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.

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