Marketing and sales efforts are an exercise in distributing accurate and up to date information about your product, while also ensuring that your organization’s brand is also growing. But between creating new blogs, case studies, brand material, videos, and promotional materials for both your brand and your product, and ensuring that all of your employees are using updated material to promote the product or company, keeping track of everything can be a challenge unto itself.

Another challenge that comes with the distribution of this information is efficiency. Which channels require your attention? Which channels already have your updated information?

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Enter Product information Management and Digital Asset Management. These are two systems that are designed to help you disseminate your product and company information in an efficient and effective manner while ensuring that you’re not missing out on any channels, while also helping your organization manage the latest and outdated information internally.

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But what is the difference between the two? Are they interchangeable or do they serve unique purposes between them? Let’s find out.

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PIM vs DAM, What are They?

Product Information Management, or PIM, enables you to integrate product data into a single system that can be controlled across distribution or marketing channels. If you have a number of variants in the product, a PIM can help you manage all aspects of your product, such as different SKU variants, relationships between other products in your lineup, marketing collaterals, and any other assets. In PIM, any and all data that is required to sell or market a product is handled by the PIM.

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Digital Asset Management, or DAM, is when content such as documents, images, videos, presentations, blogs, marketing materials, are all digital assets of an organization. Here, the main goal is to help your organization find and use digital files. If your organization is using a number of company assets to market and sell a product, then a DAM can be very useful in helping companies ensure that all of their organizational assets are managed in a single place.

Difference between PIM and DAM

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When should I use PIM vs DAM solutions?

If your work consists mainly around a product and managing its information channels and ensuring no work is stolen, then it makes sense to use a PIM system, since there is no organizational data to worry about. The only thing that you’ll be handling is product information and marketing channels, which can help you narrow down the scope and focus better on how best to protect product information and disseminate it for marketing and sales purposes.

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But if your work involves operations and organizational matters, such as communicating with different clients about your product, providing information to partners about your organization and its offerings, then it makes sense to use DAM integration.

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How Best to Perform PIM DAM Integration?

In PIM integration, your challenge lies in consolidating all of your marketing and sales channel information to ensure that you’re delivering accurate and latest content to your audience. Ensuring that people are able to access your content easily, while tracking malicious parties from stealing it and using it for their own benefits is where your integration efforts should be focused on.

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In DAM integration, the solution needs to be integrated across different channels, different internal departments, and all stakeholders and participants should be educated on the merits and limits of the DAM system, so that they’re able to understand the necessity for the DAM integration and work alongside it to ensure that people are able to safeguard organizational assets.

How Best to Perform PIM DAM Integration?

When it comes to PIM integration, the benefits of integration are,

• Shortens the time it takes to bring a product and its promotional material to market.
• Improves the operational efficiency of inventory management and tracking marketing activities.
• Helps improve the customer journey for people who are looking to purchase your solution by providing high quality and timely product information
• Ensures that any act of wrongful usage of product information is easily tracked and reported to your internal teams.

For DAM integration, the benefits are,

• Providing a quick and easy method to access a company’s digital assets.
• Provides an avenue to maintain brand consistency and protect brand assets.
• Streamlines how marketing efforts are made by ensuring internal teams are able to access and manage digital assets easily.

Conclusion

The choice between PIM vs DAM is fairly simple depending on where your work takes you. If you’re working on producing, marketing, and managing inventory for a product and disseminating information to potential customers through digital avenues, then a PIM integration makes sense. But if your work involves handling brand and organizational data, and communicating that data with partners, customers, and competitors, then it makes sense to integrate DAM into your workflows.

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The best way to find out which is right for you is to do an internal assessment of whether PIM will suit your company’s requirements better or whether a DAM integration will be required.

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