While many organizations feel that they’re equipped to support remote work, a report from Upwork found that only 43% of companies actually have a remote work policy in place. This can be due to a number of factors including security, technical infrastructure, and more, but, as these barriers decrease, more and more organizations are considering transitioning to a remote workforce.

As these organizations provide more employees with the flexibility to work from home, cloud-based solutions become critical to ensure collaboration remains high. Arguably one of the most critical solutions – especially for marketing and creative teams – is a digital asset management system (DAM).

What is a DAM?

A digital asset management system (DAM for short) helps companies manage, organize, share, and distribute their digital assets from within one central library. It improves the productivity of marketing teams and increases the ROI of content and creative programs. While almost any digital file can be managed within a DAM, the most common digital formats include photos, videos, documents, design files, and audio files.

How Can a DAM Support Remote Teams?

A DAM can support remote teams by offering many different benefits including:

1. Remote access to assets,
2. Easy transfer of projects, and
3. Improved communication.

Here we will dive into each of these 3 benefits and identify how they can help your remote team maximize their success.

1) Remote Access to Assets

If your team is planning to work remotely, you need to ensure that everyone can access the files and assets they need. This can be a challenge when you use in-house servers or hard drives, as employees need to take the time to manually find, download and send individual assets to remote team members. This challenge can increase 10-fold if you’re working with large files that can’t be sent over email.

A cloud-based DAM ensures everyone has the ability to securely access, upload, download, and share the assets they need to continue working efficiently – no matter where they are. Unlike other online file-storage solutions, a DAM also offers fully customized permission settings, allowing you to limit who can access, download and share any given set of assets.

When selecting a DAM, it’s important to find a vendor that can meet the security standards required by your organization, such as compliance regulations, recovery policies, and data residency. In particular, if your organization requires data to reside within a specific geography, select a vendor that offers data centers within that area.

Providing users self-serve access enables anyone on your team to find the assets they need quickly and efficiently.

2) Easy Transfer of Projects

A DAM acts as a centralized library for all file types, including Adobe Creative Cloud files and Office documents. This capability provides remote teams with an efficient way to pass off projects from one person to another, without worrying about challenges faced when sending large files through email or delays experienced downloading design packages.

Advanced sharing features, like Web Galleries or Branded Portals, allow you to share a collection of files effortlessly, to both internal and external users. With the option to send via email or create a share link, you can also distribute these collections across multiple collaboration apps, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Wrike.

With Branded Portals, you gain the added benefit of fully customizing your portal with a highlight color, header photo, and logo. In addition, these portals can be shared via a customizable URL, providing another way to maintain your brand identity while giving end-users the ability to quickly access the files they need.

No matter which method you use to distribute your assets, you can rest assured that only individuals with specific permission settings will be able to access and download files.

3) Improved Communication

With a remote team, it’s crucial to keep communication flowing and ensure everyone is up to date on current initiatives. A DAM supports communication with numerous integrations into the marketing technologies your teams already love and use.

With project management systems integrations like Wrike and Workfront, users can easily access approved content from the DAM library, as it’s directly embedded into your project management platform. With an integration like MediaValet and Wrike in place, its easier for users to attach assets to specific projects, maintain version control, provide edits, approve content, and more.

With these various integrations, as well as many others, a DAM ensures that your content is easily accessible through all your existing platforms, encouraging collaboration and communication across your various teams.

Building Out Your Remote Tech Stack

Looking to build out your remote tech stack even more? Don’t forget to check out this post, highlights the Top Tools for Remote Teams.

In this series, we’re highlighting some of the common stakeholders we see involved in a DAM project, discussing their unique challenges and priorities, and showing how a digital asset management initiative aligns with their goals.

The CMO is responsible for driving marketing revenue, impacting P&L and market share for the company, and improving customer experiences with the brand. They help to drive the overall business strategy, vision, and corporate direction and spearhead the company’s brand promise and visual identity. The CMO acts as the “voice of the customer” and often impacts decisions being made in product development, distribution, and more.

