It goes without saying that visual assets are the most important tools for tourism marketing agencies to showcase their destinations. Rich digital content plays a pivotal role in effective destination marketing campaigns—helping to tell the story of your destination and your target audience. Each year tourism marketing campaigns get more immersive, impressive, and expensive to create, and with so much money being spent on high-quality digital assets, it’s important for agencies to ensure proper ROI.

A huge pain point for most agencies dealing with an ever-growing collection of visual content is finding a way to effectively store, manage, and distribute these massive amounts of assets; this is where a digital asset management (DAM) system comes in. In this post, we share the specific benefits of a DAM for tourism marketing agencies along with several critical features that will help you stand out from your competition.

What is Digital Asset Management?

A DAM helps tourism marketing agencies 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, it helps top agencies improve their creative production process and efficiently manage and launch campaigns.

Most agencies that are currently not using a DAM struggle with similar issues:

• They are storing campaign assets in multiple locations, making it hard to find what they need,
• They sometimes lose assets altogether,
• There are challenges with giving access to assets in a timely manner,
• Finding assets is taking up way too much time, which is slowing down projects, and
• They don’t feel their assets are truly secure.

Below, we look at why destination marketing agencies should consider DAM as a long-term solution to these pain points, and touch on the additional benefits that come from implementing one.

Benefits of DAM for Tourism Marketing Agencies

According to a recent Forbes article: “Many brands lack an enterprise-wide system to manage their creative assets, which reduces a marketer's ability to produce effective, timely campaigns at scale”. Employing a DAM solves this problem right away—it creates one, single source of truth for everyone at your agency to rely on. This means your team can find what they need to create visually stunning campaigns for your destination, on time, and with minimal headaches.

Here are 4 specific benefits for tourism marketing agencies using a DAM:

1. Improved relationships with media partners: A DAM offers a way for you to give access to certain assets to people outside your agency. This means your media partners can have unencumbered access to campaigns and assets—making your agency easier to work with, and likely increasing media coverage for your destination.
2. Better creative workflow: Both internal team members, and partners like videographers or photographers, have easy access to the assets they need to work on creative campaigns. This improves the overall workflow for everyone working together on these projects.
3. Increased ROI on visual assets: A DAM optimizes the reuse of digital assets since they are so easily (and securely) organized and stored. This increases the value of high-quality assets, as reuse and repurposing for future projects become much easier.
4. User-generated content support: It’s 2022—a lot of visual content is coming from your online audience. A DAM helps to organize, manage, and reuse this valuable user-generated content.

6 Critical Features of DAM for Tourism Marketing Agencies

A DAM solution can offer these significant benefits because of its features. Let’s take a closer look at what we think are 6 critical features of the DAM that shape the benefits for tourism marketing agencies:

1. Organization: Manage all content in a single location using a multi-library structure.
2. Enhanced Search: Easily find content by campaign, 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 in the world.
6. Security: Secure client marketing collateral with enterprise-level security and asset recovery.

Stand out with DAM

Destination marketing agencies should find a DAM partner not only to alleviate the headaches of storing, managing, and distributing the massive amounts of rich media content but to improve the ROI on the creation of these assets dramatically. They can get ahead of the competition by standing out—delivering engaging campaigns that truly make an impression on their target audience. A DAM helps partners and teams manage and launch these campaigns more effectively, helping to create higher-quality work, with a much better workflow. On top of all that—it can also help media partners get access to these campaigns easily and effectively.