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Have you considered subscribing to a digital asset management (DAM) service for your company? If so, you’re in good company!

Modern marketing teams need visual content — high-res photos, videos, b-roll footage, and more. But with so many files, how does one efficiently organize, find and distribute them? That’s where the right DAM service can prove immensely valuable.

How valuable, though? In the digital age in which we live and work, the ability to calculate a precise ROI for every service our companies invest in is mandatory.

DAM ROI can be complicated to figure out. And potential ROI outcomes will vary widely from company to company depending on each of their unique approaches to marketing, team size, and workflow.

In this post, we’ll attempt to distill DAM ROI down into its most essential elements. By the end, you’ll have a firm understanding of whether or not your company should invest in a DAM service and roughly how much you can expect to save by doing so.

Discovering Your Company’s Projected DAM ROI

To make this discovery process as simple as possible, we’ll start with a few easy questions:

1. How many digital assets does your company currently have in its media library? Be sure to include all photos (high and low-res), videos, b-roll footage, archived blog posts and presentations — any file that your marketing team has and wants to keep for future reference. Write this number down.

2. How many team members regularly work with said assets? The number of people who access and use the assets in your media library on a regular basis is an important figure to define. Is it just your marketing team, or do other departments also frequently search for files? Write this number down as well.

3. How much time does your team spend, on average, searching for specific assets? Finally, you need to have a solid understanding of how much time your team currently spends looking for digital assets. Try to be as precise as possible. You may even want to spend an afternoon tracking this figure, but at the very least, ask your team for a rough estimate.

By answering these three basic questions, you can already begin to tell whether a DAM service will be able to produce a desirable ROI for your company!

For example, if your company only has a couple hundred files in your media library and your marketing team only spends a couple minutes or so locating files, DAM might not be a worthwhile investment.

If, on the other hand, your marketing team manages a media library of thousands of assets and multiple team members are regularly frustrated by the time it takes to locate them, DAM could be a viable solution.

Diving Deeper

After answering the three questions above, you should have a rough idea of whether or not a DAM service will provide a positive ROI for your company. But let’s dig a little deeper.

Previously, we asked you how many people regularly search for and use the assets in your company’s media library. Now you need to know exactly how much money each of them costs your company. You need to know their “loaded hourly rate”.

If you’re not familiar with the term, a loaded hourly rate is the total cost (wage + benefits + training, etc.) a specific employee represents to a company. For more information on how to accurately calculate this figure, read this article.

But, to save on time and hassle, you can also just double the hourly rate of each team member in question. This will give you a rough estimate.

Now take the average loaded hourly rate of your team and multiply it by the average amount of time they spend searching for digital assets. This number represents the amount of money your company spends searching for files.

For example, let’s say that there are three people on your marketing team who regularly use your company’s digital media library. They each make somewhere between 50k and 60k per year and after calculating their loaded hourly rates, you’ve discovered that they represent an average cost to your company of $58 an hour.

You’ve also determined that your team spends an average of 8 hours per week searching for specific assets. After multiplying this amount of time by the loaded hourly rate, you get 464. Meaning your company spends almost $500 a week searching for files. The true DAM ROI potential for your company is becoming clear!

The Value of Your Company’s Digital Assets

We’ve discovered a lot so far! But we still have a little more work to do before we can finalize this DAM ROI calculating adventure. You now need to determine, to the best of your ability, the value of the digital assets currently residing in your company’s media library.

First, how many assets do you currently have? And how much money has your company invested in creating and/or licensing these assets? This figure should include photography and graphic design fees, licensing subscription payments, and any other related costs.

If your company has 1000 assets and has invested $50,000 in creating or acquiring them, each asset is worth, on average, $50.

That means that every time a specific asset can’t be found, an all to common problem for companies who don’t have an effective DAM system in place, your company has essentially thrown away $50. Do this enough times over the course of a year and it really starts to add up!

The Cost of a Digital Asset Management Service

Now that we’ve calculated the total amount of money your company spends searching for digital assets each year, and the value of said assets, it’s time to compare those figures to the cost of a DAM provider.

How much will you be charged to subscribe to a digital asset management service? Every provider will have a different price and feature set. Be sure investigate the exact cost required to access the set of DAM features you need.

Next, you need to estimate the amount of money it will cost to implement a DAM. This includes any initial startup fees, training programs, etc. Again, every DAM will vary in this regard.

For comparison, CleanPix excels in helping small to medium sized companies. The features we offer are geared towards this size business and our price point matches this target audience.

Also, our system is very intuitive and new clients; even those completely unaware of how DAMs typically operate, can be up and running on our platform in less than an hour. There aren’t any startup fees either so the cost of implementation is extremely low.

But not every provider is like this. So do your research on the implementation costs of any DAM service you are considering for your business.

Will a DAM Service Provide Positive ROI for Your Company?

By this point, you should have a firm grasp of how much money your company spends looking for specific assets, the average value of each asset in your media library, and the cost of subscribing to and implementing a DAM service.

Now compare these numbers. Based on your calculations, will a DAM service provide a positive ROI for your company? If you’ve read this far, we’re assuming the answer is yes.

And if that’s the case, we’d like to offer you a FREE 14 Day Trial of CleanPix! Try our platform and see for yourself it’s ROI boosting potential. We’re sure you’ll love it’s powerful feature set and intuitive interface.

All in all, DAM ROI is tough to define with complete accuracy. We haven’t even touched on the “soft” benefits of a digital asset management service such as the potential for greater brand cohesiveness and growth, lower cost opportunities, and general peace of mind.

How much is that all worth? It’s almost impossible to say, but you’ll definitely know and appreciate the value when you see it!

Hopefully this guide to discovering DAM ROI has been helpful to you. Remember to try CleanPix for free today. And good luck in all your future marketing pursuits!