From social media posts to highly produced TV commercials and stunning print ads in airline magazines, tourism marketing relies on connecting visually with the right target audience to showcase your destination in the best possible light. No matter what kind of tourism company you are, you need quality photo and video content in order to create engaging and exciting marketing campaigns.

With this in mind, it is more important than ever to make sure you’re getting the best possible ROI on the high-quality (and expensive) visual content you’re producing. In order to make that happen, you need to make sure to effectively manage this content: exactly where a digital asset management (DAM) system can help.

In this post we will cover

• What is Digital Asset Management?
• Why Do Tourism Organizations Need a DAM?
• Key Features of a DAM for Tourism
• Benefits of a DAM for Tourism
• User Spotlight: How Miles Partnership Uses a DAM
  

What is Digital Asset Management?

A digital asset management (DAM) system helps companies better manage, organize, share and distribute their digital assets from within one central library. It improves the productivity of marketing and creative teams, while increasing the ROI of content and creative programs.

A DAM system helps travel and tourism organizations make the most of their destination imagery, videography, graphics and more. It offers excellent functionality that allows users to perform a variety of time-saving tasks, including re-sizing, cropping and sharing large files easily. Additionally, a DAM improves collaboration for organizations working with various agencies and external contractors (such as photographers and videographers).

Why Do Tourism Organizations Need a DAM?

Many organizations have tried using simple file management solutions, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, etc., however, for industries that handle such a large amount of visual content, like tourism, these systems are often not enough.

While each organization has a unique use case that instigates their search for the perfect solution, most DAM purchase decisions stem from these three common challenges:

• Lack of organization: Storing and securing large amounts of media-rich content is difficult without the right system in place to keep everything in order.
• Team siloes: With so many different departments, stakeholders, partners, and contractors, it’s tough to manage assets well enough to deliver campaigns on time.
• Inconsistent branding: It’s challenging to stay on top of brand management across so many different traditional and digital marketing channels.

Key Features of a DAM for Tourism

Since tourism is one of the largest industries in the world, the extremely competitive environment of its marketing requires organizations to use their time and resources as effectively as possible in order to stay ahead. As previously mentioned, visual assets like photos and videos play a major role in engaging target audiences and therefore require the perfect home, where anyone who needs them is able to securely gain access.

As the total package for companies in the tourism industry, a DAM offers 6 critical features that drive productivity:

1. Organization: Manage content in a single location using a multi-library structure.
2. Enhanced Search: Easily find digital assets by searching for product, keywords, categories, AI-tags and more.
3. Accessibility: Enable partners and teams with self-serve access to a library of current and past projects.
4. Distribution: Preview and share collections of assets, regardless of file size or type.
5. Uploading: Enable photographers, videographers, and other contractors to upload files from anywhere.
6. Security: Secure marketing collateral with enterprise-level security and asset recovery.

Benefits of a DAM for Tourism

As the perfect solution to store, manage and distribute digital assets, a DAM can also help businesses in the tourism industry by:

1. Maximizing asset value,
2. Streamlining workflows, and
3. Increasing brand consistency.

1. Maximize Asset Value

With a DAM, time is no longer wasted searching for the assets that you need. Everyone can easily and efficiently find the assets they need using advanced search features and artificial intelligence. This improved discoverability means no more lost b-roll, source files or archived assets. Having easy access to whatever files you need also ensures you can more readily repurpose and reuse your assets and immediately increase their value.

Why is maximizing asset value important for the tourism industry? It frees up marketers’ time and money, which can then be put toward other priorities.

2. Streamline Workflows

Destination marketing agencies and tourism boards often work with third-party contractors like photographers or graphic designers, while engaging a wide variety of partners when working on initiatives and campaigns. Cloud-based DAM solutions are perfect for industries that work with several organizations and manage a large number of assets as they allow for many different users, in any location, to easily have access to what they need, and upload materials directly into one central library for review and circulation. A DAM has an incredibly easy-to-use interface that makes sharing and using assets a simple and efficient process.

