Digital Asset Management Strategy: All You Need to Know

We have learned a lot about Digital Asset Management in our previous posts, such as the definition, features, practices, benefits, signs that indicate DAM requirements, who (users) need DAM, which industries should consider it, types of DAM, best practices, and much more. These all apply after the DAM selection and implementation process.

Through this post, you will get insights into the Digital Asset Management strategy. Based on your DAM strategy, you can choose the right Digital Asset Management solution for your organization and get the most value from it.

You can select a DAM solution based on its capabilities. But it won’t be as effective as a DAM implementation backed by a strategy.

Let’s begin with defining and implementing the right Digital Asset Management strategy for your business.

Table of Content

11 Steps to Define and Implement the Digital Asset Management (DAM) Strategy

To successfully implement a Digital Asset Management solution, you need to understand your digital assets and the value they create for your business. To plan and implement the DAM strategy effectively, strengthen communication, review and consultation, and embrace cultural change.

Once you have complete control over your digital assets, you can take maximum value out of them. Ultimately, this helps you achieve organizational goals and manage your digital asset collection sustainably.

Here are the steps that you can consider to define a Digital Asset Management strategy for DAM solution auditing, planning, and implementation. Also, it helps you meet the expectations of different stakeholders.

1. Discuss the DAM requirements with your internal team

Usually, organizations select a Digital Asset Management system, implement it, and then introduce the solution to internal and external users. The reverse cycle will be more effective.

First, have a brief discussion with your internal teams to understand the challenges they face and the requirements they have without a Digital Asset Management solution. Identify how they will use the DAM solution and what capabilities they need to improve their daily work.

Involve the people who will use the solution in the decision-making process. It helps you build a team built on trust and support.

Now, with a list of problems and needs from your different departments, finding the right DAM platform becomes easier. When contacting a DAM solution vendor, you can ask how their DAM solution helps your internal teams address their issues and meet their needs.

Also, during the demo, you can see whether the system can meet your expectations. So you can implement a DAM solution that fits your business requirements.

It speeds up your decision-making process and also ensures your investment is worth it. Don’t you think this is a more realistic approach than picking just another DAM solution?

2. Create some use cases

Identify the use cases in which digital assets are required in your organization. To choose the right Digital Asset Management system, the best practice is to hold sessions with different teams and list all possible use cases.

Once you have all the use cases, it becomes easier to judge whether the DAM solution vendors offer is right for you.

3. Audit your assets and systems

Without a Digital Asset Management solution, your teams are likely managing media assets on local computers, the intranet, or in a tool or software. Spend some time identifying the digital assets already in your organization and collect the data listed below.

How many digital assets do you have?
Where are the digital assets being stored?
What is the existing software your teams use to manage the digital assets?

It helps you to understand the volume of digital assets you have. Also, if they are stored and managed in different systems that are disconnected from each other, you’ll get clarity on the challenges your teams face.

Based on this analysis, when you connect with a DAM solution provider, you can assess the system’s capabilities. Make sure the DAM system lets you manage all your assets in a single location.

You can also ask about the platform’s integration capabilities. Once you get satisfactory answers to all your queries, you can move ahead with implementation.

4. Identify your stakeholders

After gathering details about your digital assets, the next step is to identify the stakeholders for the DAM solution. Here, I mean you need to define the users who will create, use, and manage the digital assets.

Your people play a vital role in either making or breaking your Digital Asset Management strategy. If your people are used to managing digital assets a certain way, it will be difficult to convince them to adopt the new technology platform.

They will either help you adopt the DAM solution or hinder you by protesting the change. You need to make the necessary efforts to get them on your side and involve them in planning and implementing the new DAM strategy.

5. Collect the DAM requirements from your external resources

Your external resources such as suppliers, retailers, distributors, vendors, etc. are also sharing the digital assets with you and vice versa. For example, you might create a customized quotation for each supplier, and each supplier sends you specific invoices.

All these usually happen through email. Imagine the number of emails you are sending and receiving daily.

