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.

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.