The CMO is accountable to the CEO, shareholders, and board of directors and responsible for aligning their team to ensure they achieve ROI on marketing initiatives and for maintaining brand integrity and growth.

In this post we will cover

• Goals and Challenges of the CMO
• CMO Impact on a DAM Project
• Benefits of a DAM to the CMO

Goals and Challenges of the CMO

The CMO typically focuses on these three primary goals to achieve marketing success.

1. Improving brand consistency across all channels

The CMO holds the overall responsibility for the company’s brand. This includes brand vision, the strategy behind growing the brand, and ensuring that it’s consistently represented across every interaction with the company. Brand colors, types of imagery, tone of voice across all channels, and product shots represent the multitude of elements that are associated with the brand. When every touchpoint is consistent and delivers experiences aligned with the brand promise, the strength of the brand increases. On the other hand – every inconsistent experience detracts from brand perception and erodes customer trust.

With multiple opportunities to interact with the brand, including digital, social, media, and public interactions, it’s difficult to uphold visual consistency across every channel at any given time. This means that the CMO needs to implement tools and processes to ensure that brand standards are clearly defined, and approved brand resources are easily accessible to anyone representing the brand.

2. Maximizing the impact of marketing initiatives

While every team in the marketing department will have different areas of responsibility or expertise, the CMO needs to ensure that every initiative aligns with the company’s overall goals. An individual project can lead to positive results, but when multiple projects are aligned toward a common goal, their impact is multiplied.

In addition to the overall strategy and team-based KPIs, creating an environment of communication across teams and locations is important for marketing success. A combination of collaboration, project management, and distribution tools are necessary to support this alignment strategy and ensure brand assets are used to their full potential, increasing resource reach and improving ROI.

3. Delivering measurable results and driving growth

Marketing impacts multiple sources of revenue and is usually responsible for a large portion of net-new revenue growth. The CMO is responsible for proving the marketing team’s value to the organization by demonstrating clear, tangible, goal-driven results, specifically how the team impacts the bottom line.

The CMO needs to prioritize initiatives that drive higher ROI or significantly reduce marketing operations costs. As part of this, they need to evaluate their teams’ existing processes and evaluate where processes can be improved, or redundancies can be eliminated.

CMO Impact on a DAM Project

Digital asset management projects are often initiated within the marketing department, although they usually impact other areas, such as sales, IT, and creative production. As the overall marketing budget owner, the CMO is often the final sign-off on larger digital asset management projects.

As DAM can be a major project, crossing different departmental lines and involving multiple stakeholders, the CMO needs to evaluate and understand the high-level impact of the initiative and the overall business case. They’ll also likely decide on the scope of the project, determining whether it will be a single-team rollout, a multi-department system, or a cross-organization implementation.

Here are questions for the CMO to consider when making decisions about a DAM initiative:

1. How does a company’s marketing tech stack compare with the best-performing organizations within this industry? Have industry peers implemented a DAM solution with success?

2. Can revenue-generating teams and partners find and leverage content and brand assets created by the marketing team? Are they easy to find and share?

3. Is the design team enabled to meet the growing volume of creative content? Are project timelines jeopardized because of delays in creative production?

4. Is the brand at risk with the current content and visual asset management practices? Can you ensure all customer-facing assets are upholding brand visual and messaging standards?

5. Are investor and board accountability requirements being met? Are there reports available for content and creative usage?

6. Is there a risk of high-value asset loss (photography originals, investor content, etc.) with the current asset management practices?

Benefits of a DAM to the CMO

When approaching a CMO with the benefits of digital asset management, it’s important to think high-level. Here are some benefits to consider highlighting:

Improved ROI: A digital asset management system enables the marketing department to shorten time to market, enable faster product launches, and more easily deliver content to relevant internal and external stakeholders, by providing users with instant access to on-brand, pre-approved assets.

Improved Operational Efficiency: With DAM, teams are able to collaborate on and update content more easily and efficiently and distribute it across multiple channels with ease. A DAM also removes common bottlenecks and enables reuse across the team.