It’s a time-consuming and confusing process. Implementation of Digital Asset Management allows external users to store and manage digital assets in the system.

For example, you can store, manage, and share the custom quotation with the respective supplier. The supplier can store, manage, and share only your invoices in the DAM solution.

Moreover, you and your external users are using some set of software and tools such as a Collection Management System. If you want to integrate the DAM system into your existing workflow, advanced DAM allows seamless integration with any of your existing enterprise systems and third-party applications.

6. Define a business case

The business case relates to how digital asset management contributes to achieving your business objectives. Consider return on investment, training, time, budget, etc.

With a robust Digital Asset Management solution, you can achieve your business goals by reducing overhead costs or improving ROI. DAM streamlines and automates many digital asset-related activities and reduces mundane tasks for your teams.

It directly impacts employee productivity.

7. Determine the DAM strategies

Once you have all the requirements, challenges, and use cases in place, it becomes easier for you to design a plan of action for your Digital Asset Management system. When creating DAM strategies, make sure they help you meet milestones and create opportunities for the company and your organization’s people.

Keep your DAM strategies achievable and measurable. Unrealistic targets and overambitious expectations in the initial phase won’t help.

Make sure your DAM implementation targets are realistic and measurable. Once you have a Digital Asset Management strategy in place, share it with everyone, internal and external, and involve them in the implementation process to improve its effectiveness.

8. Roll out the DAM implementation strategies in phases

Organizations often prefer to implement the entire DAM strategy at once. But, to be honest, it’s not the right way.

Many Digital Asset Management strategies fail because companies want to go too far, too fast. Implementation of the DAM strategy requires considerable time, effort, and investment.

If it doesn’t work the way you expected, you might bear a big loss. Roll out the strategy in incremental phases.

This makes it easier to judge the impact and measure results. If something goes wrong, you can make the required changes to the strategy.

Moving forward, you will take these lessons into account during DAM strategy implementation. This helps avoid a complete strategy failure and keeps things moving forward.

At each phase of the DAM strategy, ensure your staff and external stakeholders are involved.

9. Mapping out your Digital Asset Management strategy

Defining the Digital Asset Management strategy is not enough. You also need to map out the DAM strategy.

While you start mapping your DAM strategy with your existing business processes, you need to take care of different aspects, starting from

Configuring the strategy in the existing workflows
Defining a taxonomy for easy search of digital assets
Managing and assigning asset access and ownership
Fostering user adoption rate
Measuring the digital asset performance and results, and more…

10. Integrate DAM strategies into your day to day DAM practices

As you implement the DAM strategy, start incorporating it into your organizational workflow. You can’t ensure DAM implementation succeeds until all your users feel comfortable working with it daily.

But, of course, you cannot ask your people to start using the DAM solution the day after it’s implemented. You need to define policies, role descriptions, and plans.

To support seamless adoption of the DAM solution, provide thorough training for your staff.

11. Build a community

Implementing DAM drives cultural change in your organization. Create an active community of stakeholders ready to embrace this change and support its success.

Latest DAM Strategies to Consider for Your Modern Workforce as a Part of Your Digital Asset Management Strategy

Media assets are essential for engaging and connecting with your target audience. They also help organizations gain a competitive edge.

However, creating, managing, distributing, and publishing a large volume of visual content becomes challenging. Every visual content item needs to be resized and reformatted to meet the needs of different channels and screen sizes where it might be displayed.

Imagine the number of variations for each asset. To manage media assets and all their variations in a structured, organized way, implementing advanced Digital Asset Management strategies is essential.

A cloud-based Digital Asset Management Solution Allows for Remote Work

It is very important that your teams can access the media assets whenever they need them. They can also optimize media files to meet the requirements of specific channels and use them.

Especially during the COVID-19 situation, when almost all teams operating remotely need quick access to the media files they need. DAM implementation lets distributed teams work remotely on fluid schedules.

