Content being the king nowadays, industries are looking for a solution to secure their digital assets and maximize productivity among different teams.

Product Information Management (PIM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) are two tools that are often confused with one another. Yes, both these tools can store large volumes of digital assets but they have been designed for different purposes and have distinctive features.

What is PIM?

Product Information Management (PIM) software ensures that all content and information about a company's products are in order, updated, and free from errors or gaps that can negatively impact traffic and sales. This robust tool also maintains consistency across sales and marketing channels.

A few of the PIM tools include Plytix, Akeneo, Catsy, Salsify, etc.

What is DAM?

The purpose of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) software is to manage, store, and distribute the digital assets of an organization, such as photos, videos, presentations, logos, marketing materials, etc. By automating workflows and keeping a single source of truth across the organization, DAM ensures digital assets can be easily found, retrieved, and used by the right people. 

Some of the top DAM tools in the industry include Bynder, Air Inc, Artwork Flow, Brandfolder, etc.  

Benefits of integrating PIM and DAM

The need for Product Information management and Digital Asset Management solutions is rising in several industries. Compiling these two tools can optimize the balance between product information and marketing content related to it.

Here are the main reasons why you should combine PIM and DAM.

1. Attain brand consistency

While trying to stay active across multiple online platforms, and promote your product data across various channels, you must not confuse your customers by giving them second thoughts about your product. Their perspective on your brand can be easily harmed by relatively minor issues such as inconsistency in brand experience. With PIM and DAM integration, you can create consistent product marketing content.

2. Improved searchability

Adopting a digital asset management tool can help you find your content easily. But what if you can enhance the search speed? Mostly, the metadata fields in DAM systems define the asset and its subject, and not the product precisely. Instead, should you be able to find all assets related to that product with an SKU (Stock keeping unit) number in the DAM, you hit a jackpot! 

Linking PIM with DAM allows you to filter and find assets based on product information like specifications and dimensions, or through smart tags and custom metadata generated by DAM, like colors and subjects.

3. Enhance Automation

A powerful DAM platform like Artwork Flow facilitates workflows that help automate creative reviews among teams. This leads to quicker feedback and approvals on projects helping stakeholders to work smoothly and produce the content on time. Validating and improving metadata with PIM speeds up the digital pipeline and ensures a more seamless transition.

4. Efficient marketing

When running a business, the more the products, the more organized you need them to be. Instead of assuming how the results are going to be, PIM and DAM will influence your marketing decisions with accurate facts. This helps you to treat each customer according to their preference, calculate each marketing decision, and act when the time is right. It also makes it easier to access product information.

5. Customer Personalization

These days customers rate their experience with a brand by observing them keenly. To make sure they stay with you in the long run, PIM and DAM highlight the fact that each customer’s experience is important. This personalized experience leads e-commerce brands to scale up their business tremendously. Customers can easily check up on your store, knowing that you will always have something in the store, especially for them.

6. Time-saver

Say goodbye to uploading details manually to individual platforms and making errors such as double-entry of data. When you spend less time on these, you can focus on the rest of the process and reach your goal faster. 

How to apply PIM and DAM Integration

Once you execute PIM and DAM, there are many ways to ensure the project is successful. Here are a few practices to keep in mind on how to implement PIM and DAM together effortlessly. 

1. Ensure it is Configurable and Scalable

Make sure that product information and digital assets are properly linked with one another. When an asset folder is added, transferring the details to the PIM tool should be quick so that they stay in sync. This step can help avoid errors too. 

2. Define data management policies

Establish clear data governance policies to ensure that data is accurate and consistent across both PIM and DAM systems. This includes defining naming conventions, metadata standards, and data validation rules. Automating this process can reduce the time taken up by manual, repetitive operations.

3. Track & Report

Reporting can aid in better decision-making by tracking the asset lifecycle throughout the pipeline. This kind of data could inform decisions around budget, metadata enhancement, or creative direction, just to name a few.

4. Test and refine

Test the integration thoroughly to ensure that data is flowing accurately between the PIM and DAM tools. Refine the integration as needed to address any issues that arise.

5. Provide training and support

Provide training and support to users who will be working with the integrated PIM and DAM tools. This can help to ensure that the integration is adopted effectively across your organization.

PIM vs. DAM: Key differences

As mentioned before, PIM and DAM software share a few similarities, like acting as a centralized repository for all information of an organization, facilitating team collaboration, maintaining brand consistency, etc. Now let’s look at how they differ from each other and learn that these tools cannot replace each other.

Final thoughts

Both Product Information Management and Digital Asset Management system have their own impressive set of features and benefits to offer. While PIM systems provide product details, DAM systems store multimedia. By pairing these tools you can not only create a massive change in streamlining collaborative workflows, but can also enhance the productivity of your team and help nurture customer relationships. 

Artwork Flow’s intuitive Digital Asset Management platform offers comprehensive features including integrations with several tools and apps. To find out how these integrations would work for your business, book a demo with our experts today.