – then an enterprise DAM will be better suited for your needs. Syndigo PIM excels at integration with all enterprise DAMs and makes using them extremely intuitive. With providers like Sheridan and Cloudinary, the integration goes beyond just transferring images; instead, the images from the providers can be seen within the Syndigo app itself, and thumbnails can be created. In other cases, a URL from the external provider is utilized so the user can see what assets are being talked about.  

Explore the Power of PIM and DAM in Action

Syndigo PIM is recognized by our customers and industry experts alike for its capabilities in enabling digital transformation. The built-in DAM capability is the perfect “force multiplier” for businesses looking to enhance the customer experience they deliver.  

Contact us for a custom tour of Syndigo’s platform to see how PIM and DAM capabilities combine to optimize your organization’s digital content and product data strategy, form a cohesive foundation for digital transformation, and foster efficiency, collaboration, and a unified brand presence across all customer touchpoints.