Brand Integrity: A DAM ensures that all customer-facing content and visuals are on-brand and consistent in messaging, using approval processes and versioning. Teams are enabled with self-serve access to the collateral they need, ensuring employees, partners, and agencies never need to turn to outside sources to get the material they need.

Cost Reduction: A DAM eliminates extra costs associated with lost digital assets and duplicate asset purchases. It also reduces content creation time (and cost), team workload, and time spent on administrative tasks.

Rights Management: A DAM allows an organization to securely allow internal and external stakeholders access only assets that are relevant to them, using advanced user group permissions. This ensures teams are only seeing and using the content that’s relevant to them.

This is the first of a three-part series highlighting common stakeholders you need to get on board with digital asset management. Don’t forget to read parts 2 and 3, on the VP of IT and Creative Operations.

Here’s some other helpful content, to help you build the business case for DAM project across your organization:

• ROI Calculator and Business Case
• Key Stakeholder Benefits Deck
• 3 Categories of Users to Consider

It’s no secret that the future of marketing is content-rich, and diverse, visual content creates the opportunity for marketing teams to connect with their audiences, create long-lasting engagement with their brand and, ultimately, drive revenue and stand out from their competitors.

The demand for unique content in a variety of formats keeps growing. What’s not growing is the budget or headcount of the creative departments. While every piece of marketing material and digital campaign needs visual elements, there are ways to ease some of the workload for the design team and stay on brand.

At MediaValet, we rely on a number of tools to help our marketing team create great visual elements for a variety of digital and social channels. In this post, we’re sharing 4 of our favorite marketing tools that help us stay visual without overloading our graphic designers.

1. Canva

Canva is a hyper-intuitive design app with an easy drag-and-drop interface and a multitude of templates. This tool allows you to layer photos, frames, graphics, and text, making it a great tool to use for social images, printouts, and even presentation slides.

Canva has thousands of templates that make it easy for even the least design-savvy person to create beautiful, attention-grabbing visuals. With a premium package, you have access to resizing, custom fonts, 400,000 free illustrations and photos, and more, but even the free version gives you more than enough functionality to create beautiful designs.

We mostly use Canva for our social media posts and any time we need to add text to visuals, like holiday posts. Canva also allows us to make small adjustments to images (such as adding a logo or doing some make-shift cropping).

2. Pexels

Our favorite website for finding high-resolution, high-quality photos and videos is Pexels. The visuals found on this site aren’t typical, cookie-cutter stock photos. You’ll find a wide variety of images of nature, cityscapes, and authentic, everyday life images, and the entire site is free (with an option to donate to talented photographers).

We use Pexels to find high-resolution images and videos for our presentations, social images, and blog posts. You can even find some in 4K!

3. Unbounce

Up next on our list of tools is Unbounce, a conversion platform that helps marketers build beautiful landing pages with A/B testing functionality. Unbounce has built a reputation for giving those without any HTML or design experience the ability to build flawless, high-converting landing pages, and they don’t disappoint! On the site, you have the ability to start from scratch or build from thousands of template options, giving you endless design options for any industry. There are plenty of training modules and stand-by support to help you to master the tool, but once you get the hang of it you can build landing pages in as little as an hour.

At MediaValet, we use Unbounce for, of course, our landing pages! The ability to quickly build clean and well-designed landing pages allows us to experiment with designs, A/B tests, and, ultimately, deliver the best experience to our visitors.

4. Office 365 PowerPoint

Not many people notice this, but the latest version of PowerPoint actually has the ability to suggest professionally designed layouts to fit the content that you’re pulling in. Put simply, PowerPoint can auto-place your images into an awesome, pre-designed template. You can give this feature a try by activating “Design Ideas” within the Design ribbon.

This function enables our team to create beautiful presentation decks without distracting our design team from new and creative projects. We also have a handy integration that allows us to quickly pull in images from our own MediaValet library and insert them directly into the PowerPoint slide.

Retailers are faced with the challenge of efficiently managing huge volumes of digital media, which are key for both effectively communicating the brand story and for driving revenue in stores and online. Customers are looking for consistent and truly personalized experiences across multiple different channels. Businesses have to create timely and visually engaging content that makes the most of each distribution channel and matches in-store experiences. This involves a complex coordination of project management, media management, and team collaboration. To do this, most retailers are investing in Digital Asset Management solutions that can help the creative process, and many have begun to realize that digital asset management is core to their strategy.

