Creating omnichannel experience, improving customer services, and driving scalability within a stipulated time leads to substantial business growth and remarkable expansion. In such a case, extending the lifecycle of your digital assets, which may include images, videos, documents, and graphics, can play an important role in allowing you to reuse them when creating new marketing material for your business.
Due to the many benefits that a well-organized digital asset management system brings in today’s business landscape, we’ve decided to provide you with a little handbook about the management of digital assets. With this ultimate guide, you will learn how you can make the best out of your software repository!
However, before we get started, it is important that we lay out the basics and discuss what digital asset management (also shortly known as DAM) actually is.
What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?
Professionals state that DAM is a process instituted by business organizations, irrespective of their size to arrange, edit, store, and share digital assets. It is one of the fastest-growing software systems and functions as a workflow and archiving tool used to automate the management process. The fundamental of digital asset management involves the movement of assets through a digital asset lifecycle, which can be stored in server systems and are often used in print, broadcast, and digital production. It enables business administrators to route workflows and prompt asset movement through an upload process to have the right metadata attached.
Core Features and Functionality of Digital Asset Management
A wide variety of the features and functionality of DAM offers extensive customization alternatives for users belonging to a business organization, and oftentimes, the level of functionality and customization offered is indicated by the system cost. Here are some of the key features of the DAM to support businesses with creative efficiency:
1) File Management
This functionality allows business administrators to store, share, and edit digital assets, including audio, video, documents, and graphics, from an integrated, centralized location. Additionally, the search feature is considered to be one of the most valuable and robust components of DAM file management. Particularly, it facilitates quick search and locate assets, which helps users avoid re-creating missing assets and witness notable savings.
2) Automated Workflow
Digital asset management renders exclusive functionality to streamline the creation and production of assets, replacing manual processes completely. With this automated capability, DAM provides efficiency in project tracking, which provides business administrators with satisfactory assurance of project completion. Simultaneously, it ensures that no approvals and proofing are missed at any level.
3) Remote Proofing and Approvals
Collaborators can get assets edited, reviewed, and approved easily from anywhere and at any time. This helps business partners save their valuable time as this functionality eliminates the redundant process of sharing and approving drafts manually. It also allows for the possibility of working remotely for those who prefer it.
4) Digital Publishing
Digital asset management facilitates digital functionality, enabling the creative team within an organization to utilize assets to its fullest, create and produce content in multifarious formats. Business administrators can publish it on a variety of platforms and devices as well. Many businesses pick a content management system to manage their content for websites or intranets with multiple users with varying levels of permissions. It incorporates metadata to describe the content of the asset, the file type, date of creation, access rights, and ownership.
5) Security and Authenticated User Access
This feature extends a layer of protection against external attacks within the DAM system. With this robust capability, business administrators can set up role-based, location-based, and department-based access permissions for users. This enables businesses to save data and evade its misuse at all levels.
6) Collaboration
Rendering such functionality, DAM empowers groups of users or teams within an organization to work together on asset development. Not only does this stimulate collaboration among the groups, but it also helps drive efficiency, enhance cooperation, and increase productivity. On top of that, this capability enables the team to create a project in real-time more often.
7) Brand Management
Brand management helps business organizations manage their brand integrity efficiently. It is a by-product of digital asset management that ensures consistency of voice, message, and tone of brand assets across all delivery platforms and languages. With such extensive capability, businesses can obtain the maximum value for their investments given towards communications and marketing.
8) Media Asset Management
Media asset management focuses on the management of audio, video, and images, both in analog and digital forms. At the same time, it assists business organizations in seeking storage of rich media, including streaming video, downloadable apps, and dynamic online ads.
9) Marketing Operations Management
This feature deals with the optimization of marketing activities, which includes strategic planning and analytical content management. It renders extensive support to an organization in analyzing, planning, and managing the response of their customers and market to their brand, helping their team assure brand consistency efficiently.
Benefits of DAM
An automated system used to manage digital assets can drive drastic transformation in the operations executed by the creative team of an enterprise. Additionally, it renders numerous benefits and helps businesses conduct the management processes smoother than ever before.