Cloud-based DAM lets teams access all digital assets on the fly. Not only that, they can create, manage, resize, reformat, distribute, and publish the asset quickly and accurately.

Ultimately, DAM helps companies establish and maintain a productive, efficient workflow.

AI-driven asset organization and analytics

When you choose a dynamic Digital Asset Management platform like Pimcore, you get access to three core capabilities.

Automated asset transformation and optimization
Manage all the asset variations in a structured way
Publish the media files in an optimal format

Before utilizing these capabilities, organizations need to identify the assets that are available in bulk. If you own a large library of images, videos, and documents, you need informed planning with Artificial Intelligence.

AI automates the content identification process for your team to facilitate:

Rapid deployment of metadata
Adding the appropriate tags and relevant search terms to make the assets easily searchable

DAM is a must-have solution for product-driven organizations and industries. For example, you are a retailer that sells apparel.

To promote products on a website or eCommerce store, you need to take photos of the apparel. You also need to resize and reformat the images to meet the specific requirements of multiple output channels.

It is always better not to reinvent content when you already have similar content. In most scenarios, teams request new digital assets when they can use existing ones to deliver the experience they want.

Often, they don’t do this intentionally; they just don’t know the required assets are available. The latest Digital Asset Management platform offers AI-powered tagging and analytics so your content creation teams can clearly see what assets they already have.

With analytics, you can gain insights into asset usage. For example, certain assets are rarely used; the analytics show why.

This allows your teams to enhance assets or create different versions of them. Content creators can use user engagement metrics to gain better insights and optimize and repurpose existing content.

Image and Video Transformation

Digital Assets are used by different teams across the company. They all need to use the media files with the required editing and optimization.

An advanced Digital Asset Management solution automates resizing, reformatting, and cropping processes for your respective digital assets. For example, DAM automates background manipulation that distracts users from the content and foreground subjects in a photo.

DAM deployment [considering distributed workforce and emerging technologies]

For maximum flexibility, we recommend implementing a cloud-based DAM solution as part of your Digital Asset Management strategy. It makes it simple and effective for distributed teams to collaborate from remote locations.

Thus, a SaaS-based DAM solution acts as a Productivity Bridge that breaks down logistical barriers and closes functional gaps between content delivery and asset management teams. It lets you and your teams keep working without interruption.

Most advanced DAM solutions enable you to create modern asset workflows. Collecting digital assets, storing them in a well-structured fashion, and enabling searchability and access are the core capabilities of any DAM platform.

The cutting-edge Digital Asset Management solutions are:

Mobile-first

The latest DAM adapts assets to display effectively on any screen size and device, including mobile. They need intelligent resizing, cropping, and adjustments on the fly.

Rich media support

Digital Asset Management transforms image formats, animated GIFs, 3D models, and 360-degree images. Advanced tools automatically crop, resize, and transcode rich media to create multiple versions and make them compatible with different use cases.

Last-mile asset delivery

Leverage last-mile asset delivery to design and deliver highly creative assets to the end-users with greater quality and faster loading times. In Digital Asset Management, every asset has a URL.

You can use these URLs directly in websites and mobile apps to deliver content faster through a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Seamless integration with different systems

The modern Digital Asset Management platform is extensible. Thus, its capabilities are not limited to the features and functionality the platform offers.

By allowing you to integrate any number of existing enterprise systems and third-party applications, you can access all the required features that you use every day. While selecting a DAM platform, make sure it has built-in connectors for all systems with which the digital assets work, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Content Management System (CMS), Product Information Management (PIM) systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Process Management (BPM) tools, marketing tools, and social media.

By integrating a wide variety of software and systems, you can streamline business operations, boost team efficiency, and deliver a better customer experience. To enable these integrations, DAM should include a range of SDKs, Widgets, and APIs.

If you face barriers to asset delivery, identify and resolve them to ensure smoother media delivery across platforms. Integrating with other systems ensures a single source of truth for every asset across every delivery and team.

This centralized data helps you manage brand standards, track version history, and enforce copyright and usage compliance.