Additionally, with a DAM’s user permissions and advanced security features, businesses ensure users will have access to only what they need. This allows teams to collaborate with contractors and share even the largest media files without a problem—streamlining businesses’ workflows and maximizing efficiencies in a seamless and secure way.

3. Increase Brand Consistency

Brand consistency is crucial for large tourism marketing campaigns and a DAM provides one central home for all brand assets including logos, images, website icons, fonts, videos, and more where users can only access up-to-date and approved assets. By giving users access to the right brand assets, businesses are able to create complete alignment across their entire organization to ensure a consistent message is being shared across all initiatives.

Maintaining brand consistency enhances customers’ trust, builds loyalty, and enhances their overall experience—helping your business to stand out from your competition.

User Spotlight: How Miles Partnership Uses a DAM

Miles Partnership is a leading destination marketing agency that has managed and delivered over 6000 hours of video footage for clients across the United States. Before implementing MediaValet, Miles Partnership had literal towers of physical hard drives making delivering videos to clients and re-using their assets extremely challenging.

MediaValet gives Miles’ clients an easier, cleaner way to access the content they need.
– Adam Storm, Miles Partnership

After implementing MediaValet, however, Miles Partnership had access to features like metadata tags that helped them significantly cut down on search time and optimize their video discoverability. They also set up user permissions that helped ensure their clients could easily retrieve and use the content created for them without any issues. Once they were able to effectively streamline content delivery and guarantee client videos were easily discoverable, it increased the overall ROI of video content for clients and, in turn, boosted their overall productivity as a company.

Read Miles Partnerships’ full story here.

Is it Time for a DAM?

Make designing and executing dynamic tourism campaigns easier with the right DAM system. Bring every department together, collaborate easier, and stay on brand, all the time. Book your demo today.

This blog post was originally posted in April 2016 and has been updated.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.

Whether it’s going out to a nice restaurant, grabbing lunch to-go from a coffee shop, or popping through a drive-thru on a road trip, everybody needs to eat. This is why, from a marketing perspective, the food & beverage sector is so unique in that it appeals to almost every kind of consumer. From professionally shot and styled food photos for restaurant websites to well-designed menu boards, or on-the-fly social media posts, regularly distributed visual content is key for food & beverage marketers.

After all, don’t they say we eat with our eyes first?

Since we can’t smell, taste or touch food through traditional advertising, marketers in the food & beverage sector have an unusually tough job trying to create the experience through visual content. This fact has made high-quality photos and videos an integral part of the industry’s marketing toolkit, as it inspires customers’ desires to purchase and consume their products.

Once that content is created, a new issue arises: how do you manage it? As businesses find they need to generate so much visual content to stay competitive, they’ve become bogged down with an ever-growing collection of photos, videos, and other digital branding assets. Food & beverage organizations are in need of an effective way to store, manage and distribute those assets – this is exactly where a digital asset management (DAM) system can help.

In this post we will cover

• What is Digital Asset Management?
• 6 Critical Features of a DAM
• Benefits of a DAM to Food & Beverage Companies
• What Size of Business Can Benefit from a DAM?
• Use Case: How A&W Food Services Handles DAM

What is Digital Asset Management?

Digital asset management (DAM) systems help food and beverage companies manage, organize, share, and distribute digital assets all from within one central library. It improves productivity and increases the ROI of content and creative programs. Additionally, DAM helps leading companies in the food and beverage industry improve their creative production process and efficiently manage and distribute products to their customers.

Food and beverage companies that are currently not using a DAM struggle with similar issues:

• Ensuring only on-brand and up-to-date material is used across digital & traditional channels and storefronts;
• Managing product photos and videos for in-progress and final creative projects;
• Empowering partners, departments, and franchises with logos and product resources they need to represent the brand; and
• Streamlining content creation across global offices, agencies, and partners.

6 Critical Features of a DAM

If you’re not yet convinced that DAM is the total package for companies in the food and beverage industry searching for the perfect solution, here are 6 critical features of DAM that we know will help.

