How DAM Helps Retailers Make Better Data-Driven Decisions and Get to Market Faster

It’s a frustration often faced by retailers across the globe—just when you’ve mobilized your team to capitalize on an emerging trend, it’s old news.

Retail trends have always moved at breakneck speed, but social media has accelerated the cycle. Platforms like TikTok can turn products into overnight sensations and just as quickly relegate them to obscurity. As noted by NPR, “social media has accelerated trend cycles,” causing them to “reach peak and obsolescence very, very quickly.”

Agility is the name of the game in modern retail. McKinsey puts it this way: “retailers need to raise their metabolic rate—that is, the speed at which they process information and develop new offerings.”

Winning in this environment requires a three-dimensional view of business performance so that you can react faster, fine-tune your budget, and iterate on your marketing, creative, and product efforts:

• Product performance: What’s selling and what isn’t?

• Marketing campaign performance: Which campaigns are driving traffic and conversions, and which are falling flat?
• Digital asset performance: Which images, videos, social posts, and other marketing materials are resonating with your audience, and which ones are they scrolling past?

Most retailers have a good handle on the first two dimensions. But the third is often a mystery that leaves leaders guessing which creative assets are truly moving the needle.

This is where a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system steps in. It’s a central command center for all your digital assets, giving you a bird’s eye view of how your content is performing across every channel. With a DAM, you can break down content silos, track asset usage and engagement, and unlock the insights needed to make better, data-driven decisions.

The Cost of Disconnected Digital Assets

Retailers are drowning in digital assets. Product photos, lifestyle shots, campaign videos, social media graphics—the list goes on and on. And when these assets are scattered across a hodgepodge of systems, efficiency suffers and costs balloon.

Data Blind Spots

The performance of individual assets is a common blind spot for retailers. Sure, you might have a general idea of which products are selling and which marketing campaigns are generating buzz. But do you know which specific images or videos are driving those results?

Without a granular level of insight, you may be forced to make decisions based on gut feelings rather than concrete data.

Inefficient Marketing Spend

These data blind spots also often translate to suboptimal marketing spend. Instead of focusing resources on your best performers, you might be spreading your budget too thin across a wide range of content. This scattershot approach hampers your ROI and prevents you from maximizing the impact of your most successful assets.

As marketing budgets get squeezed—Gartner found that “marketing budgets have dropped from an average of 9.1% of company revenue in 2023 to 7.7% in 2024, a fall of 15% year over year”—retailers need to maximize every dollar.

Integration Headaches Between PIM, CMS, and Creative Production Systems

The time and frustration spent on context switching and integrating disparate systems are a major pain point for retailers. Many rely on a patchwork of tools for product information management (PIM), content management systems (CMS), and creative production. Getting these systems to play nice with each other can be a major headache, often requiring costly custom integrations and ongoing maintenance.

Not only is this a drain on your budget, but it also turns into a major time suck for your team. A report by Cornell and Qatalog found that 45% of workers say context switching makes them less productive. Instead of focusing on strategic initiatives, they’re bogged down with manual workarounds and troubleshooting technical issues. And when systems don’t communicate well, it can lead to data inconsistencies and delays in getting content to market, further hindering your ability to respond to trends and opportunities.

A DAM can help you tackle these challenges head-on by providing a centralized platform that integrates with your existing systems. This eliminates the need for complex integrations and ensures that everyone in your organization has access to the latest approved assets. It’s a win-win for both your bottom line and your team’s sanity.

DAM: An End-To-End Solution for Data-Driven Decision-Making

A DAM can go a long way in helping you wrangle the chaos of digital assets. With everything stored in a central repository, you gain a single source of truth and streamlined content workflows. Think of it like a well-organized library where every photo, video, logo, and marketing material can be accessed at a moment’s notice.

But smart storage is just the tip of the iceberg. The true power of an intelligent DAM lies in its ability to deliver actionable insights that drive strategic decision-making.

Greater Speed-to-Market

A DAM gives you x-ray vision into how your assets are performing within the platform, which retailers can use to get to market faster.

Imagine you have a puppy-focused social post that’s driving a spike in engagements. Your team can use a DAM to quickly track down any related image, video, or graphic, making it a breeze to create a whole puppy-themed campaign. That means you don’t have to start from scratch—you’re pulling from an existing collection of approved, brand-compliant assets.

What’s more, AI features within the DAM could even suggest similar assets—other puppies, similar color palettes, or matching backgrounds—to help you build a cohesive campaign that’s ready to launch before the moment passes. And because a DAM allows you to quickly tailor and optimize these assets for different distribution channels (think alternative cropping, focal points, resolutions, etc.), you can rapidly construct a campaign that reaches your audience wherever they are.

This level of agility is invaluable in the era of omnichannel retail. Think With Google research found that “omnichannel strategies drive an 80% higher rate of incremental store visits,” and Omnisend found that “marketers using three or more channels in a campaign earned a 494% higher order rate than those using a single-channel campaign.”

Informed Content Creation

Along with accelerating speed-to-market, an intelligent DAM can arm you with data-driven insights that inform your future content creation efforts. These insights give you a holistic understanding of what types of content resonate with your audience, allowing you to dial in your campaigns based on their specific preferences.

With an intelligent DAM, you’re empowered to:

• Uncover hidden gems: Identify high-performing assets that may be buried in your archives.

• Repurpose content: Breathe new life into existing assets by adapting them to different channels and audiences.

• Make informed decisions: Use data to guide your content creation strategy and ensure your campaigns are primed to make a real impact.

These features are especially important for retailers in the social media age, where trends can come and go overnight. If your product is suddenly trending, you can instantly locate all related assets and spin up a targeted campaign while the trend is still hot. And if a product is going viral but your existing marketing campaign isn’t performing well, you can use intelligent DAM data to pinpoint the issue and adjust your strategy accordingly.

A DAM can be so much more than just a digital warehouse. If yours isn’t giving you the insights needed to track asset performance and spot trends as they’re emerging, it might be time to consider an upgrade.

Enhanced Productivity

The long, inflexible journey from content creation to distribution is a reality many retailers have come to accept. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

An intelligent DAM can speed up time-to-market by empowering retail employees to decide for themselves whether to reuse, remix, or create new content. In some cases, the right choice might be to reuse an asset to minimize costs, while in others, it might be best to ask the creative team for a net-new asset that can be easily stored and organized for later use.

In any case, providing staff with this level of autonomy helps retailers optimize their content supply chain, boost productivity, and slash costs. We recently saw this in action with a client of ours. This North American ecommerce company was able to save a whopping $500,000 by streamlining content production with a DAM.

Maximize Your Content’s Potential With a DAM

Good retailers know how to keep their finger on the pulse of consumer trends. But today, that’s not enough—as soon as you recognize a shift taking shape, you need to be able to quickly and decisively amplify what’s working and pivot away from what isn’t.

A DAM like Orange Logic can support retailers in this effort. An end-to-end digital asset management platform provides the agility and insights needed to keep up with the ever-increasing pace of the retail market.

Don’t let scattered digital assets hold you back. Embrace the power of an intelligent DAM and take back control of your content.