How can B2B marketers optimize a digital asset workflow that combines best practices for search findability both externally and within your organization?
With the global Digital Asset Management (DAM) market valued at $3.4 billion in 2019, and expected to reach $8.5 billion by 2025, according to study data from IMARC, it’s little wonder that more B2B marketers are looking at and utilizing solutions that help with search findability. Another recent report shows that the global DAM market size is expected to climb to $10.2 billion by 2027, representing a rise of 18.3 percent from 2021 levels.
From better external search engine findability to increased internal search efficiency, let’s take a look at just what digital assets are, and explore some of the solutions B2B marketers are using to manage ever-expanding digital content.
What Are Digital Assets In B2B Marketing
Just what is a digital asset, anyhow?
As we first explored in Why B2B Marketers Should Give a DAM: Top Tips on Digital Asset Management, digital assets are simply any computer files, stored anywhere — whether on your phone, tablet, desktop, network, or in the cloud.
Digital Asset Management — known as DAM, is a category of software that runs either on a local computer network or in the cloud, and is built to ingest and make it easy to organize an unlimited number of files — all those digital assets that business marketers create and use daily.
The more complex your marketing strategies and brand or business are, the greater the benefits of DAM will be, especially when accumulated over time.
The pandemic has also brought to light certain weaknesses for some businesses, as remote workers have placed additional strains on internal systems not necessarily designed for unified online access to digital asset libraries.
So how does DAM technology help with getting your content found?
Better Search Findability Externally
Most of the same signals search engines use to determine which online content is the best for solving the questions people are asking also help organizations with internal findability efforts, which means that well-optimized content successfully serves both purposes.
This dual power makes optimizing content and the individual elements that make up digital assets a smart choice for B2B marketers.
When potential customers can find your content through search, digital asset optimization has more often than not played an important role in ranking well within search engine result pages (SERPs).
Search marketers also benefit from a powerful and properly optimized DAM system, being able to systematically find internal search campaign assets, analytics data contained in spreadsheets or other formats, in ways that help make more data-informed search marketing efforts easier.
In many ways, the so-called findability of search marketing goes naturally well with a smart DAM solution, as both are centered around finding things — whether in the form of search engine query answers or finding a file you know you have but haven’t been able to quickly find until the arrival of a DAM system.
Better Findability For Your Organization
If your organization is like most others in the digital technology and B2B marketing sector today, you’re faced with more data in more locations than ever before — information that is likely ripe for optimization using digital asset management best-practices and techniques.
By nature B2B marketing involves large quantities of content in all its various digital forms, and a powerful DAM system enhances marketing by making it easy to find all the digital assets a business has ever created, both for current campaigns and when gathering past performance and return on investment (ROI) data.
DAM helps businesses elegantly and efficiently keep track of the entirety of their digital assets going back to their earliest files, preserving digital histories, and allowing teams to:
- Organize in multiple ways using many different views, such as timelines and maps
- Perform advanced searches such as “show me all photos from 2018 taken in winter that contain both our old spokesperson and our new one, and which contain a blue car and which were taken at night using a Canon camera older than 2015, which we haven’t yet used in a public campaign.”
Trying to do this could take ages to do manually, but a good DAM can make the task a snap, and ends up saving a great deal of time in the long run.
“The more complex your marketing strategies and organization are, the greater the benefits of digital asset management (DAM) will be, especially over time.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis Click To Tweet
Bringing It All Together With A Digital Asset Management Solution
It’s entirely possible to implement and consistently use your own digital asset management plan, making use of your organization’s existing software and processes, however this approach will have a hard time matching the efficiency and effectiveness of making the jump to a dedicated and purpose-built digital asset management solution.
I took a look at over 30 of the leading players in the DAM world in our Why Digital Asset Management Matters in B2B Marketing, with solutions running the gamut from popular photo-centric consumer-oriented packages such as Adobe Lightroom, to enterprise workflow DAM systems including Canto and Adobe Experience Manager Assets.
That list was only a sampling of the many DAM solutions available, and with new or revised DAM providers entering the market regularly, such as Pics.io, if you’re searching for the ideal DAM match it can pay off to test both the established players and newcomers.
Jump Through The Digital Looking Glass
It doesn’t take a fairy-tale mirror to create your own digital adventures in wonderland, just the proper planning, implementation, and consistent use of your own DAM system.
We hope the digital asset optimization areas we’ve touched on here will help guide you as you move ahead into 2022 and beyond, to a future that’s more findable than ever.
No matter how you slice it, creating award-winning B2B marketing takes considerable time and effort, which is why many firms choose to work with a top digital marketing agency such as TopRank Marketing. Contact us today to learn how we can help, as we’ve done for businesses ranging from LinkedIn, Dell and 3M to Adobe, Oracle, monday.com and others.
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