Return on investment of a DAM : A customer case

When you are considering committing to a tool or a system, one of the most important (if not the MOST important) factors that you need to consider is the return on investment. While no one has a crystal ball to see what this number would be for a specific organization before a tool is implemented, you can get a solid idea from the data of existing customers. To help you out as best we can, we put together all the numbers and analyzed the ROI of our DAM solution for one of our customers.  

Before we get started with the hard numbers that come with investing in a DAM, let’s quickly define this term, in our context. A Digital Asset Management solution or a DAM is a central location that helps in storing, organizing, managing, creating, sharing, and publishing digital content. This includes images, videos, presentations, templates, gifs, logos, white papers, reports, illustrations and more.  

Using a DAM system for managing your digital content has many benefits, which can be roughly grouped into these four categories:  

• Brand consistency: Making sure everything that comes out of your company is on-brand  
• Marketing efficiency: Scaling content creation and saving time in marketing operations  
• Improved collaboration: Helping all colleagues work on up-to-date versions and share work   

• Maximized talent: Take away mundane tasks and allow your team to truly contribute  

To calculate the full value of a Digital Asset Management system, we need to consider all the areas it impacts. The above core benefits show that a DAM can have an impact on your brand, your content and your people.  

If you’d like to learn more about what the price tag on your digital assets is and how you can calculate your own brand’s value, check out this free white paper. 

Savings and added value 

Now we will turn our focus on what the return on investment for a DAM is. The ROI formula of a DAM is:  

Savings on your asset spend + added value to your brand - cost of DAM = ROI  

While all these numbers are both difficult to estimate and organization-specific, you can get an idea of what the potential is through a real-life case from one of our customers, Kiwa. If you’d like to learn more about their case and why they chose Lytho’s DAM solution, check out this customer case white paper.  

Basic details about Kiwa:  

Revenue €522m  

Revenue increase from 2018 to 2019 +35m  

Number of employees 4,500+,   

450+ employees in marketing, comms and sales   

After implementing the Lytho DAM solution, Kiwa reported the following improvements:  

75% increase in brand consistency  

50% decrease in using other applications / CMS systems  

60% less expenses on outsourced designers and agencies  

40% quicker to publish brand content  

Let’s assume that employee costs per position average around 80,000€ /year. This includes the employee’s salary, employer costs, commute compensation, taxes, holiday pay and other benefits.   

Sales, marketing, communications and other departments that work with content (presentations, banners, ebooks, templates, quotes) generally spend at least 50% of their work time on branded content. This time includes planning for content, meetings and briefs, back-and-forth emailing, creating the content, searching for right images and publishing content.  

Kiwa has around 450 people in sales, marketing, communications and brand management positions, and they reported 40% time savings on branded content. In cost savings this amounts to:  

80.000€ salary * 450 people * 0,5 time spent on content * 0.4 saved time = 7.200.000€ per year  

The value of your company is strongly linked to your brand image. According to the State of Brand Consistency report, brands that are consistently presented can expect to see an average revenue increase of 33%.    

Kiwa reported a 75% increase in brand consistency after implementing the Lytho DAM solution. Let’s assume that their brand compliance used to be 50% before Lytho, which would make their current brand consistency rate 87,5%. 

Kiwa’s revenue grew 7,2% or 35m from 2018 to 2019. Based on the connection between increased brand consistency and revenue, we can assume that implementing a DAM solution contributed to Kiwa’s revenue growth in the following way:  

0,375 brand consistency growth * 35m revenue growth = 13,125m    

The total effect of successfully implementing the Lytho DAM system based on these calculations would be:  

Reduced time spent in branded content = 7,2m  

Increased brand consistency = 13,125m  

Total 20,325m  

This ROI example calculation does not include saved agency costs (60% decrease) or savings in discontinuing or downgrading redundant software and other tools because we don’t have enough data to make estimations.  

In summary… 

The goal of this article is to give you an idea of what the ROI of a Digital Asset Management could be for your organization. It’s good to keep in mind that implementing a solution that has a profound impact on something as fundamental as digital content is bound to have consequences that are difficult to measure. Our customers, for example, report increased retention and happiness among employees that spend a big chunk of their work time with content.   

Some companies manage to channel their saved time to innovating and exploring new solutions that, when successful, have a significant impact on the business. On the flip side, if the implementation is poor or user adoption is not high, implementing a DAM system, or any other tool for that matter, will lead to a loss instead of a positive return.  

That’s why all organizations should take time to find a solution that is the right fit for them. If you are interested in finding out what the business value of a DAM would be for your company, get in touch with our specialists. They will be happy to help build a business case with you.