Prioritize company culture and buy-in as you implement the DAM

Implementing a DAM solution with the right Digital Asset Management strategy helps organizations take efficiency to the next level and address teams’ critical issues effectively. If you don’t involve people in DAM strategy, solution selection, and implementation, you won’t achieve the expected results.

So, let DAM play a supporting role in improving your organization’s work culture.

Why Do You Need a Digital Asset Management Strategy?

Maintain brand consistency across multiple channels

Digital Asset Management significantly improves brand consistency across sales and marketing channels for each campaign. DAM offers

Next-level automation in managing local or global versions of assets
Integration with enterprise systems and third-party engagement software
Different renditions of digital assets across multiple channels

It’s challenging to know and find the digital assets

Without the right Digital Asset Management strategy, many businesses have acquired and created digital assets without a coordinated approach. Eventually, they end up unable to identify what the assets are, where they are located, and how to use them.

In most cases, organizations have no comprehension of what digital assets are and what role they play in a company. This is one of the most inefficient and costly exercises, and it impacts your business’s competitiveness.

When your assets are scattered, your teams spend a lot of time and effort finding them. If they can’t find them, they have to recreate the asset, even though it already exists.

Without a DAM, you cannot have reliable digital asset standardization. Without standardization, you may face issues with third-party licensing and version control.

You may incur the cost of storing duplicate assets.

Create delightful digital experiences for your customers

Well-managed digital assets empower content value by creating and delivering a compelling digital experience. Creating these experiences involves many steps.

At the time of designing a Digital Asset Management strategy, you need to consider

Management, production, and innumerable editorial activities
Editing and enriching the digital assets
Storing and indexing the multiple renditions
Reviewing and approving the final versions
Identifying derivative works
Channeling the distribution to marketers across the organization, and more…

Implementing a DAM simplifies commercial rights and payments-related matters, such as analyzing how digital assets are used, ensuring usage terms are met, generating data for royalty payments, and identifying issues before they become costly mistakes. If you plan to define business models for commercial content, I want to share that they will be complex and not easily reduced to predefined rules and algorithms.

Brand-conscious companies are facing brand consistency issues. With the emergence of DAM platforms, they can manage a wide range of digital assets by storing, organizing, protecting, and distributing them effectively and securely.

Allows your teams to focus more on creative and revenue-generating activities

If you implement a SaaS-based Digital Asset Management solution, your sales, marketing, and other teams can quickly convert media files with less time spent and less bandwidth. They can enrich content on the fly and move on to address the remaining challenges without a clunky workflow and manual requests.

Gain a competitive edge with a Digital Asset Management strategy

Using analytics from Digital Asset Management platforms, digital architecture, and frameworks, organizations make a massive volume and diversity of actions and decisions every day. In every domain, organizations constantly try to leverage data and build unique data assets before competitors outmaneuver, outperform, and outpace them.

Organizations that don’t treat digital assets as a core business necessity can’t develop an effective Digital Asset Management strategy. By overlooking the importance of digital assets, companies risk business failure.

DAM transforms the way your creative team operates

As a Digital Asset Management platform automates asset management processes, it drastically changes how creative teams work and achieve their targets. Implementation of an advanced DAM system

Offers efficient workflow

DAM enables brands to keep projects moving with automated workflows and send necessary alerts to stakeholders, so they can complete reviews and approvals on time and meet deadlines seamlessly.

Reduces file search time

Metadata tagging is one of the most essential Digital Asset Management strategies, allowing users to search digital assets faster and reduce the likelihood of recreating the same assets.

Streamlines file repurposing and creation

A DAM platform allows companies to create assets and edit and enrich them as needed. It also lets you distribute them quickly across multiple channels.

Ensures brand consistency

Implementing a Digital Asset Management solution helps companies improve the quality of their digital assets. It also prevents the use of outdated digital assets, which can negatively impact brand reputation.

