What Is the Difference Between DAM and CMS?

Content and digital assets ensure customers have an engaging and interactive experience when engaging with your brand, whether that be through social media, your website, or an in-aisle experience. 

These items are essential for helping to sell your products, but without proper management, it can be extremely frustrating for marketing teams to find and retrieve the assets they need in order to create compelling digital touchpoints throughout the customer journey. 

Luckily, there are systems in place called a Content Management System (CMS) and a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution to help marketers centralize their content and digital assets into one place. 

How Does a CMS Work and How Is It Used?

Content is king. Sixty-seven percent of marketers revealed that their content marketing efforts help generate leads for their brand. 

Because content helps contribute to a brand’s demand, marketers spend an incredible amount of time on content creation to help generate ROI - 25 hours a week to be exact. 

Marketers need a content repository where they can easily manage the content being created for their brand. That’s where a CMS comes into play. 

CMS asset management is defined by Gartner as, “software that enables marketers and their proxies (e.g., webmasters) to produce and manage text, graphics, pictures, audio, and video for use in web landing pages, blogs, document repositories, campaigns or any marketing activity requiring single or multimedia content.”

When looking at various CMS solutions like Contentful or even Adobe’s CMS, you may have run into other terms describing a CMS like a headless CMS. A headless is a place where businesses can store all of their content, they just need an additional solution to present the content to front-end users. 

What Is Digital Asset Management?

Digital asset management is skyrocketing in popularity among businesses of all types. That means the higher the demand for these solutions the more options you as a buyer have to choose from. 

Below is a list of some of the more popular DAM tools in the market you can invest in. 

DAM System Examples

• Lumavate

• Brandfolder

• Bynder

• Adobe DAM

Though all of these platforms are DAM solutions, they’re not all made equally. Some are simply DAM solutions that do not possess any additional functionality for you to carry out your product experience strategy. That means you’ll have to make sure they can easily integrate into your current Product Information Management (PIM) and Digital Experience Platform (DXP) solutions so you can easily create digital experiences for your customers without headaches. 

Some of these solutions are more costly and take a longer time to onboard than others. For example, Adobe is notorious for lengthy implementation times and will set you back a pretty penny.  

Which of the Following Is a Digital Asset?

Ready for a pop quiz? Which of the following is considered to be a  digital asset?

• Images

• Videos

• Text

• Audio

• Documents 

If you answered all of the above, you’d be correct.

Digital assets help conduct a comprehensive product story that entices your customers to purchase your products. They can encompass a wide range of items and play a crucial role in enhancing the overall product experience for your customers. 

What Is the Difference Between DAM and CMS?

So both a CMS and DAM help marketers organize their content and digital assets. So which one should you choose? 

Let’s take a look at the differences between a DAM vs CMS. 

A CMS and a DAM solution both help businesses achieve the following: 

• Improved Efficiency and Productivity

• Consistency and Accuracy of Content

• Enhanced Security 

• Enable Scalability and Flexibility 

Where a CMS and DAM differ the most is the use case of the content and digital assets. A CMS is where content for a brand’s website is stored. That’s it. A DAM solution is much more flexible in terms of the places the digital assets can be stored. Marketers can use the digital assets stored in a DAM in a wide variety of channels, making this solution more robust. 

Get Started with Lumavate

Lumavate is a Product Experience Management (PXM) Platform, meaning we have a PIM, DAM, and DXP functionality built within one platform so you don’t have to invest in several one-off solutions. Plus, we make it easy for you to build your website in minutes using our platform so you don’t have to invest in a third-party CMS solution either. 

You can pull your digital assets and content from our platform into engaging digital experiences for your customers quickly and without the need for developers. 

Ready to get started? Schedule a demo with a member of our team and we’ll show you how easy it is to use Lumavate.