Production and management of digital assets is usually the job of the creative team. Out of both the tasks, their main role is to create conceptual and compelling artworks. And, that’s where their competency lies.
Ensure they invest their time and energy in creating outstanding pictures, documents, videos, and content instead of resizing the images, trawling through files, and other such miscellaneous tasks.
If your creative team is more involved in managing the digital assets rather than producing them, it’s an alarm for you.
Your creative team is already distracted by many secondary tasks. You have to make sure media asset management shouldn’t divert them from their core job and enforce extra responsibility.
That is where the Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution comes in. Consideration of DAM facilitates you and your team with a cartelized platform for storing, managing, and sharing the critical brand assets. It saves a lot of time, effort, and money of yours by allowing your creative team to do what they are the best.
Also, it helps you address many day to day operational and business challenges related to digital assets.
Let’s get started with the definition.
What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?
Digital Asset Management is a platform that allows companies to store, manage, organize and share digital assets from a single system. It streamlines and automates many of your asset-related processes. DAM ensures the secure and effective management of digital assets.
To understand Digital Asset Management in detail, read An Ultimate Guide to Digital Asset Management (DAM).
36 Signs That Proves Your Business Needs a Digital Asset Management (DAM) Solution
1. It’s always a challenge where to find an asset
The creative team creates the digital assets, but different teams across the organization use them. These teams store assets in varied locations such as local folders, servers, email attachments, cloud storage, network, and hard drive.
When assets are scattered across multiple locations, it becomes time-consuming and confusing to search required assets quickly. Specifically when you have large asset libraries.
Additionally, if the systems (where they store and manage the assets) do not have the search functionality, they need to check through all the digital assets. There is no single way for anyone in the organization to find digital assets quickly and download them. It is the most irritating job ever.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
DAM allows you to store, manage and organize all the digital assets in a centralized platform. All the teams can access and use the needed brand assets. The creative team can share the assets with other departments or users (who want to use assets but do not have access to the solution) directly from the Digital Asset Management solution.
All the DAM platforms contain features like Advanced Search so that users can find the digital assets in a matter of seconds.
2. Your assets need to be explained a bit more
Do you have asset libraries with special instructions or restricted use cases? Does your marketing team frequently receive fines for violating the usage rights unknowingly on licensed photos? All this happens due to unorganized assets. If your assets are distributed in an organized way, you can deal with these challenges seamlessly.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
DAM allows you to manage your asset data in a centralized location in an organized way. It also permits you to define access and usage rights for each asset file, folder, or collection.
Digital Asset Management solution allows you to add metadata that involves product details, expiration date, usage rights, other information of each asset file. It ensures your teams can access only those assets for which they hold the access rights. Thus, there is zero possibility for unauthenticated usage of any critical brand assets.
The platform allows you to attach other relevant files like a model release form so that your teams can access all the required assets from a single location.
Additionally, as your business grows, you need to interact with your target audience using the different output channels. An advanced DAM ensures proper digital asset usage across your team – when, where, how, and by whom.
3. You are managing the digital assets in disparate systems
Usually, organizations prefer to store and manage the assets in different systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, Project Management software, and other software.
If assets are available in separate systems, it becomes difficult for the teams to find, download and use the digital assets when needed. To improve organizational productivity and accelerate business operations, your team must have quick access to media assets.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
With the DAM system, you can gather all the assets in a single location. It allows you and your teams to find, download, and share the assets as and when needed in a matter of seconds.
If you save the files with proper metadata, it becomes easier for you to find the intended files from the millions of digital assets using the search functionality of the Digital Asset Management solution.
4. Managing and sharing the digital assets is resource-sensitive
Creating digital assets is not an option. It is a necessity. Companies need to develop videos, product images, PDF files, etc. to make online sales effective. Using the data sheets and product catalogs, your teams can also boost online and offline selling.
Earlier, most businesses prefer to invest in human resources instead of a solution for the reliable management of digital assets. It takes a lot of time to manage and share the digital assets across the organization.