Define user rights and permission for content accessibility

With a Digital Asset Management system, you can control user access to digital assets using the user rights and permissions feature. As we know, DAM is a centralized repository for all your digital assets ready for distribution across multiple output channels.

These assets can also be shared with others. But some digital assets are still in progress.

An internal team needs to access these assets until they are ready for distribution and publishing. Without the right DAM platform, your employees usually manage digital assets on their local computers.

This creates issues when former employees leave the organization. The data may leave with them.

When new employees join the company, they might recreate the same types of assets. This is obvious, as they may not be aware of existing assets.

By managing all digital assets in a single location, you don’t need to worry about employee exits and new hires.

How to be prepared for Digital Asset Management (DAM) strategy implementation?

Perform a Digital Asset Audit Quickly

It is always the first step to identify what you have and how you can utilize it, regardless of any business or strategy. It’s a cost-effective approach.

Thus, it applies to digital assets too. Start by identifying the most common use cases for Digital Asset Management in your organization.

Coordinate with your internal teams to clarify how digital assets support your organizational needs now and in the future. Once you understand how the Digital Asset Management systems are being used in your company and across your different teams, it’s time to identify where your assets are stored, what is needed to manage them, and how these digital assets are accessed by the users.

When you have all this information in place, it becomes easy for your Information Technology and digital asset management teams to compile all the required information and address it early. I hope you’re now clear on which teams need to work with digital assets.

Involve all your team members in creating, implementing, and managing the Digital Asset Management system. Their input is crucial, as they perform day-to-day DAM activities.

Discuss their day-to-day frustrations and requirements to build a suitable DAM solution instead of selecting a ready-to-use one.

Develop a Business Plan

Here, consider the business plan in the context of DAM. While making a decision to implement a DAM solution, outline the values it delivers to your company and how the system will help you accomplish your organizational objectives and challenges.

You also need to quantify the investment for the DAM and then justify that investment. To design a perfect business plan, you need to create detailed documentation that covers

The way processes are managed now
What is the cost of the existing process in terms of effort, time, and resources?

Consider this as a baseline while deploying a DAM. Ensure it is cost-efficient in all ways, regardless of resources, time, or effort.

Define your business plan to map where you are now, where you are going, and the full plan to achieve your objectives. Basically, you need to create a business plan that works as a blueprint for your entire project.

Discuss DAM Requirements & Challenges with Your Teams

As we discussed in our Digital Asset Management strategy section, you must involve DAM users in the decision-making process. You need to understand how your team members will use the DAM in their daily work.

This simplifies digital asset management processes and builds a culture of trust and support across the organization.

Identify the DAM Implementation Objectives

Determining the objective is essential for everything that you do. The most common way to do this is through face-to-face meetings.

Have a detailed discussion with your stakeholders and users about digital asset requirements and challenges, and learn what matters most to your team. Based on users’ and stakeholders’ needs and issues, you can define objectives and identify how to achieve them.

For example, if your objective for the DAM implementation is to speed up catalog production, define and document this in the pre-planning stages.

Determine Your Basic Requirements for the DAM

Before moving ahead with DAM platform selection and implementation, define your basic needs. Based on your requirements, invest in a Digital Asset Management solution.

It’s hard to find a “one-size-fits-all” DAM solution. So, thoroughly analyze your business requirements, wants, and needs.

The requirements of the digital asset managers consist of:

A centralized repository for media asset preservation
Managing the media assets for marketing, sales, and production purposes
Market and sell products online through digital assets
Built-in media asset distribution facility

An organization may have multiple objectives it wants to achieve. But among them, one objective takes top priority, and it’s nearly impossible to achieve without a Digital Asset Management solution.

So, DAM addresses your top-rated objectives. You can accomplish the other objectives phase by phase later.

During your market research, you might come across a wide variety of DAM solutions. Make a list, analyze which platforms meet your primary objectives, and which can be more easily extended to handle your secondary objectives.

Points to be Considered while Defining a Digital Asset Management Strategy

Leverage Metadata to Simplify Asset Search and Amplify SEO Results

Metadata makes asset search simpler. It lets you describe and define digital assets in the DAM system.

