Digital Asset Management (DAM) for Retail

The success of modern retail largely depends on high-quality content. Expressive photos, creative videos, and detailed blog posts help draw attention to products, making them stand out from the competition. Therefore, all large companies operating in this field today have content management departments in their marketing teams. And even small online stores have employees responsible for this area of activity. 

But almost all businesses, regardless of their scale, face the same problems. Sooner or later, there is so much content that it is no longer possible to organize it using conventional methods. This leads to chaos, which significantly reduces the productivity of marketing departments: it takes much time to find the right materials and the areas of authority and responsibility of certain employees are blurred. Moreover, the number of critical mistakes increases: product photos are messed up, important features disappear from descriptions, and irrelevant videos are added to blog posts.

In this case, you shouldn't try to scale your existing system to accommodate new volumes of activity — instead, you need to look for a fundamentally new solution. It can be a digital asset management system for the retail industry (DAM). We will tell you in more detail what this platform is, how it works, and in what real-life scenarios it will be useful for online stores and other retailers. 

Why Retailers Need DAM

To begin with, a DAM is designed to store, distribute, quickly search and retrieve, share, and publish digital assets. Some platforms in this category also have file editing, version comparison, and usage analytics features. Most of them allow you to customize file-sharing rules and access levels for individual users or workgroups. 

Thus, the main goal of using a digital asset management system for retail is to create a centralized repository for all types of content. This allows you to solve the following problems:

• Wasting time searching for necessary multimedia materials and documents. When collateral is placed in separate folders or even in different local storages, work processes become less efficient as employees are looking for the necessary materials instead of doing their direct responsibilities. What’s more, there’s the risk of irretrievable loss of critical content.
• Differences in content policies across communication channels. When different teams take materials from different sources, this leads to a violation of the corporate identity. Such content may not be consistent with the company's strategic goals or tone of voice.
• The appearance of critical errors that disrupt normal workflows. Without a digital asset management system as a source for retail, employees may select incorrect file versions that have not been approved for final publication. This can lead to both minor problems and large-scale scandals with multimillion-dollar losses for the business.
• Reduced efficiency of work processes. When each team performs its part of the work using different tools and without coordinating details with other employees, it negatively affects the final result.  

In general, the use of a digital asset management system for retail services allows you to change the usual approach in which speed and quality are opposed to each other. DAM increases the productivity of the company's marketing department and improves the quality of the final product. 

By the way, this applies not only to retail. In our article, you can read about the digital asset management industries where DAM platforms are proving to be most effective. 

Benefits of DAM in Retail and Apparel

Let's learn more about digital asset management (DAM) software benefits using the example of Pics.io. 

DAM software is a complex platform that has many functions and areas of integration into workflows. It can increase the productivity of the company's marketing department in almost all aspects. Let's learn more about its benefits using the example of Pics.io. 

1. Centralized Storage for All Marketing and Brand Materials

Businesses that offer one or two products are rare. In most cases, retailers have dozens of brands and thousands of products. Sometimes, there are even several branches or divisions of the company with their own branding. And all their materials require systematization and cataloging to improve the efficiency of work processes. 

Cloud storage is usually used for this purpose. However, their standard tools are not enough to effectively sort hundreds of thousands of files belonging to different brands, departments, and projects. Nevertheless, you can significantly expand cloud storages functionality using Pics.io, a digital asset management system for retail and apparel. It works with both Google Drive and Amazon S3, offering out-of-the-box solutions for quick integration into existing workflows. You don't have to increase costs by purchasing additional disk space. But you can also opt for a Pics.io storage, which is convenient, multifunctional, and secure. 

Pics.io platform supports many digital asset formats:

• Images
• Videos
• Sketches
• Text documents
• Audio
• Vector graphics
• Spreadsheets
• 3D models, etc. 

You can even add links to external sources as a separate type of digital asset. This allows you to link projects to specific web pages or create mood boards for designers. 

2. Organized, Up-To-Date, and Easily-Searchable Library

Similar to popular cloud storage services, Pics.io allows you to create a convenient file management system with a multi-level folder structure. You can choose how you want to catalog your materials — by departments, projects, dates, etc. Pics.io also offers a much more powerful advanced search function than popular cloud storages. The main difference is the possibility to add metadata to digital assets and later use these tags for file search. 

The platform even allows you to fill in blank lines using AI to generate keywords or create additional custom metadata fields for faster search. 

3. One Place for All Product Information

Product cards are among the most important elements of online stores. They must be filled out perfectly, as this affects the level of website conversion and business sales. Moreover, mistakes in them can result in customer dissatisfaction if the card’s content and the actual product differ. Consequently, company can have considerable losses because of product returns, complaints, and even lawsuits. 

