A digital asset management system isn’t a small software purchase. It’s a significant, strategic investment that will affect multiple departments, so it needs executive buy-in to succeed.
Adopting a new DAM comes with many challenges — the initial cost is high, and driving adoption and change management can require significant time and resources. Without a compelling business case, many DAM initiatives stall or get pushed to next year’s budget, as they don’t have the necessary buy-in to get the purchase across the line.
So when you’re planning to invest in a DAM system, make sure to build a persuasive business case first, before going through the process of comparing and selecting vendors. You need a strategic framework for demonstrating return on investment, mitigating risk, and aligning stakeholders.
Core elements of a strong DAM business case
Before you can secure the investment needed for your DAM solution, you need buy-in from key stakeholders across the business. Put together your business case, including these core elements.
Problem statement
Your business case should help your key stakeholders understand the problem you want to solve with a digital asset management system. Explain your current challenges in terms that will resonate with your executives, framing problems in terms of time, cost, or risk to the business.
In this part of your business case, highlight the major costs of poor digital asset management, such as:
In this part of your business case, highlight the major costs of poor digital asset management, such as:
- Wasted time and resources: Show how having assets scattered across multiple systems, duplicate files, and manually tagging new files in your existing systems drains productivity across marketing and creative teams.
- Compliance risks caused by brand inconsistencies: Explain how the lack of centralized asset management means people can mistakenly use outdated or draft-stage brand assets, introducing inconsistent brand imagery or messaging, as well as compliance and regulatory risks.
- Scaling challenges: Explain the challenges facing your growing organization as the number of assets and number of employees grows. Companies need to tackle regional variations, asset translation, and version control at scale. Our research found that companies have experienced a 458% increase in the number of brand assets over three years, and without proper asset management, asset libraries will become more and more difficult to maintain, organize, and manage.
Gather evidence that shows the scale of the issue. Survey your marketing and creative teams to calculate the hours lost duplicating work, circulating brand files, and searching for assets across multiple systems. Compile examples of misused brand elements or outdated brand assets slipping into real campaigns.
This will make the problem tangible and quantifiable for your stakeholders, and make it easier for you to show projected return on investment later in the business case.
Proposed solution
In the next part of your business case, you need to outline your proposed solution — in this case, a digital asset management system.
Explain what a DAM is, to help executives who are less familiar with the topic. In simple terms, a DAM is a centralized system to store, organize, and govern brand assets, digital files, and guidelines.
To strengthen your business case, make sure you explain that a DAM enables and improves brand growth and compliance, rather than just providing asset storage. This will help stakeholders understand how a DAM differs from your existing system and why it’s worth investing in.
Consider putting together a table or other visual to compare your current state compared with using a DAM. For example:
Financial analysis
Your business case should also include a cost-benefit analysis, to compare the total anticipated costs of your DAM against its expected benefits.
List out the costs associated with investing in a DAM. Include tangible and intangible costs, and remember to consider ongoing costs as well as the initial investment, such as:
- Licence cost
- Costs for additional users
- Onboarding fees
- Migration costs
- Training fees
- Productivity dips while migrating and learning a new system.
Then, do the same for the benefits, expressing them in terms of cost savings:
- Savings from consolidating multiple tools
- Savings from improved productivity and efficiency (time saved x average salary)
- Legal costs avoided by reducing compliance risks
- Savings from reducing brand errors and duplicate work (time saved x average salary).
Make sure you can answer questions about hidden and ongoing costs too. For example, some vendors may charge extra for premium features, AI functionality, or introduce significant price increases at contract renewal.
Risk assessment
Your key stakeholders will want to know how investing in a DAM will benefit the business, but they’ll also be thinking about potential downsides and risks of that investment.
Show that you’ve considered the risks of this investment, such as:
- Compliance issues, like using images with expired licenses or outdated brand elements
- Productivity loss due to low adoption or poor change management
- File or data loss during the migration process
- Governance issues if there are problems with user permissions and access.
Then share mitigation strategies to address these potential risks and reduce their impact on the business when adopting a DAM platform. This can help secure buy-in from stakeholders who may have reservations due to the risks involved.
ROI metrics
Finally, you want to be able to demonstrate to your stakeholders that a digital asset management system is worth the investment. Use simple metrics and key performance indicators to calculate the potential return on investment.
