The role of DAM in marketing resource management

Digital Asset Management is an essential part of marketing resource management. And with software solutions available for both DAM and MRM, it can be hard to know what’s right for your marketing team.

Below we’ll explore how DAM and MRM deliver improved performance for marketers, their similarities and differences, and which solutions might be best for your business.

What is marketing resource management?
What is an MRM platform?
What’s the role of DAM in marketing resource management?
Choosing a DAM for marketing resource management
What makes Asset Bank great for MRM and more

What is marketing resource management?

Marketing resource management is all about organisation, transparency and control for marketers. It’s often abbreviated to MRM to describe a specific type of all-in-one software. But it is more of a philosophy than a product.

MRM is about methodologically managing all aspects of a marketing team’s work to deliver greater speed and scale. It aims to bring that famous trio - people, processes and technology - into harmony, delivering creative work without the chaos.

And that’s challenging.

As channels and customer expectations grow, so does the ‘to do’ list for a modern marketing team. Strategy, planning, budget, brand, ideation, creative development, task and workflow management, digital asset management, analytics, measurement… It’s hard work just reading that list, let alone delivering it all.

It’s no wonder marketers crave a way to control it all.

Embracing marketing resource management methodology - and associated software - provides an effective way to do just that.

What is an MRM platform?

An MRM platform is a software solution that includes a range of tools to help marketers manage their resources. Typically it might include functionality to support:

• Strategic planning
• Budget planning and management
• Task and workflow management
• Digital asset management
• Product information management
• Account management
• Reporting - often through intuitive personalised dashboards

By keeping all of these activities in a single system, an MRM platform:

• Bridges gaps between planning, execution and oversight
• Provides an integrated environment for strategy, execution and delivery
• Improves transparency across multiple campaigns, channels and customer groups
• Makes it easier to track progress, allocate resources and measure success

All of this can help improve collaboration, productivity, quality and ROI for busy marketing departments.

What’s the role of DAM in marketing resource management?

Digital Asset Management is an important subcategory of marketing resource management. It describes the process of managing all of your digital marketing assets to provide easy access and streamlined workflows.

If you think about the number of digital assets your marketing team handles on a daily basis, it makes sense to take a strategic approach to how they’re stored, shared, made discoverable and deployed.

DAM software centralises storage of all of your digital assets, so you can always find them within a couple of clicks. It also plugs into other software so employees can find and use assets within native applications, cutting out on unproductive busy work between systems.

Digital Asset Management functionality is often built into MRM software. But all-in-one solutions can deliver breadth at the expense of depth. They may offer a wide range of features but the functionality can be superficial.

That’s why many marketers prefer to combine different - dedicated - software solutions into a bespoke stack. This delivers the exact functionality your team needs, with a greater level of functionality and control.

New to DAM? Discover more about features, benefits and use cases here.

Choosing a DAM for marketing resource management

If you do decide to opt for a dedicated Digital Asset Management system, you want to be sure it offers the features you need for effective marketing resource management.

Integration
The whole concept of MRM is integrating people, processes and technology into a single system. So the ability to integrate your DAM into a software stack is essential. Look for built-in integrations as well as the option of creating custom integrations using an API.

Productivity and collaboration
You’ll also want to make sure that having a dedicated DAM delivers more benefits to your business than using an all-in-one MRM solution. What else does a DAM offer to make your team more efficient, productive and faster?

What makes Asset Bank great for MRM and more

At Asset Bank, we’re all about making marketers’ lives easier. Our intuitive DAM is designed to deliver all the functionality you need and nothing you don’t - making it fast, flexible and easy to use.

And thanks to cloud-based hosting, our REST API and numerous built-in integrations, it’s easy to slot into your software stack.

Here’s a handful of key features of our DAM that can accelerate and streamline your marketing processes, but which may not be available in an all-in-one MRM system.

Supports all digital file types
Just think of a digital file type and you can store it - from images, artwork, video, audio and documents - we've got you covered. Asset Bank lets you tailor metadata fields according to file type, previews content in search results, and lets you convert files on the fly.

Fast and flexible metadata
Make your assets eminently findable with flexible metadata options. With free text fields, drop-downs, checklists and keyword pickers, your digital assets will be easy to find. AI auto-tagging makes adding metadata a breeze. 

User permissions
Get the right people seeing the right content at the click of a button. As an admin of the system, you can easily create user groups and decide what they can see and do.

Rights management
Wherever your digital assets originate from, stock imagery or photo shoot, there'll be some kind of ownership or licence to consider. You can easily keep track and communicate any licence information or restrictions to your users.

Convert files at download
Crop images to preset or custom sizes within Asset Bank and download them ready for use. A brilliant time-saving feature for anyone needing to regularly upload images to social channels or websites.

Share files externally
Our lightning-fast quick-share feature helps to increase the reach of your digital assets. Send external partners and agencies a quick download link from Asset Bank so that they can download your files, fast. Share curated collections of content with stakeholders, even if they don’t have an account.

REST API and integrations
Get connected to the systems that matter. Our API feature allows external applications to connect to Asset Bank and achieve things including performing searches, retrieving assets, adding assets, adding metadata and more. We also have built-in integrations for common CMS, brand, design and workflow tools.

Reporting and audit trails
Really get to grips with how your DAM is being used, who is engaging with it and if there are any areas that need work. View user and group engagement on the admin dashboard, search reports, asset popularity, duplicates and full audit trails.

Discover all of Asset Bank’s features for marketing departments

Ultimately, the choice between a dedicated DAM or an all-in-one MRM system will be down to your individual use case. Whichever you choose, the philosophy behind marketing resource management is the first thing you need to adopt. Rallying your team behind the concept - of strategically aligning people, processes and technology - will make it easier to manage software implementation and organisational change.

If you'd like to talk to us about how Asset Bank can aid marketing resource management, please get in touch. We are always happy to chat.