Building materials manufacturers often have large, even overwhelming, collections of digital files. If they’re not easily found and used, productivity can quickly decline when it comes to sales, marketing, and other aspects of daily business.
Using high-quality digital asset management (DAM) software is one of the best solutions to this problem. This type of tool is meant to centralize and organize files for maximum efficiency.
How much does a DAM cost, and is it worth budgeting for? The upfront costs can vary based on a number of factors — but you may well find it’s a worthwhile investment for the peace of mind, productivity, and actual long-term savings you’ll get out of it.
Here, we’ll break down what really goes into the cost of a DAM…and why the potential cost-savings make it something to seriously consider for your building materials business.
Factors That Affect Cost
Every DAM platform is different. Some are capable of being a one-stop shop for organizing all of your company’s valuable marketing, sales, and product assets out of the box. Others are much more limited in what can be achieved.
For that reason, you might come across a wide range of prices for DAM software. What matters most, however, is the right fit.
With 51% of businesses planning to increase their 2023 IT budgets according to Spiceworks, it’s understandable to want to invest wisely. Investing in the right DAM for your building material company will add priceless benefits to your marketing and sales processes, as well as your overall productivity.
Here are some of the different factors that have an impact on a DAM’s cost:
- Search functionality. More advanced DAMs will have deep search capabilities for locating assets — helpful for building materials manufacturers with tons of product images, brochures, spec sheets, installation files, and more to filter through.
- User access. An enterprise-level DAM will support secure access for hundreds of users regardless of location, while also providing robust admin controls for managing user privileges.
- Storage capacity. Companies hosting hundreds or thousands of files, and constantly generating more, will need a scale-friendly DAM solution that can handle it all without hiccups.
- Automation. A decent DAM will come with automated workflows that can instantly assign assets for feedback and approval, notify specific team members of new content, and provide visibility into file edit histories.
- Integration. Seamless integration via API with leading third-party software, such as marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, is a key hallmark of higher-end platforms.
- Reliability. The best DAM solutions tend to be cloud platforms built on a software provider’s deep experience and continued innovations in asset management.
As you might expect, DAM software with the strongest feature sets will cost more due to the resources involved in creating a best-in-class business tool.
Can a DAM Save You Money?
In a word, yes! The right digital asset management tool is the ticket to quickly getting key assets around your company to the right people at the right time, on demand.
The easier it is to share and collaborate on business-critical sales collateral, marketing content, design files, and product documentation, the more you’ll boost harmony and productivity. That sets the stage for a smoother sales process and lower costs.
Here’s more detail on how a premium DAM can reduce costs your building materials brand by a substantial amount:
Reduce Duplicate Work and Wasted Time
Are your employees engaged in repetitive, time-draining tasks on a daily basis? Especially when it comes to working with important files and documents?
If you’re not sure, it’s something to quickly look into and get a handle on — it could be seriously costing your business materials brand. According to the Asana Anatomy of Work Index 2022 as quoted by BusinessWire, employees waste 6 working weeks each year, in part due to duplicated work.
The right DAM solution will solve this issue for you. Once you implement it, your staff can avoid wasting hours searching for and re-creating documents and images they can’t find, thus taking them away from more valuable tasks.
Instead, you’ll have a centralized digital hub where all your assets are stored and easily found. This lets your users find exactly what they need in seconds, without the frustration…enabling them to actually use those assets faster.
Let’s say one of your sales reps is in talks with a potential new local dealer. You have a detailed brochure about why dealers should partner with your brand. If that brochure is impossible to find, however, your sales rep can appear unprepared and the deal might be lost.
A DAM can fix this issue and allow your sales rep to retrieve the right asset on their phone or tablet in minutes, instead of losing hours or days to that task. The sooner important assets can be located, the sooner they can be used to drive sales, share with local channel partners like dealers and contractors, and educate consumers.
Boost Efficiency
Another benefit offered by a good DAM tool is efficiency. Your personnel will especially see the importance and impact of this: 46% of employees feel as though digital tools make them more productive, according to Zippia.
When it comes to using your assets more efficiently — pieces of marketing content like blog posts and product walkthrough videos, or sales tools like trade show materials, data sheets, and catalogs — a DAM can help you simplify every part of the job.
For example, a good DAM can help streamline and automate repetitive work such as editing files, notifying staff of changes, and routing orders of print collateral to the right place.