These metrics are useful for demonstrating DAM ROI:
- Adoption rate: shows whether the DAM is being widely used in the business
- Time savings searching for assets: average search time before vs. after DAM implementation
- Asset reuse rate: percentage of assets that are repurposed rather than recreated
- Time-to-market acceleration: campaign delivery speed before vs. after DAM implementation
- Compliance adherence: number of issues per month caused by the use of unlicensed or off-brand assets.
Including basic ROI calculations will support your business case. These metrics will help you tie everyday operational improvements, like faster asset retrieval, fewer reworks, and smoother collaboration, to clear financial outcomes.
Stakeholder perspectives: Tailoring the business case to your audience
While your business case should include all the core elements we’ve previously mentioned, it will be stronger and more convincing if it’s tailored to the people you’re sharing it with. Adapt your business case so that it focuses on the challenges, needs, or priorities of each group of stakeholders.
Marketing & creative teams
Marketing and creative teams will likely be the heaviest users of your DAM system. They potentially have the most to gain, but will also have the steepest learning curve when switching from their existing tools and processes to the new system.
When presenting your business case to your marketing and creative teams, highlight the benefits that are most relevant to their priorities:
- Improved brand consistency: Team members will be empowered to access brand elements and use templates to self-serve rather than relying on the marketing team’s time and capacity to produce basic branded materials.
- Wider access to brand assets: Team members will be able to access approved brand assets in a shared, centralized location, rather than asking marketing or brand teams to provide them.
- Reduced creative and administrative bottlenecks: Marketing and other departments will increase productivity as there will be less time lost waiting for access to assets or for designers to provide branded files.
- Faster project approvals: Many DAM platforms provide automated feedback and approval workflows, helping marketing teams run projects more efficiently.
IT & compliance leaders
IT teams and compliance leaders will be most involved in the implementation stage of your DAM project, though they’ll also be interested in the long-term impacts of the project from a security and compliance perspective.
When you present your DAM business case to IT and compliance leaders, focus on the areas most relevant to their priorities:
- Enterprise-grade governance: Your DAM can provide enterprise-level governance through customizable role-based permissions, portals for each global region, and asset version controls and expiry dates. These strengthen your asset and data governance compared with storing assets on a shared drive.
- Scalable infrastructure: A DAM provides a secure home for your valuable brand assets. DAMs are built on secure, enterprise-grade infrastructure, designed to handle large quantities of files and to scale with your business.
- Integrations with existing tech stack: Explain the benefits of connecting your DAM with tools in your existing tech stack, such as CMS or design tools. Focus on productivity gains as well as brand governance and consistency benefits, with brand assets flowing seamlessly between connected systems without disrupting your current workflows.
Executives & finance
You’ll need buy-in from your executive and finance teams to secure the necessary budget for your DAM implementation. When presenting your business case to these stakeholders, show how DAM investment aligns with the company’s top-level goals, such as digital transformation and global scalability. Additionally, focus on demonstrating measurable ROI, to show that it’s a project worth allocating significant budget for.
Focus your business case on these top-level priorities:
- Return on investment: Use metrics and KPIs to provide basic ROI calculations for a DAM system. Use your initial research to show the time and cost savings the DAM can deliver.
- Scalability: Explain the challenges your growing, global organization experiences managing brand assets across multiple tools and locations. Show how a DAM is a scalable, future-proof solution, designed to grow with your business.
- Digital transformation: Explain how investing in a DAM aligns with your company’s digital transformation efforts — consolidating multiple tools into a centralized, more efficient, and cost-effective solution.
- Brand protection: Show how a DAM platform can reduce brand and legal compliance risks, as well as improve brand consistency and adoption across the business.
How to build your DAM business case
A strong business case needs to be built on facts. To gain buy-in from stakeholders, you need to show where inefficiencies exist, what they’re costing your brand, and how they impact the business.
Identify pain points & collect evidence
Begin by mapping the daily frustrations your teams face when working with digital assets. Look at how much time they spend searching for files, recreating content that already exists, or waiting for approvals. Interview different groups to hear their experience in their own words, and pair their stories with quantifiable data, so you can say “our team spends X hours each week hunting for assets,” and have evidence to support your claims.
Don’t stop at productivity losses. Track issues like versioning errors, outdated assets going live, or compliance missteps. These mistakes often lead to rework, campaign delays, or even reputational risk. Show how frequently they occur and what they cost the business in real terms. This evidence paints a clear picture of why your organization needs a DAM system.
Map benefits to strategic goals
Executives want to know how a DAM system will help the business operate faster, safer, and smarter, not just how it saves your team time.
