If you work for an enterprise who is serious about marketing, your DAM and your CMS should be two key components of your marketing technology stack. But more than that, their ability to be ‘good friends’, to integrate and work together, will have a major impact on the productivity of your digital marketing team.
Your DAM and CMS need to be good friends if you are serious about marketing
What’s a DAM?
Digital Asset Management software, like our Asset Bank system, is used by organisations to store, manage and share all their digital assets; images, videos, ads, word documents – any type of file that you might want to store digitally.What’s a CMS?
Content Management Systems are designed to make it easy for users to manage, publish, update and delete content on a website. Popular CMS include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and SiteCore.Why should they be good friends?
Your website needs content; such as text, images, videos, and pdfs. A DAM is the place to find this content. Your digital marketing team will love you if you can make it as easy as possible for them to get content from your DAM onto your website. There can be a number of steps involved in this process.- Browse the content in your DAM
- Select the content they want to use
- Secure approval to use this content
- Download the content
- Edit the content to make sure it is in the right format for your website
- Publish on your website
A good DAM will enable this process.
Let’s look at those steps again.
1. Browse for content
A DAM will make it easy for users to find the content they need, via sophisticated search but also via easy-to-browse categories or folders.
2. Selecting content
You can use lightboxes to examine content in more detail. You can also share your lightbox with others to ensure all relevant stakeholders are happy with the video or image being used on the web page.
3. Securing approval
Depending on your organisation’s permission structure users might need to get approval to download and use the content. A DAM can automate the approval process.
4. & 5. Downloading and editing the content prior to upload
With a traditional filing system you will need to download the content then upload it to an editing tool to resize, crop or reformat the asset for its intended use. Most DAMs will enable you to edit the content as you require prior to download.
How do you make them really good friends?
An enterprise level DAM should do all of the above but even better it will integrate with your CMS so you can quickly perform all these actions without ever leaving your CMS. This short video demonstrates how it can be done.
It is also possible to automatically publish content to your website via your DAM.
Using Asset Bank with your CMS
Asset Bank integrates with most content management systems, read more about how it works. We are also currently developing a bespoke integration with SiteCore. If you would like to find out more please get in touch.
