When it comes to travel marketing, images and videos are everything. After all, it is these typically flawless, breathtaking and never-ending images and videos that make clients and potential customers burst with aspiration and wanderlust, encouraging them to buy your product or service.
Given the worth of your digital assets, it is important that they are stored and managed with the appropriate system, in order to maximise their value and make your working life easier at the same time. Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems provide travel marketers with a variety of benefits.
What benefits do DAM systems bring travel marketers?
One of the key benefits of a DAM system is that it makes finding the right file easy. Time spent looking for the perfect image can be spent instead on more creative tasks, saving your workforce time and money as existing photography can be effectively reused. A well-configured system also helps to ensure that your assets are used properly, complying with any consent forms and copyright, as well as managing access to your files so users can only see imagery they have permission to use.
Using a DAM to share and publish your assets can also be a great tool as this enables your library of assets to be used quickly and easily, making your creative work much more accessible to partners, staff, and clients globally.
Helping people find the right image to use
So, among your multitude of images and videos, you need a system that enables you to search and find the exact asset you need swiftly and easily. Imagine you are marketing a trip to New York City. It is highly likely that you will have imagery of this destination in many contexts and situations, like the four seasons. A simple shared drive will require that you search through images and choose an asset based on what you can see. A DAM will allow you to filter down your assets to the relevant content from its high performing search tool. All of your assets will have attributes and descriptions attached to them during upload which makes this possible. Seasonal filtering is just the beginning - it can be as specific as you like.
Whilst we are talking about the seasons, it is worth mentioning that using a DAM will enable you to customise the user experience to help your staff see relevant assets, whether that’s on the homepage or on featured collections that you’ve brought to their attention. This is a great way for your users to stay inspired and in tune with the seasons or latest campaign that you are working on! We have converted our homepage to a winter and Christmas theme here at Asset Bank. As you can see above this feature can be used with the four seasons, but it can be themed any way you like. Imagine if you were pushing the Maldives one month. Your screen would be pure azure bliss…
Making sure your assets are used properly: Stay up to date
It is vital when marketing trips and holidays to travellers and holidaymakers that your imagery is up to date, visually exciting, and high quality. Tourism trends can change very quickly, and destinations adapt to this. This means that a photo taken last year of somewhere popular could be outdated, and enough to deter your prospects who are not short of options online.
Dubai's skyline is constantly evolving
Additionally, you can use embedded metadata to enable information saved within the file to populate key fields within your DAM. This saves you time rekeying tags and copyright information that has been added by creative agencies and photographers. If you have specific information that needs to follow the file after it is downloaded from your DAM, such as an expiry date for the relevant consent form, this can be added to the filename or embedded within the asset for future use.
Social media made easier
As a travel marketer, there is a high chance you will be spending a lot of time sharing your content and digital assets on various social media channels. Social media is at the heart of communicating your story to your customers and prospects. However, it has the tendency to eat into your time largely because each social channel all require different sizes for their different image types. Instagram is a true culprit for this - you think you have the best photo sorted, but as soon as you load it into Instagram, it is cropped and zoomed and you lose the finish you were after.
DAM systems have powerful download options that allow users to quickly download the file they need in the exact format and size they require. For example, an image could be downloaded as a ‘facebook cover photo’ size, or in the correct dimensions for an Instagram story. By configuring these download options within your system your users are easily able to work with the highest quality original and still end up with the perfectly resized and cropped file.
Example sizes for a Facebook cover photo, Instagram square, a portrait crop, and the original image in the bottom right for comparison.
Of course, this download feature is not helpful for social media requirements only. You can edit and re-format files in several different ways within the DAM, which means you can maximise the use of your images and videos for every occasion.
Ready for lift off?
Whether you're in the marketing industry or inspired by the possibilities of DAM, we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch and we'll happily run you through all of the ways that a well-configured Asset Bank can save you time and money - although we can't promise the savings will be spent on sending you to the Maldives, it's always worth a shot!
