Everything You Need to Know About DAM for eCommerce
- Digital Asset Management (DAM) empowers businesses to organize, store, and retrieve digital assets efficiently. It also enables seamless distribution.
- DAM for eCommerce saves time and money while increasing conversions, retention, and loyalty.
- An ideal DAM system incorporates brand portals for access controls and permissions. It ensures consistent brand representation across touchpoints.
In this Article
eCommerce sales in places like the United States grew by 32% during the pandemic. Globally, the eCommerce share of total retail sales doubled between 2015 and 2021, from 7.4% to 18.8%.
Data indicates this share will grow by an additional 6% (bringing the total to 24%) by 2026. eCommerce is a force to reckon with, and its significance will increase as more people migrate to online services worldwide.
For eCommerce businesses, this is a blessing and a sign of tough times ahead.
It is a blessing because the scope of business will expand, and the potential for online sales will become limitless. On the contrary, the fast-paced growth will inevitably increase the number of products in the digital catalog. This surge is expected for an average online retailer as more products become available to offer.
If you run such a business already, you know the importance of high-quality, engaging, and consistent content. It’s crucial for your products and services to maintain a strong presence and appeal to customers.
You also know how challenging it can be to manage, update, and distribute your content across multiple eCommerce platforms and channels.
Thankfully, this challenge is not without a solution. The market has a tool to help you save time and money while increasing your conversions, retention, and loyalty. It can also help you stand out and delight your customers. The name is Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform.
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The Basics of DAM
Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a strategic approach and technology infrastructure that empowers businesses to organize, store, retrieve, and distribute their digital assets in a structured and efficient manner.
Think of DAM as everything that happens after creating a digital asset a hundred years from now. It’s about managing data, storage, access, and usage effectively over time.
But first, what is a digital asset? Well, it’s pretty simple; a digital asset is any file or content related to your products that is stored digitally.
As a result, over tens of thousands of these images are lost annually for each team, and a few thousand are left unorganized, costing creative teams valuable time and resources. And just like product attributes, digital assets grow exponentially as digital content is created and shared.
For example, most marketing teams have up to hundreds of thousands of images. Half of them are scattered across several locations, including cloud storage platforms, email inboxes, and local folders. Over tens of thousands of images are lost annually for each team. A few thousand images remain unorganized, costing creative teams valuable time and resources.
DAM solutions create a hub for centrally storing, organizing, and sharing digital assets. They eliminate a significant roadblock to optimum productivity for companies.
If you’re involved in eCommerce, you would know that DAM for eCommerce is a lifesaver, specifically for the following reasons:
- eCommerce businesses handle a vast array of digital assets, including product images, descriptions, promotional banners, and videos. These assets play a crucial role in their online presence and marketing efforts. Organizing and categorizing these assets becomes time-consuming and error-prone without a robust DAM system.
- With a growing volume of digital assets, eCommerce businesses face asset creation, version control, and team collaboration challenges. DAM enables efficient workflows, allowing teams to collaborate seamlessly on asset creation and modification.
- Maintaining a consistent brand identity across various online platforms is vital for eCommerce businesses. DAM facilitates brand consistency with a central hub for all assets, such as logos, style guides, color palettes, and typography.
- It ensures cohesive representation across various touchpoints, strengthening brand identity and recognition.
- Delivering an exceptional customer experience is paramount in the highly competitive eCommerce landscape. DAM is crucial in optimizing the customer journey by enabling businesses to provide visually engaging and compelling content.
- As eCommerce businesses grow and expand their product offerings, the volume and diversity of digital assets also increase. DAM provides scalability, allowing companies to handle a large number of assets and accommodate future growth.
What is DAM in eCommerce?
eCommerce companies spend a serious dime on digital assets, such as sales presentations, videos, product images, and logos. And this is not for sport. Instead, it is essential for their online presence and marketing strategies.
Companies can use digital assets to build a distinct brand identity and boost brand recognition. They also aid in client attraction by creating an immersive shopping experience.
Videos and product photos, for example, assist shoppers in visualizing the products and making more educated purchasing decisions.