Gradually, they realized this approach is not sustainable. It eats up a lot of time and effort of the team and impacts their productivity negatively.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Production, quality checking, sharing, and publishing for digital assets without a DAM system become complex tasks. Especially, when you have thousands of assets to sell through multiple reseller channels. Why engage your staff in the jobs that could be done effortlessly by a robust Digital Asset Management solution.
Implementation of DAM empowers you with the many advanced capabilities
- Automation of repetitive tasks
- The centralized repository of digital assets ensures management, tracking, reporting, sharing, and security of assets
- Increased sales opportunities and reduced operational costs
- Less dependency on human resources to manage and share digital assets
- It reduces the time for finding digital assets and accomplishes the intended tasks sooner
5. Your different systems do not interact with each other
Undoubtedly, the right combination of technologies makes your creative and marketing operations way easier. But, if these departments of your organization do not work in sync, you may end up performing excessive, inefficient, and redundant work.
For example, you are using a file-sharing tool that is integrated with your marketing software partially. It takes too long to organize, communicate and release the content requirements for an upcoming campaign. Calculate the waste of time and efforts you might face.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Integrate DAM solution with your existing enterprise systems or third party applications for easier and quicker access to your content. Improve your asset management workflow by using the cross-system integration capabilities of a Digital Asset Management solution.
This integration allows you to create a single source of truth for your all critical brand assets. The centralized repository of all digital assets enables you with improved security, productivity, brand consistency, and accessibility. The Digital Asset Management platform empowers your asset tracking efforts too.
Are you looking for a Digital Asset Management solution that allows you to integrate your existing enterprise systems and third-party software to simplify asset management?
6. You cannot share media assets whenever required
How do you address asset sharing requests raised by internal departments?
You probably send the needed assets like images, videos, documents, PDFs, etc. through email attachments. Sending digital assets over email requires considerable back and forth between colleagues. Eventually, it becomes an annoying task that consumes a lot of time.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
With a DAM platform, your brand assets are accessible to all the people and departments having the access rights. Users can access the digital assets relevant to their specific work areas.
Additionally, it becomes easy to share a single document, a folder, or an entire collection of assets by sending an email directly from the system using a predefined template or giving permissions.
7. You want to establish a strong brand presence
Brand consistency is crucial to connect with your target audience and to engage with your partners and internal people of the organization. For many companies, branded experiences and tools help reinforce a corporate voice and culture that is consistent across every customer touchpoint.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Do you want to extend your branding efforts to the toolset that you are currently using? It’s a good idea, but consideration of DAM is a smart decision.
Most of the Digital Asset Management platforms available in the market offer branding options. Based on the DAM platform you choose, you can leverage customization facilities such as button colors, images, logos, and more.
In case your content workflow is quite complicated and involves multiple stakeholders, the DAM solution ensures that your brand is the center or front for every contributor at every step.
8. You are managing digital assets across varied groups
When an organization operates from a single location, they need to manage digital assets for one team. However, all multinational companies that operate from different regions need to create and manage the brand assets for all the locations. For efficient asset management, they prefer to store and manage digital assets in groups.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
If you consider a DAM with fundamental capabilities, it allows you to manage only a couple of thousands of web-based images.
While selecting an enterprise-class DAM like Pimore you can manage hundreds of assets from multiple regions smoothly.
The Digital Asset Management system supports the creative team to create artwork in different file types. It helps your sales, marketing, social media, commerce, catalog creator, and website development groups perform their diverse initiatives. All these users can find the right assets rapidly.
9. It becomes difficult to demonstrate the effectiveness of your campaigns
At the end of every marketing campaign, you are answerable to top management for its performance. While generating the performance report, the marketing team struggles to collect the data that gives clarity on how the assets are being used in the campaign.