Errors are also reduced with the tracking of every file’s version history, which enables staff to select the most up-to-date versions of files each time. Access control also prevents individual team members from changing or deleting assets that they shouldn’t.
The hours saved, effort spared, and frustration avoided makes for a more efficient work environment. The end result? You’ll be saving money and getting more important tasks done.
Improve Collaboration
In an effective organization, there are no roadblocks to team collaboration. As a building materials manufacturer needing to interface with both internal stakeholders and external channel partners, it pays to do whatever you can to improve this aspect of business.
A good DAM, again, can be a solid partner.
When assets are centralized in one place — categorized unambiguously, and easily retrieved and shared — it’s easier for your staff to work together. Team members will be able to rapidly retrieve materials for both in-person and virtual meetings, and see edits and implement feedback faster.
Smoother collaboration also matters when dealing with your local channel partners. For example, if a local dealer needs a bulk order of your brochures, but they want to request certain changes to your materials due to their inventory capacity, a full-featured DAM platform makes this fairly simple.
In short, a good DAM will eliminate the need to buy additional tools to communicate with staff and your outside partners. You’ll reduce your technology costs, and have an easier time overall doing business person-to-person.
Sharpen Your Brand Image
A consistent, focused building materials brand is one that customers trust, and one that garners loyalty and respect from local pros and dealers, as you might gather from these stats:
- An Edelman study quoted by Exploding Topics suggests that 81% of consumers need to trust a brand before they buy.
- A survey from Marq suggests consistent branding can lead to revenue increases of at least 10-20%.
These are key incentives, if you have lots of assets to contend with, to manage your assets and maintain your brand’s cohesiveness with a good DAM platform.
For one, a good DAM tool ensures all your brand-related assets, such as logos, up-to-date marketing images, and videos, can be found in one place.
Whether your team needs to present sales materials to channel partners, update your website, or put together other kinds of collateral, all the relevant files are there for fast retrieval and usage. Any staff member can see which marketing messages, visual elements, and designs have final approval and can make the appropriate choice.
Plus, because you’re no longer losing essential assets to the void, you’ll save lots of money on rebranding or redesigning assets. A good DAM tool makes it easy to find every important file and customize elements on the fly.
The result? Your customers and channel partners get to see more consistent branding. You’ll present your company as a solid, stable, building materials manufacturer to do business with — and spend less to do so.
Automate Notifications
Let’s say you’re expanding your product lines. Your sales reps need new collateral that consists of brochures and sell sheets created by the marketing team.
How are you going to notify every rep about each new content piece, especially if a large volume of new assets are involved? You can save lots of time — and allow sales processes to proceed without a hitch — by automating this task with a high-quality DAM.
With a quality DAM platform, you can allow users to subscribe to specific updates on the types of materials they regularly need to access. You’ll be able to streamline and automate updates as well.
As a result, each asset can get to the right person on time, before it’s even requested.
Maintain Secure Access Control
Security is becoming a bigger deal every day for companies across industries, including building materials manufacturers. Sometimes the threat is internal.
How do you limit user rights for employees that shouldn’t have access to certain assets? The best way to do this is with a solid DAM platform.
It allows you to restrict asset editing, hide prerelease or work-in-progress documents from the view of unauthorized personnel, and mark certain files confidential (so that only those with the proper credentials can have access).
In the end, you’ll be able to simplify and save money on security audits, to help avoid costly recovery from unauthorized asset alterations and data breaches.
The #1 DAM for Building Materials Manufacturers Who Want to Do More and Save More
Dealing with an overwhelming number of assets is a reality for modern businesses.
As a building materials manufacturer, you have tons of product materials, marketing and sales content pieces, and technical spec sheets. That’s not to mention smaller elements like brand images and videos. It gets overwhelming fast, and the disorganization might be hurting your bottom line.
How do you boost productivity, while substantially reducing your costs in the process? Use the top digital asset management platform for building product companies: RevBase.
RevBase helps you securely store and distribute all your marketing, sales, and product-related digital assets with ease. It provides secure access control, workflow automation, and powerful editing capabilities that will make your team more productive.
In the end, the savings will show up. With less need to invest in secondary tools, smoother collaboration among your staff, and instant access to the most up-to-date assets for marketing and sales, you’ll reach more customers, close deals faster…and realize more savings than you might imagine.
Ready to explore the possibilities with RevBase? Request your quote today!