While there are certain features and functions that carry across all DAM use cases, there are many ways the technology gets used in the retail industry.

Here, we have identified 3 different scenarios where a DAM implementation has been key to the retailer’s marketing strategies.

1. How a DAM Helps Grow an eCommerce Strategy

In order to grow their online presence, a German-based women’s fashion retailer needed to align their products with the latest fashion and eCommerce trends to attract a younger buyer demographic. That meant providing its customers with the ability to access and purchase the company’s fashion collections through their website and multiple social channels. As customers are looking for incredibly personalized online experiences that reflect an understanding of their needs, interests, and passions, the company was also spending an enormous amount of time constantly changing the visual content to fulfill this demand.

This company adopted a DAM system to be a single source of truth for approved marketing assets. No matter if employees are working directly from Germany or from one of the international offices, easy access to photos and videos is now guaranteed. And all of these assets have been through an evaluation process for usage rights, so employees can work individually to find the assets they need, while items they don’t have permission to use do not show up in their view of the library. With a cloud-based DAM, this retailer is able to quickly create rich new imagery, and get it to their six online stores as the trends constantly change.

Result: Centralized assets and improved workflow

Employees across the world have consistent access to all approved digital assets, and this woman’s retailer can give its teams the freedom to build progressive eCommerce projects and campaigns free of the worry over finding assets and misusing assets without proper permissions.

2. How a DAM Helps Innovate the Omni-Channel Experience

In an effort to increase global competitiveness and remain relevant to customers, a leading sports clothing and equipment franchisor decided to invest in digital retail – but wanted to give a new take on it. The company wanted to emphasize digital technology just as much as the physical store experience, so they came up with a plan to launch their new dual-approach strategy on Black Friday, the infamous day following U.S. Thanksgiving that marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season.

The company set its goal and left itself 7 months to create an impactful program that would lead to sales growth both in stores and online. It was important to leaders that this initiative was capable of truly innovating the omnichannel shopping experience. Inspired by best-in-class digital experiences from partners, employees, and franchisees, the company came up with the idea for an in-store interactive “Shoe Wall” experience. They created interactive displays that leverage unified commerce data and offer customers, as well as in-store associates, convenient and engaging experiences on the market floor where people encounter retail shoe products. They integrated a DAM into their eCommerce platform in record time to offer online shopping on Black Friday, generating $1.5M in online revenue.

Result: Revenue growth through innovative digital strategy

In partnership with a true eCommerce platform, a digital asset management system helped create a truly innovative in-store digital experience that paired valuable product information, such as sizing, color, and availability with powerful product visuals at the point of sale.

3. How a DAM Helps Manage Multiple Retail Brands

A best-in-class marketer, producer, and distributor of branded garden and pet products implemented digital asset management as a way to manage all of the subsidiary brands. With national and regional manufacturing, purchasing, sales, and delivery affiliates, the company was struggling to keep track of all of the different brands falling under its umbrella. After implementing a DAM solution, however, the company can now keep track of who uses images and when, control access to images, and provide access to the marketing and branding images directly to the affiliates.

Essentially, how it works is that the company keeps a DAM admin team who is in charge of managing the entire collection of photos, videos, and other visual digital assets for all of the affiliate brands. The admins give employees working in different regions access to a subset of the entire collection relative to their marketing needs. This happens through a well-organized set of permissions and controls. When creating their brand campaigns, employees then have direct access to approved assets for searching, browsing, sharing, and downloading. The company uses digital asset management as a central library, and then it gives limited access to each one of the library users based on their needs.

Result: Team enablement and centralized brand library

This garden and pet company has taken a somewhat uncommon approach such that they are using digital asset management not just for brand management, but for the management and execution of multiple companies and product brands under one single parent company. The DAM is acting as a central and accurate library that each section of the company can access as permissions allow.

