Sitecore DAM

Finding assets within a CMS platform can be a headache for busy marketing teams. Disorganised structures, poor naming conventions and data structures that have not been sanitised or archived, all contribute to the frustrations of a marketer. Enter the Sitecore Digital Asset Management feature (Sitecore DAM). Sitecore DAM works seamlessly with the other capabilities offered by Sitecore Content Hub to combat these challenges, making the day-to-day use of the platform effortless.

Improve efficiency and consistency with Sitecore DAM

Sitecore DAM enables organisations to create, store and search media assets to make them available across multiple channels. It’s easy to get into a situation where media is duplicated because you cannot locate a previously uploaded asset. This is not efficient and results in a bloated asset library which has many negative effects. These include:

• time lost in searching for assets
• increasing frustration levels

and storing an unnecessary amount of assets due to duplication, which will impact costs of storage.

First-hand experience has given us insight into business departments that have multiple media repositories that are all managed independently of each other. This not only increases the number of duplicate assets in the business, but also means there are inconsistences with:

• The quality of media assets being used cross-departments
• A range of naming conventions being used that are not cohesive amongst departments
• Brand inconsistency

If a business can introduce a central digital asset management tool such as Sitecore DAM, the above challenges becomes manageable. This can save huge amounts of time and improve consistency of media throughout the entire business and across all distribution channels e.g. desktop, mobile, tablet, print.

Who is Sitecore DAM for?

There isn’t a rule about who needs a DAM to manage their assets. It’s more a question of who wants to manage and organise the lifecycle of their assets right from creation to archive. If your assets are important to you and you’re an organisation that is frequently creating content and campaigns with rich media, then a DAM should be considered part of your landscape.

Manage all media assets from a centralised location

Sitecore DAM provides you with the ability to manage all your assets, from photos to videos to documents and more, and in a centralised location. It works as a fully integrated solution for the Sitecore Experience Platform.

For marketing teams, who are the ones primarily using the CMS, it provides them with the ability to find any assets, quickly, through its advanced search capabilities like:

• faceting options
• full text search
• thumbnail searching
• custom queries.

More benefits include the capability to:

• Save and share your search queries: this provides the confidence that you’re going to get the same results the next time you are looking for a specific type of asset.
• Preview in your browser: on the back of running a search query, you can preview the results in a browser, allowing you to dig in to the metadata for an item and also understand its link references to other content within the system.
• Zip files: Sitecore DAM provides the ability to “inspect” zip files that have been uploaded to the repository
• Make use of meta data: information such as location and language can be associated to an asset
• Bulk operations: edit, download, delete assets in batches. You can perform these actions across multiple search queries, which provides efficiency in performing these repetitive tasks.
• Multi-device: digitally savvy organisations will provide assets across multiple channels. DAM will help you manage the content across multiple devices ensuring the correct asset is used for the correct channel

Consistency and effort are the big savings here along with brand consistency. If you implement DAM in the correct way, you organise your content in a well-considered architecture, you tag your content appropriately – then the benefits are simple:

1. Time
2. Effort
3. Consistency

Your team saves time, effort and frustration because assets are easy to find. This allows your team to work more efficiently and deliver content and campaigns, allowing you as a business to move faster.

Your business is empowered to provide richer content and a more engaging experience.

Offering integrated solutions with easy implementation

Sitecore DAM offers you an integrated solution that helps marketing teams manage and deliver their content lifecycle. DAM offers other capabilities via the Sitecore Content Hub to complement the overall experience platform.

Prior to Sitecore DAM, customers and partners have explored other system integrations to achieve the DAM capabilities. One of our experiences is WebDAM, although achievable, came with its challenges. Having a fully integrated solution within the Sitecore eco-system, solves the challenges that integrating with a third-party solution introduces.

Finally, Sitecore DAM can be used as your asset repository, not just for your website, but for your entire organisation. This ensures that all departments are using the same asset for the same purpose, therefore ensuring brand consistency and asset re-use instead of repetition.

Given we are focusing on Sitecore’s offering, the installation and configuration of Sitecore DAM is far less complex than a 3rd party offering. Sitecore DAM is intrinsically integrated to Sitecore Experience platform through the installation and configuration of a module. It has been tested against Sitecore 8.2, Sitecore 9.1 and Sitecore 9.2, as well as Sitecore Experience Commerce versions 9.0.2 and 9.0.3.

Any Sitecore developer familiar with the Sitecore platform and how Sitecore modules/plugins are installed, will be able to implement Sitecore DAM to their instance through the use of the standard tools.

Talk to us about Sitecore DAM

We’re a top tier Platinum Sitecore Partner, that helps enterprise level organisations achieve their digital strategy goals. We have over 20 years’ experience in delivering award-winning digital solutions.

Not currently using Sitecore? Get in touch with our expert team and book a Sitecore demo.