Alma Lasers develops and markets technology-based solutions for non-invasive medical procedures such as hair removal and skin rejuvenation.  They may be a small company today, but they have big marketing needs to support their fast-growing business.   With corporate offices in both the US and Israel, and regional offices around the world, the company needed a more effective way to share and collaborate on product, sales, and marketing materials.  

Patrick Neff, Marketing Manager for the Americas, came to Alma Lasers with a goal.  He knew he would need to build a marketing operations model today that would support the company’s aggressive growth moving forward.  At the same time, he needed to optimize the value of his investments in marketing photos, graphics, and other high-cost collateral.

An Affordable Option

At the heart of his plan was a solution to provide both centralized management of sales and marketing materials as well as fulfillment support for the company’s de-centralized sales and marketing group.  With a marketing team scattered across several locations who work with vendors around the world, centralizing the management of the company’s marketing assets seemed a daunting task.    So Patrick turned to digital asset management (DAM) for an answer. 

“As a pre-IPO company, we have a limited budget and needed to find an affordable, easy-to-manage solution that would help us have better control of our expanding global marketing communications,” explains Neff.  “After researching a number of more expensive, more complicated digital asset management products, we realized that a hosted ActiveMedia Essentials implementation from ClearStory would be a perfect fit.” 

DAM Value

Today Alma Lasers uses ActiveMedia to centrally manage all of the company’s sales and marketing assets and materials.  The system allows the company to get premium value from their investments in print ads, Web graphics, product photos, before-and-after clinical photos, brochures, presentations, sales quotes and other materials. 

By allowing the company’s vendors secure access to the system, Alma Lasers is able to achieve time-to-market improvements:    An advertising vendor can upload a final project for instant access by a print vendor to shorten project cycle times.  Marketing managers can easily distribute large graphic files via secure email links to print vendors, directly from the system. Print vendors can upload final production files directly into the system, which transforms the files into formats that the sales team can use. Owning the final files allows Alma Lasers to choose future vendors at will.

 

The system is used frequently to repurpose and reuse marketing investments.  Benefits span a number of areas:

• The marketing department can easily catalog and share marketing collateral globally

• Remote marketing teams can rapidly locate graphics and photos created for a campaign, then reuse and repurpose their initial investment across additional ads, web campaigns, or other projects. 

• Sales management can upload new sales materials into the system for instant access by sales representatives, ensuring that sales reps are always effectively working form the most current materials and information.

• Global sales staff can easily access presentations, product specifications, pricing, contracts, etc., from anywhere in the world.  

Before and After

One significant improvement enabled by DAM is the use of Alma Lasers’ clinical “before-and-after” photos. These images are critical proof points in the sales process, as they demonstrate the improvements realized from aesthetic treatments using laser devices.  To ensure the accuracy of information delivered to physicians, the photos must be identified by the equipment used, the treatment details, the doctor’s name, the practice location, and other critical detail.  Organizing this information into a searchable, “browseable”, and easy-to-navigate solution could never be achieved with a file system or traditional database.  

 “Before-and-after photos are what sell our product.  Giving sales people an organized, effective way to get the photos they need for physician presentations makes all the difference in the world,” comments Neff. 

Patrick envisions a day when Alma Lasers will take advantage of the more advanced capabilities of their DAM, including broader administrative functionality and a more complex security and taxonomy structure.  Because ActiveMedia Essentials is based on an enterprise-class DAM solution, the company can migrate to the full version of ActiveMedia in the future. 

“Upper management is really seeing the sales benefit from having a system that can accommodate rapid worldwide delivery of sales and marketing materials,” concludes Neff, “The notion of upload-once, reach many puts us in a great position to support growth moving forward.”