What these examples show is that for the retail industry, there isn’t just one way to benefit from digital asset management technology. To truly get the most out of a DAM system, you need to understand your business and user needs. A DAM solution can then be used as a tool to structure employee and team workflows.

If you’re ready to get started with your digital asset management project, make sure you download How to Buy a Digital Asset Management System, for an 8-step playbook to finding a DAM system that works for you.

This week at MediaValet, we are dying our eggs, breaking open chocolate-filled packages, and hunting around for all the bunny-shaped sugary surprises. Around here, we take Easter, and our sweet tooth, very seriously.

Our festivities during this season never stop at the edible, and we can’t think of a better way to celebrate than to explore the power behind digital Easter eggs for marketers!

“Digital Easter eggs,” you say? “What exactly are digital Easter eggs?”

According to Wikipedia, “An Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, hidden message, or feature in an interactive work such as a computer program, video game or DVD menu screen. The name is used to evoke the idea of a traditional Easter egg hunt.”

This Easter, to make your season “egg-stra” special, we’d like to break down 3 powerful reasons why these jokes and hidden messages are genius in the world of content marketing and offer a list of links that will send you on an Easter egg hunt of your own!

In this post we will cover

• Why Digital Easter Eggs are Pure Marketing Genius
• Easter Egg Examples

Why Digital Easter Eggs are Pure Marketing Genius

1. Easter eggs are highly visual

Over the last year, the need for visual content has taken marketing teams by storm, with audiences constantly wanting more and more and MORE! Easter eggs give your visitors, readers, etc. an extra hit of fun visual elements, and the secrecy of these visuals just makes them that much more satisfying. Vogue did a great job of adding a “secret visual” to its website, which gives its brand a little extra flair. By entering the Konami code (pictured below) on the Vogue UK homepage, visitors are treated with a hilarious image of…well… you’ll have to see for yourself.

2. Easter eggs add an element of surprise, excitement and secret knowledge

There’s something exhilarating about holding a secret that no one else knows or being the first to share a secret. Brands take advantage of this thrill by adding an Easter egg to their website, app, and other content to create a feeling of exclusivity among those who know. SnapChat did a great job of this back in 2013, by creating an easter egg that allowed users to send photos with black & white filters by typing “B&W…” into the text box of the photo. Users were intrigued, baffled, and a little bit jealous, when egg-finding friends began snapping black and white photos, creating extra interest in the SnapChat platform.

3. Easter egg hunting drives deeper engagement with content or a product

Another way that companies are taking advantage of Easter eggs is by adding an element of gamification around them – basically, encouraging users to actively hunt for eggs. This gets users engaged with the brand and spending time with the product more frequently. One of the clear leaders of this gamification is Google, more specifically, its search bar. There are over 25 different tricks, all centered around entering various phrases into the Google search bar. By adding these tricks, Google has given its users a reason to visit the page, even when they don’t need to search for something! Check out the video below of different Google Easter eggs to try:

Easter Egg Examples

Here are some of our favourite easter eggs to try out yourself!

Google Antarctica Trip

Find Half Moon Island, Antarctica on Google Maps, grab the pegman in the bottom right hand corner of the screen and drag him over the southern tip of the Island. A blue route should appear where you can drop the man and have a walk around. Who doesn’t love penguins?!

Wikipedia Easter Egg Entry

When you search for easter egg (media) on Wikipedia, you will see a photo of 2 rabbits looking at a hedgehog – hold cursor over the hedgehog & a message will appear – click the hedgehog for an Easter surprise!

Asana

Go to Asana.com, enable Tab+B under the “Hacks” section in “My Profile Settings”, then go to your homepage and press Tab+B – you’ll get a Tab+B (or Tabby) surprise!!

Google Chrome

If you are disconnected from the internet and try to access a website in your browser, the “Unable to connect” T. Rex pops up. What you might not know is that if you press the spacebar it turns the T. Rex into a game to play while you wait for the connection to come back!

Easter eggs are just one way to have some fun with your website and show off your winning personality! For more insight into making your digital marketing stand out, check out 3 Reasons to Use Custom Images in Your Digital Strategy.