Why Do You Need a Digital Asset Management Platform? [Significance, Advantages, Common Issues & Criteria ]
Digital asset management (DAM) is an online platform for protecting, sharing, and organizing available and usable digital assets in a central location. It helps in intensifying the benefits of creative files like images, videos, and other media. DAM is an ideal solution for a company’s content sharing and storage and acts as a one-stop solution for all digital requirements. Let us get deep into digital asset management now.
What is considered Digital Assets?
Anything that can be digitally used is called a digital asset. For example, files like photos, videos, music, documents, and other media are considered digital assets. With the increase in digital content creation and sharing, the value of digital assets grows exponentially.
Significance of Digital Asset Management (DAM)
Digital asset management makes it easy for teams to access centrally stored relevant branded materials. It enhances the searchability of digital assets, along with the aspect of security and organization. Digital Asset Management plays a crucial role in expanding digital content storage and maintaining brand consistency. It empowers productivity among your employees by making them understand what is needed.
Advantages of Digital Asset Management (DAM)
DAM organizes digital assets in a centralized repository.
- It automates workflows and improves your team’s creativity.
- It quickly finds media files using enriched search capabilities.
- It flexibly managed press kits and picture collections.
- It provides automated watermarks for images.
- It contains extensive copyright functionality through which you can easily manage permissions.
- It tags images automatically and uses facial recognition.
Now as we know in what ways digital asset management can be useful to an organization, let’s look at the factors that may influence your decision while selecting a digital asset management solution.
Common issues that show it is time to consider a DAM solution
1. Versions and duplicates in digital assets
You want to print a brochure for an upcoming meeting and your quick search displays three different versions in the result. Finding the latest one would be the most difficult thing to do. You may feel twisted to choose the right one and end up printing the wrong one, which can be unfavorable to your company.
2. Multiple asset requests lead to confusion
If you have many departments that keep sending constant requests to creative teams for developing digital assets, it confuses which file to choose, and most of the files look alike and by mistake, you may intend to choose the wrong one. Sometimes, the format may go wrong even the required asset is available.
Because every day your creative team might be handling plenty of digital asset creation requests such as photos, videos, logos, and other brand assets, and confusions are common to happen. Therefore, DAM can be a great tool and solution for them that can lighten the request load from others, while still able to send the content to those who need it.
3. Lack of brand and content control
You might have added new products to your catalog/brochure but by mistake, you end up sending an older version of your marketing collateral to your customer or any of your stakeholders. The price hike or the change in product quantity may seriously affect your business. Because these factors will lead you either to lose customer retention or to end up in loss. Therefore, to take control of your brand and content a digital asset management solution is essential.
4. Sharing large files
Many platforms allow storing data files without any space limitation, but with digital files getting larger, it can cause many issues while collaborating. You try to send your photos to an agency and instantly you could see a bounce back due to file size. If the same thing happens repeatedly, at one point, you may get irritated.
Anyhow, companies are slowly realizing that this way of working can no longer be effective and require a system that makes asset sharing and collaboration way easier with their teams and get the work done. This emphasizes the need for a digital asset management system in the organization.
Are you facing any or many or all these issues in managing your digital assets? You need to be serious about DAM implementation.
We have learned about the most common signs that indicate you need to implement a digital asset management system, we will now look into the factors you should see while opting for the DAM solution.
Top Criteria That Attracts Towards Selecting Digital Asset Management
#1: Organizational Alignment
Before you go for a digital asset management solution, it is a great idea to discuss with your stakeholders across the organization and know their comfort and adaptive tendency towards using the technology. Like using other technology, the success of DAM also depends on people’s usability, thereby justifying the amount you invest in implementing the solution.
Unless you have the organizational alignment in place, your extensive teams and workflows might have an impact on the DAM’s implementation.
#2: Ease of use
Once the DAM is implemented, it takes a considerable amount of time for your team to understand. Especially, your team may face trouble on how to use the new solution. And also, on confirming whether it works to their advantage.
With DAM solution, you should give your users the control they need to develop their business processes without showing more dependence on the IT department.
Digital asset management with intuitive user experience, collaborative workflow templates, and seamless navigation makes it certain and ease-of-use for every user, irrespective of any high-end technical expertise.
#3: Integration with legacy applications
DAM is a cost-effective solution in synchronizing hundreds of applications in a typical organization and integrates several business processes, which brings a greater value to the brand.
The DAM solution you choose for your organization should have intrinsic and pre-developed integration as well as extensibility potentialities. Therefore, it allows interoperations with an existing system and offers you a seamless asset management experience.
#4: Workflow management
Most business owners in the present day expect visibility into their business processes. Owing to that they prefer a DAM solution that efficiently manages workflow.
To overcome the existing competition and sustain in the cut-throat competition, DAM solution lets the business owners enjoy control over their business processes that are constantly evolving.
Therefore, prefer a DAM solution that has low-code integration and adapts existing workflows along with automated asset tracking, right from the beginning to review distribution and archiving.
#5: Cloud-based environment
If you want to implement a DAM solution to meet your business goals, consider a cloud-based environment. You can anytime leverage your standard cloud computing benefits. The benefits like flexibility and scalability for improving productivity, speeding up, and boosting time-to-market save huge costs.
A cloud-based DAM solution also endows you with highly creative plug-ins for collaborating with external partners supported by a robust global infrastructure for distribution and backup support.
#6: Metadata management
A digital asset management solution completely varies from general file storing options. The DAM provides a comprehensive view of the digital assets of an organization. The view is obtained by using robust metadata management. While you are investing in a DAM solution, make sure it supports all media formats, and is highly scalable, and can provide seamless features to any number of increasing users and assets.
The DAM solution you choose should ensure that the information you store in the central location can be assimilated, connected, properly maintained, reviewed, and shared across your organization. Moreover, despite the location you store your assets, your DAM solution should be able to provide you with advanced searching and indexing capabilities to find the needed digital assets quickly and easily.
#7: Security checks
Although the cloud-based DAM solution is highly supportive and cost-effective, it raises a concern of security apprehensions, thereby making it questionable to access and share digital assets.
The digital asset management solution you invest in should offer a wide range of security features. Features like multi-factor authentication, whitelisting file sharing destinations, auditing periodic automation script, variable user permissions, logging, user access controls, and monitoring are highly useful. With these features, you can safeguard your assets and cautiously prevent security risks.
Are looking for the right Digital Asset Management system for your organization that contains all the above-listed criteria?
Bottom Line
Your organization may involve many business processes that require quick and frequent visibility, accessibility, and sharing of digital assets across all the channels. Besides, it is essential to make use of the data effectively.
Therefore, to make digital data delivery amazing, you need to create relevant, personalized, and engaging digital experiences. You can deliver compelling digital experiences only by implementing a digital asset management solution for your organization.
Offering a seamless and convincing customer experience is highly difficult these days since the proliferation of devices, channels, and tools are often connected to it. This makes a huge demand for a solution like DAM in today’s business scenario. Keeping a DAM solution in place is highly beneficial in many ways. All you need is to provide proper training to your team on using the platform effectively and obtaining efficient results.
Moreover, due to gaps in content management and data points, the interaction of customers reduced significantly. Therefore, investment in an efficient digital asset management solution can help mitigate all these challenges, and fill those gaps to engage customers, increase conversions, and influence brand loyalty and advocacy.
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