Many eCommerce teams seek ease in managing current brand assets. They also aim to develop new, high-quality collateral for marketing and distribution to retailers.
Digital asset management considers media files as valuable assets, akin to physical assets. They hold value as they represent certain media and contribute to business objectives.
Digital asset management safely stores these assets, along with important metadata. Metadata is information about a file; if, for example, the asset is a product image, the information would be the photographer’s name, regional specifics, the items in the image, etc.
The concept of DAM for eCommerce (also the quality that distinguishes it from other DAM platforms) is really straightforward. A digital asset is only valuable if everyone on the team (or within the organization) knows where to find it.
Otherwise, many precious hours would be lost searching for files, impeding a lot of creative energy. For example, most organizations use different creative tools, each one creating copies of production files. Eventually, nobody can remember where the most current copy was saved.
A DAM tool solves asset storage challenges for B2B eCommerce businesses, unifying and ensuring easy accessibility. It allows users to retrieve the most recent and accurate digital files or product images.
Example of an eCommerce DAM Platform in Action
Let’s say you sell clothes in bulk to retailers using an online platform. In a bid to scale the business and reach more customers, you decide to leverage a DAM software, say Catsy DAM.
Before the DAM platform, you only relied on product information management PIM software to manage product content.
Fortunately, Catsy offers a platform with both PIM and DAM solutions integrated. You can easily migrate product information and synchronize it with digital assets in the DAM.
Let’s see how you would use the DAM tool in practice. To do that, we’ll first examine how a digital asset relates to PIM.
Suppose you have a fresh inventory of trousers and, as you know well, not only does a pair of trouser has many attributes like size, price, and color, but it also has several digital media connected to it, such as videos and pictures of the item, or even documents with a full description of the features.
So, the DAM side of Catsy will store the digital assets as URLs, which are linked to the product information on the PIM side. That way, any changes on either side of the platform will be reflected in real-time.
Even better, Catsy DAM has a readiness reporting functionality, which tells users how far away the product content is from being complete. Of course, your organization will set the rules that define completeness and accuracy, and the platform will do all the leg work.
So far, we have seen how eCommerce DAM, and anyone reading keenly must have noticed that this platform has several key features and functionalities that, to understand better how it works, one must first understand these features and functionalities. Well, let’s get to it.
Features and Functionalities of DAM for eCommerce
A DAM software for B2B eCommerce delivers plentiful value with tailored features and functions. It caters to the unique needs of online retail businesses, enhancing their operations significantly. Here are the main features and functions of DAM in eCommerce:
- Storing, categorizing, filtering, and sharing product content: The platform provides a centralized storage location for digital assets. It allows businesses to organize assets into folders or collections, assign tags and metadata, and apply advanced search capabilities for quick and efficient asset retrieval.
- Access control, version control, metadata management, and workflow management: eCommerce DAM ensures secure access to digital assets by implementing robust access control mechanisms. It allows organizations to define user roles and the scope of access. It restricts users to authorized sections and assets, ensuring the integrity and quality of product content. Version control features enable tracking and managing revisions. They ensure that only the most up-to-date and approved versions are shared across channels. Regarding metadata management, the platform provides capabilities that enable businesses to assign and manage descriptive information to assets, facilitating efficient asset organization and search. Finally, workflow management features streamline collaboration and approval processes, enabling efficient asset creation, review, and publishing workflows.
- Integrating with other eCommerce platforms, tools, and applications. B2B eCommerce often involves a combination of technology, each component handling specific functions. This tech stack must work in harmony to achieve optimum results. When a DAM tool is added, it must integrate with other stack components to be useful. This integration allows seamless collaboration and enhances the overall workflow efficiency. To this end, most DAM tools have pre-built integrations with common business tools, including social media platforms, content management systems, and (for standalone DAM solutions) PIM solution. That way, users can easily synchronize product content across all channels, ensuring efficiency, quality, and consistency.