You might have the most convenient option for asset management such as a free cloud platform. It is the right choice if you need to handle a limited number of assets. But, if you are managing thousands and millions of media files within the free cloud platform, then it would be a critical job for you to handle such a huge amount of digital asset data within it.
Moreover, the cloud solution cannot help you with converting assets into the right format, distributing them across the multiple output channels, and controlling the access sensitive asset files.
To measure your camping performance and manage your multimedia library, you need to implement a custom DAM solution.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Digital Asset Management platform provides statistics about the performance of your media assets on the different devices. You can access the data any time you want. It helps you judge which assets are the most used ones, the most profitable, and the most effective.
Based on this data, you can generate the report of marketing campaigns and present it to the management to prove ROI in which they are interested.
10. You want to achieve brand consistency
Marketers of all organizations focus on improving brand consistency across all customer touchpoints. When a wrong asset is distributed across varied platforms, it impacts your brand awareness and growth.
For example, when a wrong logo or outdated messaging is used on the branded content, it hurts the company’s brand reputation.
Changes in the assets happen regularly and communicating these changes to every team member is nearly impossible. Also, it is quite hard to ensure that outdated assets aren’t used in the random asset files.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Compared to poor brands, consistent and well-managed brands make a far better business.
Implementation of the Digital Asset Management platform allows you to distribute the digital assets across the teams so that they access the required assets right away and accomplish their intended tasks.
DAM enables you with a centralized repository of all the digital assets so it becomes easier for you to communicate the asset changes across all the teams. It also ensures that all the users are using the right and latest digital assets. All you need to do is update the assets in the DAM solution.
No need to send the email of new assets and to keep checking the old assets get discarded. Now you have total control over your digital assets, and you can decide which team can access what digital assets.
Do you want to leverage the benefits of brand consistency by considering a feature-rich Digital Asset Management platform?
11. There is no way to monitor your digital assets
When your digital assets are scattered in different systems, and anyone is allowed to access them, it becomes difficult to monitor the usage of the digital assets. This results in some critical issues like critical brand assets are misplaced or deleted.
To address this situation, you need to determine
- Who uses digital assets?
- How are the digital assets being used?
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
To facilitate you with effective asset monitoring and tracking, many of the Digital Asset Management platforms allow you to integrate analytics. Also, some of the platforms provide you a quick overview of your account activity.
Integration of analytics allows you to check which sales deck is being used frequently or whether the PR team has downloaded the new logo. This analysis helps the marketing team to identify the most valuable assets.
Additionally, asset tracking and monitoring also contribute effectively to building a powerful brand presence.
12. Accessing assets is a bottleneck
Unorganized and scattered digital assets become a bottleneck for certain people and teams of your organization as they won’t be able to get the digital assets they require. It becomes highly frustrating when the person or department needs to perform multiple tasks within a short period. It also impacts the overall productivity of the organization and slows down the bottleneck.
If you continue to work with scattered and unorganized data as your team grows, this challenge converts into a pain point.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Using the DAM platform, you can manage all the assets in a single location in a well-organized way. It enables your team with quick access to the digital assets and performs their intended tasks quickly.
Therefore, your team cannot only self-serve using a DAM platform but also download multiple assets at a time to accomplish discrete tasks in time.
13. You never know when your media asset will expire
Just like food products, some content and assets also have an expiry date. Once the copyright and usage rights have expired, you need to archive the content/asset, update them and renew the rights.
If ignored, this will be a big issue for you in the upcoming time when an expired asset will be distributed by mistake. It impacts badly on your brand reputation.
How a Digital Asset Management Solution helps you?
To ensure the assets expire on time, you can rely on the Digital Asset Management platform. It enables you with the digital asset right management. It allows you to schedule notifications and manage the accessibility of the asset files effectively.
14. You work with multiple asset types
Do you need only 3-4 types of specific digital assets such as images, videos, documents, and PDFs?
Of course not.