Metadata usually contains specific attributes and keyword phrases to create an effective asset structure and organize data logically. When defining metadata for our digital assets, ensure it doesn’t complicate the search process.

Metadata is supposed to make the asset search more efficient and easier. Adding keywords to your asset name can support your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.

It helps search engines, including Google, understand your image content and boosts the SEO value of the blog, web page, social media, or other online platforms where your assets live. When you increase your page’s SEO value, you amplify your page authority.

The chances of being found are improved due to prime visibility on search engines. Most Digital Asset Management searches work like Google search, so investing time and effort in optimizing digital asset names is worth it.

Always choose the relevant attributes and keywords as metadata for your digital assets. To create the right metadata, everyone who uses the DAM system should be clear on the metadata structure.

So, connect with potential and actual users to define the right set of metadata fields. Actual users’ needs may differ from the admin’s expectations.

So, to build a solid metadata structure, face-to-face communication with your users is more effective.

Insufficient Metadata Makes the Asset Search Complicated

Metadata’s main job is to make digital assets easily searchable. This is only possible if you catalog assets with meaningful, descriptive metadata.

When assets are created and uploaded to the DAM system, admins tend to add only perfunctory cataloging metadata. This is quite risky.

In such cases, the users won’t be able to find what they are looking for. They might start hoarding assets in their personal collections.

When defining the Digital Asset findability strategy, you must consider training and cataloging processes in parallel. It helps you to create sufficient metadata for all your digital assets.

Consider DAM as a Part of your Content Roadmap

If you consider Digital Asset Management strategy as an integral part of your content roadmap then you can implement it quickly.
In fact, tracking digital assets becomes easier for you where you can analyze how each of your digital assets is being used including videos, images, logos, documents, graphics, PDFs, and more.

To gain the optimum output from your digital assets, you need to align DAM with your organizational objectives. Define monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals. Perform an audit for your DAM on a regular basis to check if you have all the necessary assets that support your video campaigns or new product launch.

With the help of DAM, digital asset audit becomes easier which is quite a time and effort coming in an internal server where the hundreds and thousands of assets are available in an unorganized way.

In the DAM, to find assets, you need to search assets by asset type, tagged with the keyword of the new product. It instantly lets you know if you have any content gaps in your digital asset library.

Strategic advantages of Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Improved Productivity

Digital Asset Management enables organizations with powerful search capabilities, flexible access rights, automated workflows, third-party integrations/plugins, content repurposing, and many advanced features.

It also provides a version control feature that has the ability to track changes, save time for your team, drive efficiency in your DAM processes, and boost the organization’s productivity.

Measure Performance of Digital Assets

All the modern Digital Asset Management solutions come with a built-in insights feature that helps the brands to get a detailed understanding of where and how your digital assists are being used. The system allows you to embed code and provides you custom links to help you to measure the performance of each asset on specific sales and marketing channels.

Integrate Google Analytics with DAM to improve your performance tacking process significantly.

Break Down Data silos

Leveraging automated workflows, companies can manage digital assets with minimal human intervention. The user control feature allows the users to control access to the critical business assets and discuss the changes and feedback within the system. This breaks down silos and improves interdepartmental collaboration.

Digital Asset Backup

Implementation of DAM allows you to keep the back of the old version. So. At any point in time, if you want to return to your earlier version of digital assets, you can quickly search for the old version and use it.

Similarly, all the files can be archived and preserved in the DAM solution. Thus, if you need them in the future, you can easily retrieve them from the system.

Closing thoughts

Before implementing a DAM solution, it is essential to define the right strategy as per your business needs. It helps you in either selecting or developing the right DAM solution for your business that delivers outstanding values to your organization. So, make sure you are determining the right strategy to address and satisfy your digital assets-related challenges and requirements.

Product Data (PIM)

Data Management

Data Engineering

Data Insights

Data Intelligence

Databricks

Snowflake

PIM / MDM