- Supporting multiple formats, languages, and channels. DAM in eCommerce handles diverse digital assets like images (JPEG, PNG), videos (MP4), documents (PDF), and audio files (MP3). It supports various file types, making it an essential tool for managing multimedia content. It can also support different languages and locales for global markets. Users can translate and localize their assets for different regions and audiences. Most crucially, the platform can adapt to different devices and resolutions for optimal viewing experiences across channels.
What is DAM vs Brand Portal?
A brand portal is a dedicated digital platform that serves as a centralized hub for storing, managing, and distributing brand-related assets, guidelines, and resources. It is designed to provide internal and external stakeholders easy access to brand assets, ensuring consistent brand representation across various touchpoints.
A brand portal goes beyond asset management, incorporating features for brand governance and collaboration. It provides a comprehensive platform for maintaining brand consistency and fostering teamwork.
The primary differences between a DAM tool and a brand portal include the following:
- Brand portals narrow their focus specifically to brand-related resources and assets, whereas DAM systems focus on managing a wide range of digital assets.
- While brand portals strongly emphasize brand consistency across channels and governance, DAM systems are all-rounded, serving all needs related to digital assets.
- Brand portals offer more advanced collaboration features often tailored to brand-related workflows, whereas DAM systems tend to be general-purpose.
- Brand portals act as a gateway for internal and external stakeholders. They access brand assets stored in the DAM system, ensuring easy availability and accessibility. Therefore, it is safe to say that brand portals are a component of the DAM solution.
The Main Features and Functions of a Brand Portal
A brand portal is able to serve its purpose because of the following functions and features:
- It provides access to the DAM system’s unified storage location. This eliminates the need for searching through various folders or systems, providing stakeholders with a single source of truth for brand assets and guidelines.
- A portal reinforces brand awareness and recognition among internal teams, external partners, and stakeholders by providing a dedicated access path for brand assets and resources. Most crucially, a brand portal maintains a consistent visual identity, tone of voice, and messaging. It strengthens the brand’s presence and fosters loyalty among customers and stakeholders.
- The dedicated access path facilitates effective communication and collaboration among different teams and stakeholders involved in brand-related activities. Users can share brand assets seamlessly, allowing teams to collaborate on creative projects, provide feedback, and streamline approval processes.
- Interestingly, you will be pleased to know that the brand portal is the feature that enables a DAM system to manage access controls and permissions. Each portal is password protected, and each user has security clearances matching their team rank. When assigning portals to users, the administrator defines the user’s role, their permissions, and what assets they can access (including whether they have editing permission).
Why DAM Systems that Incorporate a Brand Portal are Ideal for a Sound eCommerce Strategy
The impact on sales volume determines the soundness of an eCommerce strategy. And to increase this volume, your business must appeal to as many customers as possible.
We have already seen that a brand portal supercharges a DAM system, but precisely what does the system that incorporates the brand portal achieve?
- Consistent and engaging brand experiences across all channels
- Streamlined and optimized workflows and processes related to eCommerce content creation and delivery.
- Increased visibility, trust, and engagement of the brand among the stakeholders
Best Practices for Implementing DAM in B2B eCommerce
Assess Asset Management Needs and Requirements
- Evaluate your current asset management practices and identify pain points and challenges.
- Define your specific B2B eCommerce asset management needs, considering factors like the volume and types of assets, user roles and permissions, integration requirements, and scalability.
- Engage stakeholders from different departments to gather input and align on requirements.
Choose the Right DAM Solution for B2B eCommerce
- Conduct thorough research and evaluate DAM solutions that cater specifically to B2B eCommerce requirements.
- Consider factors such as ease of use, scalability, integration capabilities, security features, and collaboration and workflow management support.
- Request demos, assess vendor references, and evaluate the solution’s compatibility with your existing technology stack.
Data Migration and Asset Onboarding Strategies
- Develop a data migration strategy to transfer existing assets into the DAM system efficiently.
- Prioritize assets based on relevance and usage frequency, and consider leveraging automation tools or workflows to streamline the migration process.
- Define asset onboarding processes for new assets, including naming conventions, file formats, and metadata requirements.