Every organization needs to create, manage and use a wide variety of digital assets. Every software is not competent to manage different types of digital assets.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Using the DAM solution, you can optimize the media content like images, videos, and other digital assets. When an organization builds a compelling brand story, DAM allows such brands to create and manage different kinds of creative files to support their content.
Apart from providing a rich media library, DAM also supports additional types of content such as animation, 3D images, design templates for online and printed product catalogs, and more.
Being a centralized repository of all the brand assets, DAM helps you understand which assets are being used most often and by which user and group of users. Being a single source of truth, DAM enables you with analytics capabilities to analyze the digital asset performance.
15. File conversions are eating up too much design time
Your creative might receive requests for file conversations from other departments. To accomplish the file conversation requirements, they need to stop and start their project work very frequently. This workflow distracts the designers and creates bottlenecks for other departments too.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
DAM solution automated the file conversions once and for all. Define the common use cases and accordingly set the conversations in the solution. Now your teams can automatically download the asset files in the format and size they need.
For example, your marketing team needs to promote a content piece on different social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more. They need relevant media files such as images or videos in different sizes and formats as per the specific requirements of each platform. Leveraging role-specific conversions, your social media team can download the photos for their intended platform in the needed size and format.
Your creative team needs to upload a master file directly from any design software like InDesign or Adobe Illustrator. The rest of the file conversion process is taken care of by the DAM solution.
So, there is no more dependency on the design team to convert the file size and format they need to use every day.
Do you want to implement a DAM that automates asset resizing and formatting and reduces the burden of your creative team?
16. Your digital assets are all over the place
When your assets are available in different locations in a scattered way, and not in an organized way, this makes it difficult to find the assets when required.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Digital Asset Management solution not only manages all the assets in a centralized repository but also allows users to manage them in a well-organized way by creating a logical structure for all the digital assets. To make the digital assets searchable, DAM allows users to define taxonomy, categories, and metadata.
17. Anybody can access and use your brand assets
If there is no restriction on your brand asset usage, then the security of your assets is riskier. Anyone within or out of your organization can access the assets from your intranet, extranet, or local systems without your permission. Thus, the tracking of asset distribution becomes extremely difficult.
In the absence of a Digital Asset Management system, the creative team cannot control and loses power over the asset once it is distributed. To allow your different teams to work independently, it is essential to allow them to access the assets. In this scenario, the control over the asset use becomes difficult.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
If you want to provide your team with the freedom to use brand assets, you need to be well organized and set up appropriate workflows. DAM solution allows your creative team to create workflows for efficient editing and approval process and to control who can access certain assets.
Allowing your creative team with the flexibility to define custom workflows, DAM simplifies many of your business operations too.
For example, when the marketing team needs approval to use a product picture and the sales team requires to resize the presentation template, the creative team can easily and quickly manage and address these requests using DAM.
Using the Digital Asset Management platform, you can leverage quick turnaround time, reduce pressure on the creative team, and keep the brand assets under control.
18. Digital Asset Management process is repetitive
Most of the asset management processes are mundane and irritating. Your team needs to perform these activities every day. Here’s the list of the most time-consuming asset management processes:
- Creating, associating, and managing metadata to digital assets
- Sending the assets to the internal or external users
- Updating systems to record the asset details
- Naming, formatting, and resizing the digital assets according to the precise requirements for external users (resellers for distribution) and internal users (eCommerce and catalog systems)
- Keep updating the databases that consist of the location of all digital assets that are scattered throughout the organization
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Considering the right DAM solution, you can streamline and automate all the above listed repetitive activities and many other tasks related to asset management. Through the automation, DAM enables you with a bunch of benefits of
- Your teams can focus on more important tasks rather than performing the mundane activities
- Automation of repetitive tasks frees up the resources that lower the costs of sharing and managing the digital assets
- Decreased time to market of assets increases the overall sales and eventually boosts your revenue stream. For example, DAM makes it easier to send the assets faster to multiple sales and marketing channels
19. Secure file sharing with your internal and external teams is difficult
Most of the time only a limited number of people in the organization have access to digital assets. They continuously receive requests for asset sharing from internal (sales, marketing, catalog, eCommerce, production, etc.) and external (resellers, customers, etc.) users.
