Customer engagement and consistent brand experiences are key elements for the success of any company operating in the digital-first world. But delivering engaging content experiences consistently and at scale is no easy feat for modern marketers.
The ever-increasing number of communication touchpoints, marketing tech solutions, and specialized people involved in the communication process has increased complexities—often leading to internal inefficiencies that translate into poor brand experiences for the customer.
Choosing the right partners and tech systems—able to support your teams at present, but also as your organization grows and your needs change—is vital for brands aiming to thrive in the digital-first world.
Digital asset management (DAM) software helps busy marketers store, manage, and distribute digital assets and marketing collateral quickly and efficiently while safeguarding brand consistency. The best DAM systems allow companies to go to market faster, promote product launches more effectively, create engaging digital experiences, and distribute them seamlessly across all customer touchpoints. But not all DAM solutions follow a one-size-fits-all model.
In this blog, we'll take a look into the world of DAM. We’ll compare the best DAM solutions available on the market to help you choose the right provider for your organization. Let's begin by looking at some of the top digital asset management systems before diving into how to select the right one for your organization.
Compare digital asset management software
We get it; choosing a partner is difficult, especially when there are various options to consider.
Bynder is officially recognized as one of the best DAM systems out there, but a plethora of other vendors are available on the market. Let's take a more detailed look at the ones that, together with Bynder, made it into Forrester's exclusive leaderboard.
1 - Bynder
Far from being just one of the leading DAM providers identified by Forrester in their Wave Report, Bynder's strategic digital asset management software is also widely recognized as the strongest best-of-breed solution currently on the market.
Bynderʼs cloud-based Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a single source of truth for all brand, campaign, and product-related assets. Its powerful functionality, intuitive UI, and wide range of integrations help global teams store, manage, find, and deliver assets more efficiently for a world-class customer content experience.
But, in the dynamic world of digital asset management, AI plays a pivotal role in addressing the challenges marketers face when managing content at scale. Bynder’s AI capabilities enable brands to overcome these obstacles, facilitating effective content operations—across the entire content lifecycle—and empowering brands to face the challenges of today’s marketplace.
Thanks to AI-powered search capabilities, AI-based tagging, and automated metaproperties, marketers can optimize their workflows, extract maximum value from their digital assets, and stay ahead of the competition.
Here's what Molly Catalano, VP of Marketing and Communications at Five Guys, has to say:
International expansion really prompted us to find a better way to organize and distribute our assets. What made Bynder stand out to us was the user experience. People like the experience Bynder offers, and it makes them want to use it more.
At Bynder, we believe in people. All that's needed to build your Bynder DAM is a handful of selected people from your organization and our award-winning team of customer advocates. Together, we'll quickly create the perfect platform based on your needs and we'll support you every step of the way as these change as you grow and scale. Check out the video below to find out more about the process.
Similar tech solution implementations I’ve been part of in the past were not nearly as organized and thoughtful as the experience that we had with Bynder. Our Onboarding Manager gave us so many lightbulb moments, she asked us great questions, and helped proactively to build our taxonomy.
2 - Aprimo
Aprimo is a best-of-suite solution that acquired its DAM product to complement its marketing resource management capabilities. It promises its users the ability to orchestrate the end-to-end content lifecycle while streamlining workflows and ensuring brand consistency.
Aprimo offers a range of automation features to make the creative team’s lives easier. This includes a tool that suggests existing content that can be repurposed before a request is made to optimize asset reuse.
While an excellent player on the market, according to Forrester, it struggles to cater competitively to large enterprises.
3 - Adobe Experience Manager
At first look, the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) might seem like more of a CMS, but it has a number of DAM software features to help creative teams organize and distribute digital assets from a centralized location.
AEM, runs on a complex, hard-to-maintain infrastructure that requires copious resources (and IT expertise on the customer's side) to maintain. An excellent example of best-of-suite solution, AEM often struggles to integrate with tools beyond its own (though wide) ecosystem.
4 - Widen
Widen is a cloud-based DAM system that enables users to find, share, upload and collaborate on visual content from any location. It also offers smart workflows, including the ability to apply default metadata and to set up repeatable review processes.
Widen integrates with a wide range of e-commerce platforms, online marketplaces, and creative applications. But since it didn't originate as a SaaS solution, its UX and UI can at times give customers a bit of a headache.
5 - Cloudinary
Cloudinary is a media experience platform that offers its users some digital asset management functionalities. While their product offering covers the entire asset life cycle, their area of expertise is content distribution.
Cloudinary caters mostly to developers within client companies and is a good solution for brands with a strong internal IT presence and a modest need to manage high numbers of digital assets for marketing campaigns.
The DAM vendors we've mentioned above are not the only vendors in the space. Companies like Brandfolder, Canto, and Sitecore also offer their customers best-of-suite DAM solutions. However, they currently lag behind when it comes to specific core DAM features and adjacent products and integrations.
How to choose the right DAM system
A DAM system should most certainly offer a friendly interface that’s simple to use, but there are three key steps worth taking before you invest.
Identify your goals and expectations: Work with key stakeholders within your organization to identify the wider needs of all future DAM users.
Identify must-have features: After analyzing your goals and expectations, develop a list of critical features that will help you and your team to get the most out of your solution day in, and day out.
Identify the right provider: Choosing the right digital asset management provider is crucial to your DAM experience. It is important to build a relationship with a vendor who can strike a healthy balance between innovation, customer satisfaction, and transparency.
For more information on what features you might look for, check out the DAM Features Overview Guide.
How to identify the best digital asset management providers?
When choosing the right DAM for your company, you have several tools that can help you navigate the complex world of B2B software. Global market research companies, such as Forrester and Gartner, regularly publish reports that enable companies to better understand the state of the market in the field of technology.
The Forrester Wave report, for example, is a unique way of comparing vendors—using fully-accessible, transparent criteria to score each industry's top vendors, then displaying them according to the strength of current product offerings, strategy, and market size.
Bynder received the highest scores possible across eight criteria, including usability and user interface, performance, and planned enhancements.
Download the full report to find out why.
Check out our DAM Comparison Guide
With so many alternatives to choose from, identifying the right DAM software for you can feel like a challenge. That's why we've put together a digital asset management software comparison guide to help you compare vendors against a number of features. Check out the full guide below to see which DAM solution is right for your business. 👇