- Digital asset management system provides the capability to develop an asset once, edit on an existing one, and share it swiftly via multiple channels. This prompts streamlining file creating and repurposing.
- Digital asset management provides organizations with an efficient workflow to keep projects in motion. It also keeps stakeholders updated so that they always remain on target. It helps them get projects reviewed and approved for better analysis while also meeting project deadlines.
- Preventing accidental use of off-brand or outdated assets, this system helps improve the quality of published assets. In addition, it reduces file search time. Users can find a file using metatags, which readily eliminates the redundancy of recreating unfound assets.
Who Can Use Digital Asset Management?
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Marketing and Sales Professionals
Marketing and sales teams can deploy digital asset management to drive efficiency in their organizational operations. Particularly, marketing and omnichannel professionals can access this management system for creating and storing marketing material, such as images or specific templates. On the other hand, the sales team can avail access to approved assets and use it for sales pitches. This helps them assure the delivery of creative and targeted assets to their clients.
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Creative Personnel
Graphic designers and photographers can use DAM to access digital assets as well as upload new assets into the system. They can make the most of integration with creative and intuitive tools and steer increased productivity as well.
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Educators
Educational institutions can deploy digital asset management to quickly create targeted and customized communications and use them to outreach students or alumni. They may also use it to share event updates on educational platforms to gain attention and acknowledgment.
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IT Professionals
DAM renders a team of asset owners, DAM managers, metadata managers, and archivists to help IT professionals configure the system and assure their ingestion with proper information. With this management system, IT professionals can assure the involvement of the right data in the integration of DAM with other systems as well.
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Packagers
Deployment of DAM can assist the packaging team as a repository to store packaging assets. It helps them access and create updates with agility and speed.
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Agencies
This management system assists agencies in uploading newly developed campaign assets for approval. It delivers extensive support for them to access logos, brand guidelines, and lifestyle images to use as an integral part of campaigns.
Digital Asset Management Systems
Business organizations can leverage digital asset management through three distinctive configurations, namely cloud, on-premises, and hybrid.
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Cloud-based management system
Cloud-based management systems are the preferred choice for most of the business organizations. Their cost-effective, scalable, and negligible IT maintenance features make the system stand at the forefront of advances in DAM technology. Web-based interface and hosting on the web make the deployment swift and facilitates easy learning for the staff to use the system.
Furthermore, all upgrades, maintenance, and system backups are managed by the system vendor itself. These systems are proven most cost-effective for digital asset management as it requires no hardware and functions under a subscription model. Business organizations can easily pick NetSuite Integration to maintain and control the entire asset lifecycle and streamline all the processes efficiently.
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On-premises management system
On-premises systems often eliminate the risk of downtime during an outage due to their partial dependency on internet access. However, it requires in-house management and maintenance, including updates and system backups. Moreover, business organizations need to add costs to their investment if custom functionality is required.
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Hybrid management system
This system renders the cost-effectiveness of the cloud and uptime of an on-premise system to help the business organization gain both the benefits at once. Having one foot in the cloud, these systems offer a low budget requirement as well as removes the risk of downtime. It also offers simple access for partners and vendors; a system vendor manages all the upgrades efficiently.
What Helps You Pick DAM? — Know If You Really Need It
Although DAM (Digital Asset Management) system is a robust functionality that provides values to asset management of an organization, it is essential to know if your organizational operations really need it. Regardless of what software vendors tell, as a business administrator, you must know that this functionality is orchestrated to fulfill specific needs of asset management within an enterprise. For instance, business organizations may choose to deploy a digital asset management system in the following circumstances:
- Trouble finding assets, using them one time once
- Trouble tracking marketing projects
- Trouble converting assets into formats needed for various campaigns
- Uncertainty with using an approved version of the asset
- Uncertainty with the usage of digital assets by external partners
Deploying DAM without a proper understanding of its impact on the business can be a speculative decision, hence determining organizational benefits from this intelligent marketing technology will be the smartest approach. On a conclusive note, an easy-to-use, integrated, and scalable digital asset management can help connect marketing technologies, where NetSuite Integration can offer robust alignment on product roadmaps as well. This advanced technology allows the creative team to work to their best and steer impressive productivity across the entire organization.
