Collaboration with external partners

How to centralize your assets and maximize their value

Having your digital assets in a variety of hard drives, cloud solutions, desktops and other places is never best practice. The occasional inconvenience of not being able to find a specific image immediately shifts to a serious problem start when you need to collaborate with external partners, and they need access to your files as well. Finding the right DAM solution is crucial in streamlining your processes and it will save your resources while making your brand stronger. 

Stop Coordinating with Your Partners 

Have you ever counted how many people who don’t work in your company need access to your logos, branding guidelines, images and other digital content? The amount depends on a variety of factors like your marketing team’s size, how much you can do internally, your industry and your marketing/branding/communications strategy but my cautious estimate would be at least a hundred people, could be up to thousands.  

It may sound like a lot at first but give it some thought. This group the size of a small village includes your advertising and prodction partners, the PR agency, printing suppliers, potential resellers of your product, as well as any other official partners. With some you connect with weekly, with some significantly less. 

Coordinating with all these stakeholders to make sure they have easy access to the materials they need is hard work. It’s also work that you don’t have to do. Centralizing your digital assets will save you much more than just grey hairs, though avoiding those is a definite plus.  

Centralizing in this context means that your materials are all stored in one location (digital asset management solution or DAM) that is your one source of truth when it comes to your brand. Let’s look at some of the benefits of not having to constantly coordinate with your external partners.  

Consistent branding without the back and forth 

Your branding and marketing assets change and grow with your company, which implies that there is a high risk that one of your partners uses the wrong logo, the old color scheme or a picture from 5 years ago that no longer reflects the image of your company. This will, at minimum, hinder your brand consistency, or at worst, damage your image. 

With the right DAM solution, you can avoid confusion and miscommunication by making sure that all your external partners have access to only the newest brand guidelines and up-to-date visual assets. 

Only share the necessary 

All your content is not for all your stakeholders. You most likely have sensitive documents for internal eyes only that you don’t want your external partners seeing or using. Does that mean you need different solutions for internal and external assets? No. The right DAM solution allows you to set different levels of access for different users. You can rest easy knowing that your APAC partners, for example, cannot access your EMEA campaign materials. 

Spare your time and money 

The obvious benefit that usually makes for the strongest business case. If your partner has access to a portal that houses all your up-to-date content that they will need, you and your team don’t have to spend time looking for and approving the use of assets.  

While it is tough to measure the exact time you and the team spend on coordination, An IDC study estimates that each week professionals spend 8.8 hours looking for a piece of content, which adds up to 52 working days per year. But that’s not all. Agencies and other external partners usually bill by the hour and the time they spend trying to find the materials they need from you comes directly out of your budget.  

Make your assets work harder 

Creating great content isn’t cheap. Once you have your carefully curated top-quality digital assets, you naturally want them to add value for your campaigns and brand. And ideally not just once, but as many times as possible. 

 The right DAM solution helps your team and external partners re-use your content when appropriate and shows you how many times an asset has been used and by whom. This feature will give you a good overview on what content works the best and helps you promote under-utilized assets so you can avoid a situation where every campaign features the same image or video clip. 

Want to learn more about the benefits of a DAM system to your brand management efforts?  

• To learn more about the added value of a DAM system for managing your brand, download our white paper “Improve your Marketing Performance with DAM.”
  
  
• To learn more about the Lytho DAM platform and its core capabilities, click here or go right ahead and book a demo with us. It's free and online, and takes up no more than about 20 minutes.