Establish Metadata Standards and Taxonomy
- Define a comprehensive and consistent metadata schema to tag and categorize assets.
- Establish metadata standards for key attributes such as asset type, description, keywords, usage rights, and expiration dates.
- To organize assets, provide a clear classification system and folder structure that will make it simple for users to find and retrieve materials.
User Training and Change Management Processes
- Develop a training plan to educate users on the features and functionality of the DAM system.
- Provide training sessions, workshops, and documentation to ensure users understand how to upload, search, share, and download assets effectively.
- Promote the benefits of the DAM system and communicate the value it brings to B2B eCommerce processes to encourage adoption.
- Involve change champions within your organization who can advocate for the DAM system and help address any resistance to change.
Combine DAM and Product Information Management (PIM)
- Consider integrating your DAM system with a PIM solution for comprehensive product asset management.
- The integration between DAM and PIM enables centralized management of both marketing assets and product data, ensuring consistency and accuracy across B2B eCommerce channels.
- Collaborate with teams responsible for product information and leverage the combined power of DAM and PIM to enhance the customer experience and drive conversions.
- Better yet, choose a solution like Catsy DAM, built into a PIM platform. Simply put, Catsy gives you a pre-integrated DAM and eCommerce PIM solution; hence, no need to look for a separate PIM tool to perform integrations.
Key Takeaways
A DAM system is the lynchpin of a successful B2B eCommerce strategy. The platform brings order to the management of digital assets, which may often be in the hundreds of thousands.
Not only do users get a centralized repository for storing and managing content such as files and graphics, but they also get a system that automates numerous processes and workflows. Add to this the brand portals that allow brands to automate collaboration and communication between the central repository and stakeholders (both internal and external).
DAM stands for Digital Asset Management. In eCommerce, DAM refers to the process of managing and organizing digital assets such as product images, videos, descriptions, logos, and other marketing materials.
DAM solutions create a hub for centrally storing, organizing, and sharing digital assets, eliminating a significant roadblock to optimum productivity for companies.
DAM is crucial in optimizing the customer journey by enabling businesses to provide visually engaging and compelling content.
DAM for eCommerce is tailored to the unique needs of online retail businesses.
It provides a centralized storage location for digital assets, allowing businesses to organize assets into folders or collections, assign tags and metadata, and apply advanced search capabilities for quick and efficient asset retrieval.
DAM for eCommerce also facilitates brand consistency by providing a central hub for all brand assets, including logos, style guides, color palettes, and typography.
Additionally, DAM for eCommerce enables efficient workflows, allowing teams to collaborate seamlessly on asset creation and modification. Finally, DAM for eCommerce provides scalability, allowing companies to handle a large number of assets and accommodate future growth.
DAM for eCommerce works by providing a centralized hub for storing, organizing, and sharing digital assets such as product images, videos, descriptions, logos, and other marketing materials.
The platform provides a centralized storage location for digital assets, allowing businesses to organize assets into folders or collections, assign tags and metadata, and apply advanced search capabilities for quick and efficient asset retrieval.
DAM for eCommerce also facilitates brand consistency by providing a central hub for all brand assets, including logos, style guides, color palettes, and typography.
Additionally, DAM for eCommerce enables efficient workflows, allowing teams to collaborate seamlessly on asset creation and modification. DAM for eCommerce also ensures secure access to digital assets by implementing robust access control mechanisms, enabling businesses to define user roles and the scope of access.
Finally, DAM for eCommerce integrates with other eCommerce platforms, tools, and applications, allowing businesses to achieve optimum results.
DAM is a system for managing digital assets, while a brand portal controls access to digital assets. DAM manages a wide range of digital assets, while brand portals focus specifically on brand-related resources.
Brand portals emphasize brand consistency and offer advanced collaboration features, while DAM systems are general-purpose. Brand portals are a component of the DAM solution.
An ideal DAM system incorporates brand portals to manage access controls and permissions, ensuring consistent brand representation across various touchpoints.
It achieves consistent and engaging brand experiences, streamlined workflows, and increased visibility and trust among stakeholders.
