As the digital asset management industry has matured, the terms “digital assets” and “content” have begun to be used interchangeably. While this change emerged as a way to resonate more with marketing teams and the increasing surge in content marketing, the use of the word “content” within the DAM space has created the illusion that a DAM and a CMS perform the same function. What does CMS stand for? A CMS is a Content Management System like WordPress or Contentful.

A DAM and a CMS act as two completely separate systems, performing very different functions for a marketing team. In a nutshell, a CMS helps manage content for your website, while a DAM helps manage content for your entire organization across multiple channels.

In other words:

• A CMS powers your website.
• A DAM powers your entire organization’s content ecosystem.

In this article, we’ll break down the definitions, features, and best use cases of each system—and answer the common question: If I already have a CMS, why do I need a DAM?

What is The Difference Between DAM and CMS?

• The definition of a DAM and a CMS,
• The key features of each solution, and
• What use cases each solution is best for.

To understand the difference between DAM and CMS, a good starting point is to look at the definition of each:

What is a Content Management System?

WPBeginner describes a CMS as: “A platform that facilitates the creation, editing, organization, and publishing of content.”

Primarily, a CMS is designed for website and related web content management. It allows users to craft and manage textual and media content on websites. Typically, access to a CMS is reserved for specialized members of the marketing team, such as web developers and content marketers. Its media library generally hosts assets explicitly intended for webpage creation.

What is a Digital Asset Management System?

On the other hand, TechTarget defines DAM as: “A tool for organizing, storing, and retrieving rich media, and managing digital rights and permissions.”

DAM serves as a hub for organizing and disseminating media, visuals, and content throughout an entire organization. While primarily managed by the marketing team, DAM can be accessed by various departments like sales, product management, PR, communications, and even external entities like contractors, agencies, and partners.

Let’s explore each in further detail:

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

A digital asset management system is pivotal to the media and content creation landscape. It is a centralized hub, enabling companies to seamlessly organize, collaborate, and distribute their visual content and digital files. By establishing a unified repository for all essential visuals, a DAM streamlines operations, mitigates bottlenecks, and fortifies brand consistency across diverse channels.

Within the DAM environment, users are equipped to manage an extensive range of digital files. They can effortlessly resize, reformat, monitor usage histories, and share hefty files with external collaborators. Moreover, DAM ensures robust media security through features like user permissions, compliance adherence, data recovery, and geo-replication.

However, it’s vital to recognize the limits of DAM in publishing. While DAM excels in handling visuals and offers select features like web publishing and embedding, it can’t create well-designed, highly specific web pages like a CMS can.

Interested in seeing a DAM in action? Check out our free guided tour right here!

Key Features of a DAM

• Storing and managing brand and marketing material (photos, videos, etc.)
• Finding and retrieving media assets, using advanced searches
• Enriching assets with custom metadata, such as keywords
• Version control, history tracking, and reporting for all media assets
• Manipulating assets into other forms, such as file type or size
• Access permissions for internal and external users
• Templating and Proofing capabilities for seamless collaboration on digital assets

The Bottom Line

A DAM is best for companies that need a better way to produce, store, collaborate on, share and distribute large amounts of marketing content (photos, videos, audio, etc.)

Content Management Systems (CMS)

A content management system essentially acts as the foundation for your website (blog, news, eCommerce, etc). With a CMS, you’re able to publish, change and remove content from your website, making it a strong solution for teams across the globe.

A CMS is usually home to web designers, editors, and administrators. It hosts easy-to-use templates and comprehensive WYSIWYG building blocks to allow users to easily and quickly build beautiful, impactful websites. It has strong capabilities when managing text-based content, with version tracking, SEO add-ons, and robust search capabilities.

Where a CMS is lacking, however, is in its media abilities. The media library within a CMS is built to function as a repository for content being shared on your website. While it can store videos, images, documents, audio, and more, its searching, sharing and permission capabilities are limited. With this in mind, media and content that are not part of your website should not be stored in your CMS.

Examples of Content Management Systems

Key Features of a CMS

• Content authoring tools (blogs, product pages, eCommerce copy)
• Publishing workflows with scheduling and revision control
• Templates & WYSIWYG builders for creating page layouts
• SEO add-ons to optimize web content

The Bottom Line

A CMS is best for companies looking to streamline the way they build visual, informative, and user-friendly websites.

CMS vs DAM: Feature Comparison

Integrating DAM and CMS

When you understand the difference between a DAM and CMS, it becomes clear that the two systems are actually complementary to each other (rather than alternatives). With a DAM, users are able to use advanced library capabilities to feed their web team the media content they need to confidently build on-brand, visual web content. This benefit only improves with an integration between the two, as users will be able to access the DAM without having to leave the CMS.

