Future-proofing your DAM selection
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Dynamic Templating 101: Why big business can’t live without it
Josh Van DykJuly 7, 2023
- Digital Asset Management
The larger the business, the more assets it requires. Unifying those assets poses a major challenge, one that grows even harder when a business needs to keep branding and messaging unified across multiple platforms and locations. Franchises are a good example - each franchise needs marketing material customized for its own location, but that stays in line with accepted branding.
Companies can use a dynamic template to achieve those two goals simultaneously. Similar to a dynamic website template, dynamic templating allows users to change some elements of a given template without affecting others.
Used correctly, dynamic templates can be a secret weapon for franchises and larger corporations, keeping brand identity consistent but fluid.
What is Dynamic Templating?
A dynamic templating system locks some elements of a given asset while allowing others to be changed. Companies use dynamic templating to ensure that digital assets stay on-brand while remaining customizable.
Dynamic templates work alongside digital asset management (DAM) systems. In a robust omnichannel content platform, like censhare, DAM organizes assets while dynamic templating allows companies to deploy those assets more efficiently.
Where Dynamic Templating meets DAM
A good DAM is more than a library of resources. Simply categorizing tens of thousands of assets is not enough to meet the needs of well-established, complex organizations.
Instead, a well-developed DAM underpins a marketing tech stack, allowing anyone involved in the marketing process to access and process material more efficiently. That can include automating workflows, archiving old resources, and a number of other benefits.
Dynamic templating keeps the DAM on-brand. With thousands of marketing assets accessed by large teams of people, sometimes from around the globe, companies can struggle to keep everyone on the same page. Dynamic templating controls who can change select elements. In turn, this allows local users (e.g., franchise owners) to customize their marketing campaigns, but enables corporate marketing to keep everything uniform.
In short, dynamic templating keeps a DAM connected, preventing assets and users from spiraling out of control across a large and distributed organization.
Dynamic Templating benefits
Marketing material tends to be created on an ad-hoc basis. That’s doubly true for situations like the one mentioned above, where a franchisee needs to keep their branding consistent with global standards, but customizable for the local market.
Dynamic templating makes this possible in three key ways:
Unified production
Dynamic templates allow assets to be customized directly within the DAM itself, eliminating the reliance on third-party platforms (Adobe, Avid) or asset resources (such as Getty Images). Source, edit, and produce new assets all in one place, and with full control over who can access or change each asset.
Omnichannel management
By controlling which elements of a given asset can be changed, dynamic templating allows resources to be unified across channels from print to online vouchers.
Targeted marketing
A DAM with dynamic templating allows high-level brands and slogans to stay consistent while encouraging on-the-ground marketing efforts that are highly targeted.
How do those benefits play out within a DAM?
A good DAM with dynamic templating sets itself apart from competitors with a number of key differentiators, including:
- The ability to edit multiple templates at once, while having the ability to customize individual templates further afterwards.
- Central management of fields across all templates.
- Same underlying configuration for all templates, instead of having to configure each template individually.
- Complete flexibility in the configuration of the end-user UI/UX.
- Mobile interface responsive and easy to use for full on-the-go access.
- Previews rendered straight from InDesign - not a false HTML preview that differs from the final version.
- Web-to-Publish capabilities. DAM solutions like censhare can support other types of output channels that aren’t print related (i.e., social, web, email), with full ability to output different types of files to multiple channels
- The ability to create reports on almost anything. Aggregate all end-user data for easy-to-view formats, allowing users to see which templates are being used most and by whom.
- The ability to see a 360-degree view of all assets (images, products, text, layouts, users, etc.) that are related to the template.
Dynamic templating is particularly useful for retail and media & entertainment industries, where digital assets are necessarily diverse and often widely distributed.
Conclusion
Dynamic templating, on a well-built DAM solution, is more than a useful tool. For large businesses with tens of thousands of digital assets, hundreds of users, and multiple locations, dynamic templating can make all the difference. Without it, automation becomes nearly impossible and small changes to marketing material can require dozens of steps.
With it, marketing managers free up local marketing teams to produce what they need, when they need it, without compromising the brand’s tone of voice.
That ability becomes absolutely essential for enterprise-level operations in retail or media. The dynamic templating interface is integrated directly into censhare’s DAM, so there’s no need to learn something new, or rely on third-party design software.
Keep all your marketing material on-brand and under control, all while improving efficiency and making everything easier.
It’s the best DAM solution for your biggest marketing challenges.
Dynamic Templating FAQs:
Can I edit and customize templates for individuals?
Yes, by controlling who can access and change certain templates, managers can create customized templates for a particular individual. The same principle applies to creating customized templates for certain stores.
Doesn’t DAM need costly design expertise?
No! The censhare DAM and dynamic templates rely on InDesign, providing advanced design capabilities without the need for deep experience. Of course, the more you use the DAM, the better you’ll be.
What if I have thousands of outlets and millions of customers?
More outlets and more customers means more assets to manage, and censhare’s DAM can handle all the assets you can throw at it. That’s largely due to its horizontally scalable structure and open architecture (and the underlying graph database).
How do I know what each template comprises?
User rights determine which elements of each template can be modified, and who can create templates.
Can I keep track of the templates being used?
Yes. The censhare DAM can generate reports on every aspect of the DAM, including which templates are being used, and by whom.
Josh Van Dyk
As Vice President, North American Sales for censhare US, Josh oversees the censhare solution consultants, and sales teams for North America, and has over 15 years of tech experience in the software industry. Over the last several years at censhare, he has had the opportunity to help many companies benefit from implementing a truly unified enterprise DAM, and understands the value of helping companies knock down data silos and create RIO through automation.
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