1. Organization: Manage content in a single location using a multi-library structure.
2. Enhanced Search: Easily find digital assets by searching for products, keywords, categories, AI-tags and more.
3. Accessibility: Enable partners and teams with self-serve access to a library of current and past projects.
4. Distribution: Preview and share collections of assets, regardless of file size or type.
5. Uploading: Enable photographers, videographers, and other contractors to upload files from anywhere.
6. Security: Secure marketing collateral with enterprise-level security and asset recovery.

Benefits of a DAM to Food & Beverage Companies

A DAM can help food & beverage companies:

• Improve asset discoverability by enhancing assets with categories, metadata, and artificial intelligence.
• Ensure brand consistency by enabling all locations and stakeholders with on-brand and up-to-date assets.
• Reduce administrative tasks by allowing the marketing and design team to focus on high-value tasks, instead of sharing assets.
• Improve access security by ensuring each user only has access to assets relevant to their role or location (and is unable to delete assets).
• Maximize asset value by ensuring all photoshoots, b-roll videos and more are readily available and can be re-purposed.
• Improve time-to-market with faster access to campaign materials.
• Preserve brand history with a secure archive of all campaigns, product assets, marketing material, and more.

A DAM can be especially helpful for franchise companies, which are often working with thousands of visual assets and campaigns that need to be distributed to their franchisees to ensure brand consistency across the board. Read more about DAM for franchises here.

What Size of Business Can Benefit from a DAM?

The food & beverage industry has a diverse range of businesses; large, small, and everything in between. While cloud-based DAM solutions are likely the best option for mid-sized and large organizations, this option can sometimes be too expansive and costly for small operations.

Smaller businesses face challenges unique to them, regarding managing photo and video collections. Many of these companies are still creating and storing more assets than they can realistically handle but have smaller teams managing the process and lower data limits. For these kinds of businesses, an online project management solution, like Wrike can be a great starting point for getting organized. It has a free option perfect for independent restaurants, food trucks, or pop-up restaurants. This allows you to gain project management capabilities while taking advantage of the basic asset library that comes with a Wrike subscription.

Once you’ve started, you can continually monitor your storage and user requirements and eventually upgrade to an enterprise-level DAM system when the time is right. Even better – some integrate directly with Wrike, so you can continue using your existing project management system.

Use Case: How A&W Food Services Handles DAM

A&W opened its first Canadian location in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1956. Since then, the hamburger chain has grown to over 1,000 locations across the country, the second largest in Canada. The company is also one of Canada’s leading franchisors serving more than 133 million customers every year!

A&W experienced a multitude of challenges dealing with their branded assets before implementing a DAM as their internal library was extremely hard to manage. Building on-brand marketing campaigns for multiple locations to access was a big struggle without an organized, easily accessible home for their digital assets.

Once selecting a DAM solution, A&W could import all its assets into one trusted, central library. Using metadata, their assets became easily searchable for those who needed them. Through user-based permission settings and branded portals, users only have to log in and they immediately have access to everything they need—always up to date, always on-brand. Now, cross-country marketing campaigns are easy to execute, and no one is scrambling to find assets in various locations.

Get Ahead with a DAM

Whether you need a full-service enterprise DAM solution or a less-intensive cloud-based solution, effectively managing the digital assets for your food & beverage operation will lead to more strategic marketing choices.

Marketing food & beverage experiences rely on high-quality visual assets used in the right channels, reaching the right target audiences. Having a well-organized library with easy company-wide access to these assets is an important part of executing marketing campaigns effectively. Implementing a DAM helps not only to organize your assets but make them easily searchable, and secure.

When you’re selling food and beverages, you’re not just selling a consumable product, you’re selling an experience…and DAM helps you to do just that.

Ready to Get Started?

MediaValet makes it easy to manage your growing digital asset library and enables everyone in your organization to access what they need, without confusion. Get ready for on-brand, effective marketing campaigns and check out our DAM demo today!

This blog post was originally posted in January 2017 and has been updated.