Benefits of a DAM and CMS Integration

When you’re able to access your DAM within your CMS, it allows your users to:

• Easily access on-brand and approved media assets from within your CMS
• Automatically upload and create links within your CMS library
• Use advanced search capabilities to find the assets they need
• Improve brand consistency across all web properties
• Effectively re-use media content across your website

Example of a DAM and CMS Integration

Without a DAM
You’re the web developer for a furniture retailer and you’re working on a web page to promote one of your partner brands and their upcoming sale. You go into your CMS library to find their logo, but there are 3 different variations. You know you should send a message to the marketing team to clarify which one to use, but this page needs to go live today. You ultimately decide to use the most recently uploaded logo and pray that it’s the right one.

With a DAM
You’re the same web developer, working on the same web page, but instead of searching for the logo within your CMS library, you open your DAM library plugin. From there, you can instantly see a category that your marketing team created specifically for this campaign. Within this category, you find a logo that was hand-picked by the marketing team and confidently add to the page to be published.

Learn more about DAM and CMS Integrations

MediaValet has countless integrations available out-of-the-box and an open API to enable your team to customize any of your tech stack needs.

Some of MediaValet’s CMS integrations include:

Contentful: MediaValet’s Contentful integration speeds up your content creation process by enabling users to find and embed MediaValet assets directly into Contentful entries, saving time and effort.

This DAM CMS integration enables teams to focus on creating compelling content without worrying about asset sourcing and management.

WordPress: MediaValet’s WordPress integration enhances your website creation process by enabling teams to easily search and insert on-brand assets from your MediaValet library directly within the WordPress platform.

The DAM CMS integration ensures that only approved and current assets are published. This guarantees that your website always showcases the most up-to-date and on-brand corporate visuals, protecting it from outdated or unauthorized content.

Drupal: The Drupal integration allows teams to easily insert images and videos from MediaValet into Drupal’s content editor, simplifying the process of adding assets to your webpages.

Whether you need images for website banners, social media posts, or print materials, this DAM CMS integration has you covered.

Content Management System vs Digital Asset Management FAQs

DAM and CMS: Better Together

With integrations into leading CMS platforms, DAM is equipped to bring your web development to the next level. See how MediaValet can be integrated into your Drupal 8 or WordPress platform.

It’s no secret that creative departments need effective digital asset management workflows in place in order to do their best. That goes for all departments within any organization. But with the high—and ever-increasing—demand for both fast and quality work by creative departments today, setting up creatives for success just makes sense.

The most effective workflows take into account the different kinds of situational needs for an organization. And while every organization has varied, vast and complex use cases, they tend to fit into two broad categories: asset-based, and campaign-based workflows. In this post, we explore the differences between the two types of workflows, and how the right integrations have helped MediaValet clients establish their most effective workflows.

In this post we will cover

What is a Digital Asset Management Workflow?

A digital asset management workflow is a streamlined process for managing, organizing, and distributing digital assets like images, videos, and documents within an organization. It starts with the creation or acquisition of assets, followed by their upload into digital asset management software, where they are tagged with metadata for easy search and retrieval.

After assets are organized within the system, they undergo an approval process to ensure they meet brand standards. Once approved, they are distributed across various channels, facilitated by the DAM’s integration capabilities. As assets become outdated, they are archived or deleted to keep the system current. This workflow ensures that digital assets are securely stored, easily accessible, and consistently used across all brand touchpoints.

A Typical Asset Workflow

Let’s look at a typical workflow and asset lifecycle.

Whether as part of a larger campaign, or a one-off event, the beginning of a digital asset’s life always starts with an asset request in one form or another. This request initiates the entire process, from ideation to distribution.

Once an asset is finalized and has all the necessary approvals, it’s ready for distribution – which can take many forms depending on the specific asset or campaign. At the end of the asset’s life, it’s usually archived, however, for some lucky assets, they get another run or two through the cycle, as they’re repurposed for other campaigns or use-cases.

For smaller teams or projects, this entire cycle may be handled by a small handful of people. But, for larger teams or projects, dozens may be involved and requires a robust system to manage the complex steps, requirements and approvals. In these circumstances, it’s more effective to separate this complex workflow management from your DAM.

Workflows aren’t standard, they’re unique to each organization, team and project, and we find they’re constantly changing and multiplying. Whatever your workflows are today, most likely they won’t be the same, or of the same number, tomorrow. This separation of workflow and DAM often provides a higher level of operational flexibility and scalability.

Types of DAM Workflows

Although there is a wide variety of workflow solutions available today, we break it into two levels:

1. Asset-Based Workflows
2. Campaign-Based Workflows

The workflow system that will best meet your specific needs will depend on the number of unique workflows that you require across your department or organization and their complexity.

Digital Asset Management Workflow #1: Asset-Based

Asset-based workflows automate and optimize the processes around managing the digital assets themselves. These processes or steps include things like approving assets once they’ve been uploaded by external parties, adding attributes or metadata, categorizing assets, generating specific renditions, expiring assets, updating and distributing assets – the list goes on and on. These types of workflows focus on preparing the assets to be used as source files or as content.

