DAM platforms help marketers and other customer-facing teams drive unified communication efforts because it allows larger, globally distributed teams to maintain standard collaterals and documentation to enable different stages of the brand’s product or service lifecycle. But with the constant overlapping features among the various martech or salestech that a team might already have, how can you tell whether it would make sense to additionally invest in a DAM platform?

Marketers and their other customer-facing counterparts constantly have to rethink their processes and tech stack to ensure they have the right features to enable better internal and external collaboration. This includes having a more streamlined methodology among teams to help boost the idea of a more consistent customer experience and prospect experience for every end user.

As hybrid work models become more commonplace, there is a greater need to understand what kind of tools can come handy to ensure the above.

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Here are a few starting points or thoughts to factor in before investing in a DAM platform:

Do You Have a Globally Distributed Team with Many External Agents or Freelancers?

Marketers, including corporate marketing teams will often choose to outsource a part of their marketing efforts to external agencies or freelancers. But for these agencies and freelancers, ensuring the right communication and collaterals are being used is key to driving brand consistency. DAM platforms can be useful for globally distributed teams, even those who don’t outsource a lot of their marketing efforts. Because it allows these teams to ensure every sales or marketing and even customer service team has the most recently updated brand assets and content collaterals easily accessible to them when needed.

Do you have a Lengthy, Document-Heavy Prospecting Cycle or Customer Lifecycle?

B2B Sales is known to be a little more complex than B2C. A typical B2B prospecting cycle will need the support of different types of collaterals like case studies, PPTs, whitepapers, ebooks and even researched articles to support every outreach, depending on what stage of the buying journey the prospect is at.

The onus usually lies on a central marketing or corporate team to create these assets regularly and update them when needed. But as new members join the team across global regions, ensuring that everyone has the most recent version becomes more important and is often missed, at least in smaller businesses.

This is where a DAM platform can be used to drive easier collaboration and even boost how new marketers or new sales reps who are joining the company are onboarded. Quicker onboarding of reps can actually enable faster ROI because it reduces the back and forth between the new member and their team and allows them the opportunity to start selling or marketing from the word go.

Do Any of Your Existing MarTech or SalesTech Platforms Support Similar DAM-like Features?

The idea behind ensuring a team sports the most optimized martech or salestech stack is: better integration across the tools being used and having fewer tools within the system.

A lot of times, martech and salestech tools offer features that overlap with each other. Yet, certain tools might need to be adopted additionally if a team needs a stronger feature-set for a certain use case.

While DAM platforms can allow better collaboration and seamless sharing of the right documents and collaterals for more streamlined sales and marketing journeys, a leaner team that uses a CRM like HubSpot for instance, might also find value in using HubSpot’s inbuilt DAM-like features instead of adopting a dedicated DAM. Platforms like HubSpot allow users to centrally store these type of assets for easy access as needed.

This is where seasoned marketing or sales leaders need to identify whether their existing tech stacks can support the team’s need or whether a dedicated tool will be more useful, based on the team’s current collaboration challenges and near-term goals.

Understanding the Benefits of a DAM platform Before Taking a Decision

Before investing in any new martech or salestech tool, marketers and sales teams need to know where their core challenges lie, whether a new tool is a requirement to address them, whether their budget aligns to the costs of the adoption. There is always an alternative to every type of tech solution in the market. Knowing what a DAM can potentially do to boost efforts and streamline ROI is just a starting point.

DAM platforms can be useful, depending on what situation a team evaluating these type of technologies is at. DAM platforms help drive consistent brand messaging and experiences and can reduce the time taken to train new hires.

To drive the right ROI from a new DAM adoption though, it is crucial to first define the process, create a framework and know what will be measured to evaluate whether the tool will be a good-fit for the long-term.

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