Digital Asset Management: Benefits and Best Practices

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If your organization uses any kind of digital media, chances are you have a system to organize it and access it. It may be chaotic and poorly managed but your assets are stored somewhere. However, looking for the right image or video is what accounts for the most time wasted in the marketing process. This is where Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems come in, which keeps your rich media repository organized and easily accessible.

Companies that implement a DAM system benefit from an improvement to their entire marketing cycle. With the rise of digital marketing and mobile content, producing engaging and interesting visual content is more important than ever. Companies find themselves having to manage large quantities of disparate media, such as photos, videos, graphs, infographics, thus needing a system to quickly search, retrieve and deliver these assets.

You can choose an integrated DAM solution, a Wordpress plugin or a manual code embedding process. In this article, I aim to present you with tips and best practices to choose and implement a DAM system. Read on to learn more.

What Is Digital Asset Management?

Digital Asset Management, putting it simply, is a digital library solution to manage, store, search and deliver all your digital assets, such as images, audio, video, presentations and animations, in an accessible, searchable and centralized location.

A DAM solution uses metadata to tag rich media files and enable them to be easily searchable. The system allows for efficient workflow automation, as it organizes permissions, versioning, and even manages the asset usage rights.

Most DAM solutions include the following features:

• Works as a digital library—centralizing the search system to find the last approved versions of assets for a project.
• Automates tasks—you can, for example, configure a workflow that checks all assets to ensure they are tagged and attached metadata before uploading.
• Streamlines collaboration—by facilitating the assigning, reviewing and approving of tasks, thus improving collaboration. Note that while a DAM system provides comprehensive features for collaboration, it is not a project management tool.
• Converts files automatically—converts automatically images, audio and video. This saves companies from the time invested in editing images and video. Some DAM systems integrate with video encoding and image optimization solutions.
• Distributes digital assets to third parties—you can use your DAM system to deliver you can deliver your digital content to agencies, photo editors or third party vendors without using cumbersome email attachments. Most DAM systems can also be configured to upload directly to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.

Why Do You Need a Digital Management System?

Companies using DAM are more efficient, with studies shown that this variable increases the company’s value by 20%. The increasing adoption of Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions is pushing the market, which is expected to grow from USD 2.44 Billion in 2017 to USD 5.66 Billion by 2022.

Some statistics that illustrate the need for digital asset management
35% of the times a person looks for a media file prove unsuccessful. This research shows that using a digital asset management system can reduce this number to 5%.
71% of organizations have issues sharing access to assets within the teams, stalling workflows and reducing collaboration between departments.

Other benefits of implementing a DAM include:

• Drives faster time to market—accelerates the marketing process, shortening the time needed to find assets, create new content and launch campaigns. This allows marketing teams not only to respond quickly to consumer demands but to catch market trends as they arise.
• Increases conversion—supports the creation of personalized content and experiences. It does this by categorizing the content according to the parameters configured by the organization. For example, DAM can curate content dedicated to a particular customer.
• Drives ROI—by trimming unnecessary costs such as the constant need to create new content, identifying reusable assets.

Characteristics of an Effective DAM Solution

You decided to improve and organize your digital asset management by installing a DAM solution. How do you choose the right solution for your organization? The best digital asset management systems present a few key characteristics:

• Flexibility—allows you to customize the metadata such as fields and labels to suit your specific needs. This flexibility can help the team search for assets following the organization's parameters.

• Access Management—allows the implementation of the least permission rule, meaning a person in a given role sees only the strictly minimum required to do their job. Many assets are of high intellectual property value. Therefore, restricting access minimizes the risk of an internal threat.

• Collaboration—supports a collaborative work environment. For example, you can use your DAM for communication between a given project team members.

• Analytics—provides periodical reports giving you insight about for example, where your assets are published, the scope of the production line and asset usage.

Best Practices for Implementing a DAM Solution

When starting to implement a digital asset management strategy, there are several tips you can follow:

#1. Audit your assets
You should know what assets are being used and how—which are critical for the business and which aren’t.

#2. Document a DAM strategy
You should develop a documented and delineated strategy. This should include the standardization and normalization of name conventions for the assets tags.

#3. Consistency
It is important to foster brand consistency across all departments and channels. A good DAM will enable brand consistency enabling to filter the list of requirements by departments and employees to effectively create custom solutions for each.

#3. Define the DAM objectives
What do you want to achieve with the DAM? What are the critical issues you expect the DAM to address?

#5. Determine your minimum requirements
According to the needs of your organization, you should determine what are the minimum requirements a DAM software should fill to fulfill your needs. For this, it can be a good idea to start small, with a standard version and see how it fits the priority needs and from there adapt it to your system.

Wrap Up

Organizations leveraging DAM technology streamline workflows, ensure brand consistency and get more traction from their digital assets. To achieve these goals, it is important to develop a clear digital asset management strategy implementing best practices and following clear criteria to choose the right solution.