Asset-based workflows are generally quite simple and tend to be linear in nature, requiring simple triggers and actions to automate. In-DAM workflow features are ideal and cost-effective for addressing these types of asset workflows.

For example, here’s a visualization of an asset-based workflow for a single photographer uploading assets to a company’s DAM. In-app workflows that are available in many DAM systems can help automate components of this process, ensuring the right assets are uploaded the right way (to make them easily discoverable).

Automated events, in this example, include:

1. Notifying a named administrator that photos have been uploaded and are ready to be approved.
2. Letting the photographer know if any photos were rejected.
3. Mandating what attributes need to be added.
4. Enabling auto-categorization and tagging.
5. Making approved images readily available, in the right formats and sizes, to the appropriate teams or systems.

This simple workflow helps reduce the number of basic tasks that the photographer and administrator would normally have done manually. It also eliminates the chance of human error that could cause bottlenecks, miscategorization, or overall lack of discoverability.

Digital Asset Management Workflow #2: Campaign-Based

Campaign-based workflows, on the other hand, are more complex by nature as they tend to manage the creation of assets, versus asset usage. This involves more people and more complexity.

Campaign-based workflows manage the asset lifecycle of new campaign-related assets from ideation to distribution. This involves coordinating the efforts of multiple teams and departments, and involving multiple levels of review and approval, along with distribution points. The more complex workflows include everything from a local one-off marketing campaign to a global re-branding and everything in between.

When it comes to anything but the simplest asset-based workflows, we recommend using a campaign-based workflow, connecting your DAM with a third-party project management vendor, like Workfront or Wrike. These organizations specialize in workflow and dedicate all their resources and energy to addressing a much wider array of use-cases, from basic to the most complex.

Over the years, we’ve found that integrating MediaValet with Wrike, a project management solution, that it delivers the most value to our customers, both in the short and long term. To this end, to enable and support the unique complex workflows of all our clients, we focus on creating deep integrations with well-known and regarded third-party workflow products. After all, it’s about setting our clients up for success, with the most efficient and effective partners we can find.

Digital Asset Management Workflow Challenges

Managing digital assets through a streamlined workflow offers significant advantages, but it also comes with a set of challenges that organizations must navigate

Integration Complexity:

Integrating various tools and platforms with the DAM system can be challenging, especially when dealing with outdated software or proprietary formats.

Inconsistent Metadata Tagging:

Inconsistent or incomplete metadata can make it difficult to find and retrieve assets, leading to inefficiencies and user frustration.

Approval Process Bottlenecks:

The approval process can become a bottleneck if too many stakeholders are involved or if there’s a lack of clarity about who has final decision-making authority.

System Overload:

As organizations grow and accumulate more digital assets, the DAM system can become overwhelmed. Without proper archiving and deletion protocols, the system may become cluttered, making it harder to locate current, relevant assets.

Addressing these challenges requires ongoing attention to system integration, clear governance practices, and regular maintenance of the DAM environment.

How DAM Software Resolves Workflow Challenges

Digital Asset Management software (DAM) is specifically designed to tackle the challenges that organizations face in managing their digital assets efficiently. By addressing common workflow issues, DAM systems provide robust solutions that enhance productivity and streamline operations.

Simplifying Integration:
Modern DAM software is built with powerful integration capabilities, allowing it to seamlessly connect with other tools and platforms within your tech stack. Whether you’re using content management systems, project management tools, or marketing automation platforms, DAM software ensures smooth communication and data exchange across all systems. This reduces the friction caused by incompatible formats or outdated software, making the entire workflow more cohesive and efficient.

Ensuring Consistent Metadata Tagging:
DAM software centralizes and standardizes the process of metadata tagging. With built-in guidelines and automated tagging features, it ensures that every asset is accurately categorized and easy to find. This consistency reduces the time spent searching for assets and minimizes errors, leading to more efficient asset management and better user experience

Streamlining the Approval Process:
To address bottlenecks in the approval process, DAM software offers customizable workflows that clearly define roles and responsibilities. Stakeholders can be assigned specific tasks within the system, and automated notifications ensure that approvals are completed in a timely manner. This clarity and automation eliminate delays and confusion, keeping projects on track and ensuring that assets meet brand standards before they are distributed.

Managing Asset Volume and System Overload:
As digital assets accumulate, DAM software provides robust archiving and deletion protocols to prevent system overload. Automated archiving features ensure that older, less relevant assets are stored efficiently without cluttering the active workspace. Additionally, advanced search and filtering options allow users to quickly locate current, relevant assets, maintaining an organized and efficient system as the organization grows.

More on DAM Workflows

This post is based on a webinar we hosted with Henry Stewart and industry leader, Theresa Regli, on Content Hubs and Workflow. Watch the full recording here, to learn more about DAM workflows, see a campaign-based workflow in action, and hear how MediaValet customer, Reinsurance Group of America, uses MediaValet and Wrike to drive productivity.

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.

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