Industry Overview 11: More Important than You’d Think: The implementation of DAM in Hospitality Industry

Even though there are a lot of obstacles with the hospitality industry to promote digital transformation, most of the managers still strive to do the mission as it streamlines the brand management.

Building a robust hotel brand is a critical driver for cultivating long-term customer loyalty and developing a deeper sense of trust to the hotel. Furthermore, by delivering a unique and memorable brand experience, hotels inspire guests to become repeat visitors and enthusiastic brand advocates who share their comments on the Internet, which attracts the other net surfers who read the peer recommendations.

In an era of accelerating digitalization, strategic brand positioning has taken on unprecedented importance. Consumers routinely discover unfamiliar properties for the very first time via the internet and social media platforms. For these modern travelers, a hotel's "brand" is no longer defined strictly by its physical architecture or tangible amenities; instead, it is shaped by a holistic digital impression compiled from online aesthetics, curated information, and user-generated reviews.

As a part of reinforcing a hotel’s brand image, utilizing guest data to deliver hyper-personalized experiences has become non-negotiable. Currently, hospitality enterprises sit on vast reserves of customer data harvested from booking engines. Strategically analyzing the personalized data unlocks a profound understanding of individual guest preferences, which is also a critical strategy to elevate guest satisfaction and drive repeat patronage.

From the above, we can see digital marketing plays a pivotal role in nurturing and scaling guest relationships. Facilitating continuous and meaningful communication through digital channels serves as a cornerstone for sustained corporate growth.

We have talked about “Digital Transformation” for a long time, but what item is necessary for the hotel? To reinforce and scale a hotel's brand image, implementing a specialized Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is highly effective. Here we listed out reasons why hotels need DAM:

i. Multi-Brand Centralization and One-stopped Data Management
When a hotel group operates an extensive portfolio of distinct brands, standardizing and controlling corporate logos, promotional images, and rich video assets across local properties becomes notoriously difficult. DAM resolves the data fragmentation by centralizing all creative assets on a single platform, ensuring that every local property consistently pulls materials that align strictly with the latest brand guidelines.

ii. Real-Time Update and File Sharing
Users can share their digital assets instantly through DAM. The global teams, internal marketing teams, public relations outlets, and external Online Travel Agencies can access the platform freely but securely with the user permissions. It is also important to have a unified platform to eliminate version lag and ensure a unified brand message across all markets.

iii. Image Format Conversion and Simple Assets Distribution
The upload image requirement of all the online travel platforms, booking engines, and external media channels are different. In the past, companies had to download the images and convert the format and size by external edit applications. But with DAM, you can convert source files into the exact formats, aspect ratios, and file sizes on the platform directly, eliminating the legacy bottleneck of having designers manually resize assets via editing software.

iv. Seamless Portal Site Integration
Managing distribution networks such as travel partner portals becomes vastly more efficient with a DAM. By using API key, all the assets stored in the portal sites can be directly transferred to DAM instantly. While users edit the data on DAM, the result on the portal site will also be changed simultaneously. It drastically reduces the redundant operations and streamlines the whole workflow.

v. Simple Global and Local Market Management
With a DAM, managing distinct cultural nuances and regional behaviors in the global markets is effortless. For example, marketing teams can store specific variations of a promotional campaign tailored for North American markets alongside variants optimized for East Asian regions, local managers can apply the assets they need to align with their target audience profile.

vi. Performance Analytics and Data-Driven Campaign Optimization
DAM functions as a strategic intelligence utility to evaluate digital campaign efficacy. By tracking tracking-metrics such as internal download frequencies, external asset usage, and distribution velocity, marketing executives can objectively measure which creative variants deliver the highest utility. The data will be the key to business success to obtain the best performance for each campaign.

Some of you may have the concern about the difficulty of operations and the price issue of DAM, which are some major reasons leading to slow speed of digital transformation in the hospitality industry. Take CIERTO, the DAM system by VPJ as an example, the user interface is clear and the major operations like file previewing or image format conversion. Even if the user is not an IT talent, it can still do the operations simply. In addition, the automation functions and AI search function makes the operation much easier. Users do not need to worry about the difficulty as it is pretty user-friendly.

For the price issue, DAM like CIERTO is using a user-based license: the more the number of users, the more expensive the license will be. The hotel can decide the number of users based on their needs and the scale of their business, and use optimized CIERTO service without financial burden.

If you are interested in introducing DAM, or our flagship DAM product CIERTO, feel free to contact us.