Position the benefits in the language of your company’s top priorities. When stakeholders see that a DAM platform directly advances strategic goals, your case becomes far more compelling. For example, if leadership talks about growth, emphasize speed to market. If they focus on risk, highlight governance and compliance. Show how consistent, approved assets build trust with customers and partners. Draw a straight line from fewer errors and delays to stronger campaigns and better brand perception.
Calculate ROI & present data clearly
After you’ve linked DAM benefits to business strategy, back up your arguments with numbers.
Keep the maths simple: estimate hours saved, multiply by the number of employees impacted, and then by their average hourly rate. Show how those savings compound over a year. Add in the value of reusing assets instead of creating them from scratch, and factor in how faster campaign launches can accelerate revenue opportunities.
When sharing ROI projections in your business case, clarity matters as much as the calculation. Use straightforward tables, charts, or side-by-side comparisons to make the numbers easy to grasp. Highlight both cost savings and value creation so stakeholders can see the full impact a DAM system can have on your bottom line.
Tailor the case to stakeholders
Different audiences care about different outcomes, so adjust your pitch accordingly. For executives, emphasize ROI, risk reduction, and competitive advantage. They want to see how a DAM protects brand investments and fuels growth. Keep the story high-level and focused on measurable business value.
For IT, lean into security, scalability, and system compatibility. Show how a DAM strengthens compliance, reduces shadow IT, and integrates with existing tools. Highlight features like user permissions and audit trails that reduce risk.
When you talk to creatives and marketers, focus on efficiency and freedom. Show how they’ll spend less time hunting for files and more time creating impactful work. Connect the DAM to smoother collaboration, faster campaigns, and less wasted time and resources.
Address common objections
Even the strongest business case will face questions, so prepare for them in advance. Cost is the most common pushback — counter it with ROI evidence that shows how quickly a DAM pays for itself. Point to efficiency gains, asset reuse, and reduced rework as clear, ongoing cost savings.
You may also hear, “we already use SharePoint” or another file storage tool. Explain that while those tools store files, they don’t support the governance, version control, or brand consistency a DAM provides. Show how a DAM adds structure, metadata, and approval workflows that standard file systems lack.
Finally, address adoption concerns head-on. Show how modern DAM platforms prioritize intuitive interfaces and role-based access. Share examples of quick onboarding and strong user adoption in similar organizations. Reinforce that the right DAM removes complexity instead of adding it, making everyone’s work easier.
Why Frontify strengthens your DAM business case
Frontify is a top choice DAM for enterprise businesses. Its comprehensive platform brings together DAM, brand guidelines, templates, and governance-first AI.
While you don’t want to get too focused on specific features when making your case to your stakeholders, it’s helpful to understand how Frontify’s functionality sets it apart from traditional DAM tools, to help you make a stronger, more defensible business case. Some of its notable features include:
- Integrated brand hub: Frontify combines DAM, brand guidelines, templates, and AI. Many companies are able to consolidate tools when switching to Frontify, delivering cost savings compared to using multiple tools for similar purposes.
- AI-powered Brand Assistant: Frontify’s Brand Assistant provides natural language support for users, helping them find assets more quickly and answering common brand questions. It saves hours of manual and administrative time, both for your brand team and across the business — and helps boost brand consistency.
- AI-powered predictive metadata and auto-tagging: Using AI to populate metadata and tags reduces manual work, improves asset findability, and improves data quality within your DAM. This delivers time savings throughout the asset lifecycle: during upload, and during its usable life.
- Multi-brand governance: Frontify’s platform supports multiple sub-brands, regions, and languages. Many companies choose a DAM that doesn’t scale with their business then have to switch later, but Frontify is designed to grow with your brand — avoiding the costs and productivity drops that come with changing tools.
Frontify delivers measurable value to its customers across a range of industries, regions, and company sizes. Examples from their existing customers will add credibility to your business case:
- Datacom employees used to wait for their brand or marketing teams to provide relevant assets. Using the Frontify DAM saves them 3-5 hours per request, as they can find and access the materials independently
- Telefónica has one central platform to manage all its sub-brands across 16 markets. It uses the Frontify DAM to store, organize, and manage over 717K assets and has scaled to more than 17K users across all brand teams.
- Spring Health previously used a legacy DAM, and it took three to six weeks to publish a new template in their old system. Switching to Frontify has saved them 16 hours per template, and they’ve published more than 175 templates to date.
If Frontify is your proposed solution, it’s easy to make a compelling business case to your stakeholders. To learn more about the Frontify DAM, book a demo today.
