How to Sell DAM to Your Manager (for Designers, Marketers, & Creative Directors)

A while back, our President, Steve, wrote a blog post on how to sell DAM to your manager. But because selling new software to your boss is still one of the hardest parts of the job, we thought we’d get a little more specific. So we’ve put together a few strategies just for designers, marketers, and creative directors who are making the case for digital asset management (DAM) to their executives. Because, let’s face it, CMOs are interested in different KPIs than VPs of Sales.

How to Sell DAM to Your Manager: Designers

The DAM case for designers? Time saved and more meaningful work completed. Think of a world where you’re not fielding email requests for your latest logo, product photo, or in-progress campaign creative. Are you picturing it? It’s as glorious as it sounds.

The average creative marketer spends 65 hours a year searching for digital assets. Yep, 65 hours. every. year. Are you imagining all of the work you could accomplish with 65 extra hours? It’s a lot. Bring that number to your manager and explain that with DAM, everyone in your company, and appropriate external partners, can access the digital assets they need with a single click and a simple password (if so desired).

Keep the work that’s not quite done yet under wraps, archive old logos so other departments are unable to use them, and enjoy preset formatting parameters that make it impossible for your non-design-savvy coworkers to stretch, shrink, or otherwise soil your carefully crafted assets. Oh, and Templating allows you to create base designs for simple projects like branded business cards, letterhead, and more, so you spend less time on mundane tasks and more on the work that matters. Which leads us to our next case for DAM …

How to Sell DAM to Your Manager: Marketers

That Templating feature we were just talking about? Yeah, it allows you to create approved marketing collateral without the help of your already-overworked designer. Get marketing projects out the door faster and without any of the branding missteps you might pay for later.

And those 65 hours we mentioned above? Those count for you as well! Spend less time hunting down images, copy, or brand guidelines. With DAM, everything is in one place, tagged for easy search, and organized intuitively — unlike your bulky internal server or scattered Google Drive. Permissions are set once, so you never have to worry about not having access to the files you need, and you can access your DAM wherever and whenever you need it.

You spend a lot of time and resources putting together comprehensive content marketing plans, social media campaigns, and more. With DAM you can easily share those strategies and results with key stakeholders. Give your executives transparent access to your results and your wins in real time.

Plus, with Insights, you can track who’s accessing which documents and files, and decide where follow-up might be necessary. The bottom line for marketers? DAM makes your team more efficient and better able to track successful campaigns, along with which assets were key to that success. When you look good, your boss looks good. Get a DAM, and you might both just get those promotions you’ve been eyeing.

How to Sell DAM to Your Manager: Creative Directors

Maybe one of your creatives has made the case for DAM to you and now you’re trying to figure out how to make it to your manager. We can help there too.

Rand McNally design director Joerg Metzner says of DAM, “Brandfolder has been the perfect platform to make our new brand assets, like logos and product images, easily and quickly available to the entire organization. I love knowing whether an asset is up to date, or whether it needs the newest version added or created.”

When your team is running at its most efficient, it can build a stronger brand through design, copy, and marketing efforts. When your marketers aren’t waiting for approved design, or bottle-necked waiting to know if a new campaign is ready to launch, they can implement, measure, and improve the work they’re doing faster, leading to better results for the company.

When your designers aren’t spending their most productive hours linking logo attachments to a bevy of email requests, or tracking down the person in sales who used a product photo from eight years ago in his last pitch meeting, they can get back to high-value work that leads to high-value results.

And when you’re able to see who in your department is accessing assets, your brand guide, important procedural documents, and more, that allows you to manage from above, without having to micro-manage your staff. The right DAM can unleash the creative potential of your department. So what are you waiting for?

When All Else Fails

No manager can argue with numbers. When in doubt, share this digital asset management ROI calculator with your executives and watch their eyes light up when they see how much your company can save with DAM.