As a modern building materials manufacturer, you have multimedia files. A lot of them. These could be product images, infographics, videos, and much more.
When these files start to number in the thousands, managing them all can become overwhelming. Collaborating on them internally, distributing them to the right stakeholders, and sharing them with your customers at the right times can all end up being a huge hassle.
In 2023 and beyond, you won’t want your sales, marketing, R&D, and other processes hampered by an inability to manage your media files well. Fortunately, effective tools and methods for media asset management (MAM) are here to help.
Here, we’ll take a closer look at what MAM properly entails, and discuss the best solution a building product company can ask for when it comes to effectively organizing and using their media assets.
Media Asset Management: A Definition
Simply put, media asset management (or MAM) is the practice of storing, distributing, and organizing the various media files a company has developed and collected.
Most enterprise companies have amassed a large assortment of media assets including video files, audio files, complex images, and more. Building materials manufacturers aren’t exempt.
You may, for example, have a collection of videos for use on product description web pages and blog posts, training webinars meant for professional installers, long sales presentations for use at trade shows, and a gallery of images for use in social media advertising.
Whatever form your media assets happen to take, keeping them organized will make it far easier for your team to put them to use. In theory, you could build your own media asset management system with a combination of shared folders and in-house servers.
The problem with that approach? It’s decentralized…meaning it can quickly become hard to keep track of all your assets and changes that are made to them. Files that need to be accessible at all times suddenly can’t be accessed or even located, which can hamper projects and even jeopardize promising deals.
A formal media asset management software tool is a far better solution.
With proper MAM software at your disposal, you’ll have a single, secure central location for all forms of media your business uses. In just a few clicks, anyone on your team with the proper permissions will be able to find the assets they need to complete tasks and serve customers.
Building product companies that leverage high-quality MAM systems will notice a night-and-day difference in their ability to effectively use their media for every business purpose.
Differences Between MAM and Digital Asset Management
It’s easy enough to regard media asset management and digital asset management as synonyms. To be sure, they’re quite similar. There are some key differences that are important to understand, however.
Typically, the term media asset management is used when video files are the asset in question. MAM software is particularly keyed on helping users manage and edit video files for use in various applications.
Given the size of video files — Thin Pig Media reports that just a minute of video can take up 60 megabytes at a minimum — it’s important to have a dedicated system for storing and organizing your video assets. That’s what a MAM does, while also adeptly handling large image and audio files.
By contrast, a digital asset management tool tends to be much more general in scope. It will still offer useful video management features, but it goes beyond video to include the handling of other types of files, such as brochures, catalogs, memos, and other documents.
How Does MAM Software Help Building Materials Manufacturers?
If you have a trove of video assets just waiting to be leveraged — but they’re not being put to use in any meaningful way, and they’re simply hard to find amongst a giant haystack of files, a MAM tool is worth looking into.
Implementing media asset management software can benefit a building materials manufacturer in a variety of ways:
Improves Efficiency
Perhaps the biggest benefit of centralizing your media assets with a MAM is the gain in productivity you’ll experience. According to IDC research, even modest-sized companies lose millions each year due to inefficiency.
How often do people on your team waste time looking for videos and images they need to use? How commonly do you have to recreate assets, because the first versions can’t be located?
If you’re like many building materials manufacturers, the answer to both questions is “too often.” Using a dedicated MAM tool can eliminate that wasted time and effort right away.
Reduces Costs
A more efficient process for retrieving and working with media files is ultimately a more affordable process, since fewer employee hours are going to be used in the pursuit of impossible-to-find video, images, and audio.
Also, investing in a premium media asset management system will be far less costly than cobbling together a patchwork of other platforms.
Empowers the Sales Team
In most organizations, the sales reps are the ones who are out on the front lines, engaging with leads and securing new clients.
Given their importance, it’s a given that your salespeople should have access to every asset (especially powerful ones like product-related videos and images) they could need to do their best work. A MAM system can make those media assets easier to access and use than ever before.
Elevates Channel Partner Relationships
Not only will streamlined media asset management help your sales team achieve better results…it can work wonders for your partners as well.
Whether it’s a retailer selling your products or a contractor using them in a home renovation, they’ll do their jobs more successfully and forge stronger connections with end consumers when you make your high-value media assets easier for them to retrieve.
Give local channel partners this kind of experience working with your brand, and they’ll become natural fans.
Boosts Your Overall Marketing
For every building materials company, marketing is an eternal struggle.
As consumer expectations evolve, it’s always important to find new, innovative ways to showcase your products and reach a larger segment of your audience. After all, a healthy business should grow at least 10% per year, according to the Harvard Business Review.
Leveraging a MAM tool can play a huge role in boosting leads and sales while making life in the marketing department easier.
How? Your team will be able to put together effective campaigns faster. Plus, because you’re using your persuasive visual assets more efficiently, you’ll garner higher levels of response from your pool of potential customers.
What to Look For in a Great Media Asset Management Platform
Convinced of the power of utilizing a high-quality MAM platform to manage your digital media? Great. Your next step is to pick the right platform for the job.
There are plenty of options on the market, but not all of them will be a great fit. Consider the following:
Robust Security
It’s important to remember the new platform you decide to use is going to be home to very valuable digital assets.
That said, strong security features are non-negotiable. An article from Comparitech reports that a whopping 45% of companies across the U.S. dealt with a breach of some sort within just a single year (2020-2021).
In addition to making sure your MAM software aligns with standard security protocols, you’ll also want strong access controls. This will allow you to grant entry to only those team members with appropriate uses for your media files.
Ease of Access
A quality platform will make your media assets easy to access for everyone who does have the right permissions. With quick logins to a cloud-based platform that houses all your media, no one in your sales, marketing, or product development teams will have to endure a long wait before they can continue with their work.
A Proven Track Record
Ideally, you’ll want to be able to depend on your chosen MAM tool for years to come. Once your digital assets are all loaded and parked, your MAM platform should remain active for the foreseeable future so you can keep adding, revising, and retrieving assets as needed.
Look for platforms that have established their place in the market and earned the trust of other enterprise businesses.
A Wide Array of Features
While the suite of features included within a digital asset management software will look pretty similar from one platform to the next, it’s still important to review what’s offered by each one.
Some of the many capabilities to watch for include collaboration in the editing process, editing in the cloud, an established review and approval process, and more.
The Ability to Integrate
Of course, a quality MAM tool won’t suddenly become the only piece of software employed by your organization. You’ll want to be sure it can integrate seamlessly with the other software solutions you use.
Fortunately, the #1 MAM software for building materials manufacturers is now here: RevBase. It gives you unprecedented control over all the high-impact media assets that matter to your brand.
As a best-in-class DAM platform with media management prowess, RevBase lets you easily store every business-critical asset, from large video, image, and audio files to lengthy technical guides, written content pieces, and much more.
You’ll be able to grant access to all the right stakeholders and personnel easily, and actually understand which assets are being downloaded and utilized the most, enabling better decision-making and more effective customer outreach.
RevBase: The Ideal MAM Solution for Modern Building Materials Manufacturers
Managing your media files through a haphazard collection of email threads, shared folders, and computer hard drives is less than ideal, to say the least. With such an approach, you’ll waste countless hours looking for the assets you need, and some are sure to go missing along the way.
Want greater media management power on your side? Look no further than RevBase.
From the marketing department, to your sales reps and beyond…your entire team will be able to rely on RevBase to retrieve, collaborate on, and use key video, audio, and image files more efficiently than ever before.
If you want to see how much more robust and reliable your media asset management can be, schedule your demo of RevBase today!