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Everything from contracts to videos and even metadata is a business asset, a digital business asset. But they all need storage and cataloging if you are to use them for anything within your organization. This process is known as digital asset management. But what are the digital asset management best practices?
With the whole world going digital, digital asset management has become a critical part of modern commercial and marketing operations. As digital assets range from images and videos to documents, contracts, and metadata, managing the assets efficiently is becoming a bigger task.
Doing it correctly allows marketers and creatives to work efficiently even though the number of digital assets is increasing exponentially.
As is the case with any business process there is no magical solution that will get you from chaos to efficiency in seconds, but there are a number of practices that will help make your digital asset management a much more cohesive process
In this article we’ll dive into what digital asset management (DAM) is, why you need a dedicated DAM system, and how to manage your digital assets according to best practices.
Digital Asset Management (or DAM) is the process of storing and categorizing digital assets for use in business processes, usually through the use of a digital asset management solution.
Traditional forms of digital assets includes things like:
While this list may seem extensive, things like user accounts for services like email or games could also be included in the list, and similarly newer digital assets based on blockchain technologies could also be included. These would include NFT’s (non-fungible tokens), cryptocurrencies, crypto assets, tokenized assets, security tokens and even central bank digital currencies.
As you can see, digital assets are not just a single thing, and as they are becoming increasingly important to both our professional as well as our personal lives, the way we store and categorize them is also becoming more important.
But what are the digital asset management best practices? That’s what we’ll dive into here.
When it comes to blog content, most marketing teams are performing content audits at least annually, when they update things like figures and statistics to keep the blog content relevant, but are you doing the same for the content in your DAM solution?
You really should.
Your digital asset management system isn’t supposed to become a graveyard for old content.
And even if you are regularly deleting assets from old promotions, evergreen assets like logos or metadata also become outdated over time, and it is much harder to spot when they do, because they changes usually just involve a change in hue or a couple of words in a description.
For instance, where a change in a promotional asset will usually involve new images, new text, new prices and so on, changes in a logo file between version 1, version 2, and version 3 will be quite minimal. And if all three versions of that logo file lives in your digital asset management system it’s on you and your team to know which one is correct, and make sure version 1 is never used once you’ve switched to version 2.
Managing digital assets isn’t as simple as sticking assets in a folder in some cloud solution and calling it a day. If it was, we would all just be using Google drive as our digital asset management tool.
No, managing digital assets is an ongoing process of creating, updating, categorizing, storing, and later accessing every asset your team needs. And pulling this off efficiently requires collaboration.
Now, most marketing teams already have a collaboration tool of some kind, but making sure that this tool integrates with your DAM solution is where the real trick is. Make sure that everything from asset development to review to storage happens in the same platform is not only going to make you more efficient, it will also reduce the opportunity for errors such as wrong versions of a finished asset being uploaded to your DAM.
Essentially, without collaboration, your DAM system may be nothing more than a glorified cloud drive, so ensure to use this guide to make the most of your system.
Businesses are getting more and more reliant on automation to manage the more tedious parts of business processes, and with good reason.
So why should your digital asset management be any different?
One example of how automation can be used in digital asset management is Google’s Vision API, which automatically assigns keywords to images. This significantly speeds up categorization and improves the searchability of your content storage. Similarly connecting Creative Automation Studio, a tool that automates parts of your content creation process, to your DAM system will help improve your content creation process.
There is no such thing as a silver bullet when it comes to digital asset management. What one team finds invaluable in their solution may be negligible for another team.
And this goes beyond the features of your digital asset management tool. It’s about the processes related to your digital asset management as a whole. Does everyone know how to perform content reviews, where different asset types should be stored and when to perform asset audits?
A digital asset management software is a solution that provides organizations with a central repository of digital assets such as photos, videos, documents, illustrations, contracts and metadata.
Most digital asset management software systems will include both an asset library as well as ways to collaborate on the development and improvement of assets.
There are a number of benefits to using a digital asset management system to store your digital assets, and a lot of them will depend on which digital asset management system you are using, but here are three of the more universal benefits of using a DAM system.
Most DAM solutions are cloud based, which means they provide employees with a central place to access files no matter where they are located and what time of day it is. Additionally, gathering assets in a central library makes it easy for both internal and external stakeholders to find the assets they are looking for.
Especially for larger files, sharing can be an issue as most email providers limit messages to 25MB. This is particularly cumbersome when working with video assets where files are commonly hundreds of MB in size. And even with file sharing services that lets you upload and download files for sharing, there’s always the issue of people downloading multiple versions of a file with slight variations and then needing to go back and forth to find out which is the most recent version.
With a digital asset management system, file sharing is usually just a matter of sending a URL to a folder in the system.
In marketing having access to the latest version of a file is crucial to being able to do your job well. And using google drive or similar storage solutions for your assets means that not only will you not always have access to the latest version of a file, you might not know if the version you have access to is the most recent. This issue is usually remedied with a digital asset management system, because it manages more than simply the storage of your digital assets.
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