The best DTC businesses have killer branding, creative and product images. To stand out and sell your products, you need high-quality visual content - and lots of it.
Most ecommerce businesses know this already. But what most haven’t realised yet is the power of digital asset management (DAM) for ecommerce. They don’t have to settle for the content chaos of storing thousands of visual assets in Drive or Dropbox.
The bottom line: using a digital asset management tool will give you a competitive advantage. A DAM is the central home for your brand’s visuals, product photography and marketing graphics. It'll maximise the value of your visuals and help you reach potential customers faster. We’ll cover how using one can help your DTC business grow.
11 ways DAM for ecommerce will help your business grow
From organising digital assets to sending them out to your marketing channels, here’s the benefits using a DAM solution, like Dash, will bring.
1. Keep everything in one place
A DAM is the perfect place to bring all your visual digital files together. That’s important assets like logos, video assets, lifestyle photography, product content and user-generated content (UGC).
When you have a single source of truth for marketing assets, everything’s easier to find. Say your ecommerce team needs product content to add to a new listing. Or your sales team wants to find assets of your new product line to show retail partners. Both can use custom fields (we’ll get to that in a moment) to search for shots of the product they’re after.
You won’t have to scroll through tiny thumbnails in your shared drive to find what you’re after, either. Dash has won awards for its UX and usability. It’s currently voted as one of the easiest-to-use DAMs according to G2, and that’s partly because of how visual the presentation is. It’s a home for your high-quality content which can finally do it justice. Here’s the Dash homepage of COAT Paints. It's looks like a beautifully-curated Pinterest board!
Pretty neat, huh?
2. Save time when you search for visual content
Think of your ecommerce DAM as a search engine for your creative files. By using a combination of AI-generated tags and your own custom fields, you can search by the actual content of your content.
Let’s take a look at Kinetics who make nail polishes. They have custom fields based on the type of asset in their Dash and attributes of the products they sell, like ‘polish category’ and ‘skin care category’.
Some other ideas for custom fields are:
- SKU
- Product codes
- Product range
- Brand (if you’re stocking products from different companies)
- Colour
- Marketing campaign
- Content creator
When you upload an image or video, Dash will automatically scan it and add tags based on the objects it can identify within it.
Combine both custom fields and AI tags together and you’ll have many ways to find your files, fast.
Being able to search like that will save you time, especially if you’re usually the one that has to hunt for assets for your colleagues. Here’s what Will from food brand TASTER, says:
“I'm saving 1-2 hours a day not having to dig up assets for people across the business. They can now find what they need directly in Dash super quickly, and if not, it takes me seconds not minutes to find what they need!”
3. Drop product shots straight into Shopify
Shopify is a popular tool for DTC brands to run their website and online stores. If you're using it too, consider picking a digital asset management solution that integrates with Shopify - like Dash. You can search for your neatly-organised content in Dash and drop them into your CMS pages and product listings, all without ever leaving Shopify. Dash’s integration will compress the images for you, so you don’t have to waste time optimising your product shots for Shopify.
{% video_player "embed_player" overrideable=False, type='hsvideo2', hide_playlist=True, viral_sharing=False, embed_button=False, autoplay=False, hidden_controls=False, loop=False, muted=False, full_width=False, width='800', height='450', player_id='102263302936', style='' %}
💡 P.S. Here's extra reading for tips on how to best optimise your images for Shopify.
4. Share files with your team and partners
Working in an ecommerce brand, you’ll regularly be file sharing with your colleagues or external users (like your ad agency).
An ecommerce DAM lets you do that easily. In Dash, just select the image or video assets you want to share and decide if you’d rather send the files by email or as a direct link.
But what about when you need to share large quantities of assets with your partners? We hear you, scroll to the next tip.
5. Help retail partners and distributors sell more of your products
Retail partners and distributors are an important sales channel. These could be online marketplaces or brick and mortar stores. Each needs assets from you, like product photography and logo variants.
Instead of laboriously sending custom zip files to each one, use Dash to set up a portal. A portal is a view of your Dash which lets visitors search for and download the assets they need, without having to login to your Dash account. You can customise your welcome message, too!