Pics.io, a digital asset management system for retail shops, will help you achieve the perfect order in filling out product cards. We mentioned above that it allows you to create custom fields. You can use them to mark:

• logistics codes (SKUs);
• brands;
• sizes;
• key characteristics, such as smartphone storage capacity, shoe material, or clothing color;
• modifications or series;
• marketing campaign tags. 

Another important feature of Pics.io is a ready-made integration with Shopify, a commercial CMS. The extension for this platform allows you to automatically bulk upload images to product cards by scanning SKUs in file names or custom metadata fields. Thanks to this, you can upload hundreds of images at a time, saving hours of work time. 

4. Customized Access to Brand Assets and Easy File Sharing

File sharing is one of the key functions of any digital asset management system for retail. Pics.io allows you to customize access rights for individual users or work groups:

• Allow them to view, comment, or edit specific materials;
• Allow or prohibit them from sharing and downloading files;

For example, employees can distribute only those digital assets that are in the area of responsibility of each department of the company — product photos for designers, advertising banners for marketers, stock images for content managers, etc. Another approach is to set the editing permission only for direct performers, commenting — for other participants in the workflow, and viewing — for the entire team. This will ensure that assets are shared but prevent accidental file damage. 

Pics.io works as an excellent brand asset management tool. You can save and manage all brand materials of different file formats and access them whenever it’s needed. 

Sharing and receiving files both internally and externally is possible with the next 2 features: 

In this way, Pics.io allows you to create a two-way digital asset-sharing system between your repository and external workflow participants. The tools described above make it as convenient and secure as possible. 

5. Content Workflow Automation and Simple Content Reuse

By reusing content, you can maximize its usefulness and gain additional benefits without incurring extra costs. It's a common practice for many companies to reuse materials from their previous advertising campaigns, restore old product cards when products are returned to the lineup, reformat blog articles, etc. To do all this, you need a functional storage to manage all these materials. 

Version control is an essential function of the digital asset management system for retail and apparel. It allows you to view all file versions, instantly return to previous proposals, and leave comments. Responsible employees can also approve or reject proposals.

If you're not sure which file version is better, Pics.io's digital asset management for the retail industry will help you compare them and see all the differences. Pics.io has a built-in graphic editor that allows you to change the resolution and proportions of an image, apply filters, choose the optimal color scheme, etc. It's very convenient for working with simple digital assets such as price tags, labels, and corporate letterheads.

Pics.io DAM also has ready-made templates for posting images on popular social media, which simplifies the work of SMM managers. That is, you can instantly download images in the necessary format, whether it’s an Instagram post or a featured pic for a YouTube video. 

6. Insights on the Use of Digital Assets

Analytics is the key to success in many business areas, including content management. Therefore, it is a mandatory component of the digital asset management systems for retail services. This Pics.io feature allows you to generate the following reports:

• General statistics on cloud storage usage — the percentage of storage and share of each file type.
• Digital asset usage details — allows you to see which files are used most often in general and in each category separately.
• Distribution analytics — the number of downloads of digital assets from websites, inboxes, and file-sharing activity using these tools.
• Employee productivity — the company's management can see who used digital assets most often, who downloaded them, and who made changes. 

Analytics helps to highlight the most valuable materials that are used in many workflows and generate the greatest return. Thanks to this, you can make important management decisions about their inclusion in future marketing campaigns, sharing with other departments, providing general access, etc. Reports also allow you to analyze the productivity of individual employees to create a system of incentives or promote specialists. 

7. Integrations

We’ve already mentioned the possibility of integrating digital asset management for retail stores with other services and applications. The Pics.io platform offers multiple integrations, which can be classified into the following groups:

• Cloud storage — Google Drive, Amazon S3;
• Graphic editors — Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator;
• Productivity services — Wrike, Easy Projects;
• Commercial platforms — Shopify, Salesforce;
• Marketing software — Hootsuite, Hubspot, Monday.com;
• Content management systems — WordPress;
• Corporate messengers — Slack, Trello, etc. 

Thanks to ready-made integration solutions, you can use digital asset management for retail shops in combination with other software to maximize their functionality. 

If you want to know who else can benefit from using digital asset management software like Pics.io, check our article here.

Conclusion

To wrap it up, using a digital asset management system like Pics.io is like putting your retail store's marketing content — pictures, videos, and blogs — in a super-organized digital library. Everything’s in one place, easy to find, and safe from getting mixed up. DAM gets everything sorted into neat, labeled boxes. You save time, avoid mistakes, and make sure your store looks great online, all because you have a smart system in place. Plus, Pics.io works with tools you're already using, like cloud storage and Shopify, so you don't have to start from scratch. In short, using a digital asset management tool means you can focus more on selling and less on sorting through digital clutter.

Did you enjoy this article? Give Pics.io a try — or book a demo with us, and we'll be happy to answer any of your questions.