Empower your growing remote workforce with DAM
| September 29, 2022
With remote and hybrid work quickly becoming the norm, managers of creative teams are hard at work finding ways to facilitate remote collaboration. But what happens to the content that comes out of that collaboration? Does it end up:
- In a Slack channel?
- On a shared drive?
- In a folder on somebody’s computer?
If a salesperson in London needs a one-pager created by a content team in California, do they know where to find it? Does sales even know the one pager exists?
Every time a remote employee struggles to find content they need, they’re suddenly stuck — bringing productivity to a grinding halt. Multiplied across a whole company, those delays add up to missed deadlines, postponed roll-outs, and lost sales opportunities.
To prevent productivity losses and empower teams to perform at their best, companies need to provide on-demand access to mission-critical content — so every employee has the resources they need at their fingertips.
Everyone’s job runs on content
Why is content distribution such a critical consideration for remote companies? Simply put, nearly everyone needs digital content to do their jobs, no matter what their role.
Sales reps need promotional materials to win over customers. Marketers, designers, and web teams need brand imagery to create collateral. And — as anyone who’s ever gotten a frantic Slack message from an executive before a meeting knows — the need for lightning-quick access to digital brand content goes all the way to the top.
People who can’t find the digital resources they need simply can’t do their jobs well. That would be a problem on any team, but the realities of remote work exacerbate the issue even more.
Why content distribution is a bigger problem for remote teams
Delays, delays, delays
Getting locked out of a folder on a shared drive is annoying at the best of times. But when the person who can give you access is in another timezone, it might be hours — or even a full business day — before a project can move forward.
Those types of delays can push back campaign launches, slow speed to market, and even cost sales as leads lose patience waiting for that updated price list.
Your team may be all over the place, but your brand identity shouldn’t be
When it comes to design choices representing your brand, consistency is key. But it’s hard to enforce brand standards when everyone is scattered around the world.
People may be using outdated or off-brand content without brand managers ever finding out about it. Some employees may even resort to making their own, unauthorized collateral. If remote workers don’t have direct access to their company’s latest brand content, they’re forced to get creative and work with what they have.
Cut off from content libraries, remote content creators have to start from scratch
We tend to think of content distribution as a one-way street: Creative and marketing teams create collateral and distribute it to everyone else. But creatives and marketers are also some of the biggest target groups for internal content distribution.
Often, the most resource-efficient way to create brand content is to remix something another designer already created. Designers sitting in the same room can easily sync up and share ideas, but what if they’re on opposite coasts?
The bigger your remote creative team grows, the harder it can be for designers, video producers, and copywriters to keep track of existing content they might use as inspiration or repurpose into something new.
Enable on-demand content access with digital asset management
So how can companies ensure that remote employees have on-demand access to the content they need to do their jobs?
One of the simplest and most straightforward solutions is digital asset management (DAM) software. DAM platforms like Canto provide a central location to organize, find, and share digital content — so everyone has on-demand access to the content they need.
Fewer delays, more agility
Digital asset management platforms are designed to make content easy to find — with search functionality, tags and metadata, image recognition, and other content discovery features built-in. Instead of messaging other teams and waiting to hear back, remote employees have a wealth of images, documents, and other brand assets at their fingertips.
Teams responsible for content distribution enhance the experience even more by creating curated content collections for specific audiences, like region-specific sales enablement portals.
When remote workers can find what they need quickly, entire teams become more agile, enhancing productivity and increasing speed to market.
A single source of truth for brand content
Boosting efficiency and productivity isn’t the only advantage to centralizing your brand’s content library. It can also result in better brand consistency. When people have easy access to on-brand content, they’re more likely to use it instead of something outdated or off-brand.
Brand managers also get a better oversight of all the content representing their brand and how people are using it. Centralized controls make it easy to push new content out to everyone and take old or outdated brand assets out of circulation. And reporting features make it easy to see what content teams are downloading and sharing.
Significant cost savings from repurposed content
From design hours to agency fees, it costs a lot to produce each piece of content a company creates. With all of a company’s existing content consolidated into a single source of truth, it’s easy to find and repurpose content instead of creating everything from scratch.
A centralized library also opens up new channels for collaboration and synergy. When one team develops a design another can use, it’s right at their fingertips – saving hours of duplicated design work.
Set your remote workforce up for success with Canto
While any organization can benefit from digital asset management, it’s an especially important consideration for businesses using a remote workforce. When remote employees have easy access to the digital content they need, everybody wins. Using a digital-first tech stack, businesses avoid unnecessary delays, employees experience less frustration and friction, and customers get a better experience.
A leader in digital asset management, Canto provides all of the content distribution tools your team needs while keeping the experience simple and intuitive.