Here's an example from watering can brand Haws, who use Dash to set up unique portals for each of their 100+ retail partners around the globe.
6. Launch products quicker
When all your digital content is kept in your DAM, you don’t have to scramble to find the assets to launch new products. If everyone can find the visuals they need when they need them, your time to market will decrease.
You’ll be able to go into your digital asset management platform, find the new product images your photographer just uploaded, then drop the assets straight into your product listing. Your marketing team can use the new product content for a launch campaign and get it in front of your target audience.
And then (using portals - see above), your retail partners can access new product assets easily without having to bother you for them.
7. Get content ready for your channels, quickly
You’re ready to launch your marketing campaign. But you need your creative team to work on image edits and crops for different channels before you can launch. Frustrating, right?
Using an ecommerce DAM like Dash makes it easier for you to resize, crop and download the assets you need and get them ready for your distribution channels. Pick from social media sizes already available, or create your own preset downloads for specs you use regularly like your homepage image.
Here’s what it looks like:
8. Manage content approvals from your creators
From new product photoshoots to your influencer marketing strategy, you’ll be sourcing content from external creators. Doing so involves dealing with lots of assets at different stages of approval. If you’re not organised, it can quickly feel overwhelming.
But fear not! Say your photographer has finished shooting a season’s worth of new product imagery and has hundreds of assets ready for approval. There’s an alternative to having them send over massive zip files and going through them in your downloads folder.
Instead, set them up as a contributor in Dash and have them upload the shots. You can go through and reject the ones you don’t like and leave feedback on the ones that need work. On their end, they’ll be able to see which of their assets are still waiting for your approval. From influencers to videographers to designers, you can use the same workflow for any creator you’ve partnered with.
9. Stay on top of user-generated content (UGC)
Using micro-influencers and user-generated content in your marketing campaign can lend your brand authenticity and credibility. There’s a reason why most DTC brands are all over this.
But did you know you can use a DAM software to collect all your UGC together? Just set up a guest upload link in Dash and send this to your customers and contributors. By keeping your UGC in Dash, you’ll make it easier for other teams to use, and you can attach important information to it like expiry dates and the terms of use.
Pet food brand Forthglade uses Dash to do just that. They run their monthly ‘Dog of the Month’ competition where customers send in photographs of their canine companions via Forthglade’s website. These snaps get uploaded straight into Dash, ready for their social media campaigns.
10. Integrate with your tech stack
Digital asset management platforms don’t exist in isolation. Most of the leading providers offer integrations with some of the tools you use every day. For Dash, we’ve already covered our Shopify integration. But we also connect to Canva and Hootsuite (for working on marketing content) and Adobe Creative Cloud (ideal for your graphic design teams).
👉 Check out our full list of integrations.
11. Track your asset performance
Performance is key when you’re an ambitious ecommerce company. You need to be able to track what’s working and do more of it. The same is true for your visuals.
Take your Instagram ads as an example. You’ll want to test out different variants of ads and see which ones land the best.
Rather than keep that information in a spreadsheet, use Dash to record it against the actual visuals themselves. You're able to tag your assets by how they performed. And being able to quickly call up a bank of past graphics you’ve had success with makes it easier to commission new ones, too!
How growing ecommerce businesses use Dash
If you’re convinced your DTC brand needs digital asset management software, then look no further than Dash. Some of the world’s fastest-growing ecommerce companies have ditched Drive and Dropbox. Now they use Dash to keep on top of their digital content and speed up the time it takes to get it in front of customers:
🌿 CBD brand Goodrays use Dash to get their assets ready for ecommerce marketplaces, like Deliveroo and Amazon.
🥑 Food Huggers use Dash’s portals to give press contacts access to product shots and secure features in leading publications.
🪑 Australian furniture company RJ Living freed themselves from the chaos of Google Drive and use Dash to keep on top of their thousands of creatives.
🍕Home pizza oven brand Gozney use Dash to shorten the time it takes to get assets in front of their customers.
Want to try it out for yourself? Set up a no-strings free trial and see what you think.
Barney is the Marketing Lead for Dash. He writes about small business marketing strategies and how DTC brands can boost sales.