They used to keep sharing the assets manually through emails or drive links. Over a period of time, email and drive communication becomes confusing and tedious.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Digital Asset Management enables you with a more sophisticated way to hold control over the asset. It’s called digital asset management governance where you can define who has access to what. Most of the DAM platforms have governance features built-in.
It allows you to define the user group with specific access rights and provides you granular control over file permissions. You can share the assets with vendors, other departments, and customers without worrying about the security of the assets with the surety that it won’t expose any sensitive information of your organization.
20. Finding a digital asset easts up a lot of time
Sending requests for asset sharing through an email is the most common practice in most organizations regardless of size. To address such requests, the creative team needs to dig into the massive media libraries, find the relevant ones and share them with the respective user through the email chain.
If your company is always following this practice for asset sharing, then you must be aware of how much time it sucks. Along with wasting a lot of time on the creative team, it interrupts the operations of other departments and the efficient workflow.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Implementation of a DAM solution makes it simple for your creative team to find, manage, and share the assets directly from the system. It stores all the digital assets in one place and optimizes them for quick search.
Moreover, the Digital Asset Management platform allows you to create groups of assets that contain sales sheets, presentations, logos, product shots, and more assets that can be grouped. Digital Asset Management can be also developed as a visual platform.
Do you want to simplify and fasten the asset search by developing and implementing a robust DAM solution?
21. Buying or creating the new assets instead of repurposing the existing assets
When a new project is in, you simply start creating everything from the scratch. Am I correct?
Rather than jumping into the asset production, check if you can reuse already available assets. Most of the time you can definitely have a few or many assets that you have previously created for another project and you can reuse them for this project.
Repurposing the assets often results in reduced production cost, less investment in creating artwork, and fewer errors.
If you think your team is spending considerable time and effort in creating, purchasing, and re-creating the assets that end up with unnecessary and duplicated digital assets, you should consider the DAM to avoid asset duplication and leverage quicker asset production, management, and distribution.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
In the DAM solution, you can create, store and manage your existing assets. You can also import your earlier artworks that you have created before the DAM implementation. Make sure you have provided metadata and category to each asset for asset standardization and searchability.
DAM allows you to access all the artworks so you can check which assets are created before and what is available to you. Utilize the centralized asset archives and search functionality that allows users to browse all the previous artwork and reuse or edit them as per their requirements. It saves time and money for creating images, documents, audios, videos, and more from the scratch.
As all the digital assets are stored in a single place, it becomes easier for your employees across the organization to view and use the sales and marketing assets that have been already produced or purchased. It results in improved ROI.
DAM allows you to maximize your number of files by using the already available assets. It also ensures all the existing assets are used by the utmost amount of people across the company.
22. You need to enrich content frequently
Asset enrichment is the default capability of a DAM, but many organizations have requirements to enrich the content as well. So, they are looking for solutions that address their asset and content enrichment needs.
How a Digital Asset Management helps you?
Many of the DAM platforms provide you content enrichment facilities along with asset enrichment. So, it becomes easier for you to manage a wide variety of content versions, channels, regions, local/global content variations, digital rights by dates, and more by implementing a DAM with advanced capabilities.
23. Having a manual process for sending digital assets to resellers
All the manufacturers do not go out to sell their own products. Right? They sell the products through distributors and retailers. To help all the resellers with effective sales, businesses need to share and update digital assets regularly. If the resellers do not have access to the updated asset data, they won’t be able to sell properly.
Updating the assets and sending the updated asset data to the reseller in a structured and formatted way is costly, slow, and resource-sensitive for many reasons.
- Manufacturers have to send the assets to many resellers. This count can be hundreds to thousands in some cases
- Each reseller buys a certain set of products from the manufacturers
- All the resellers have their own formatting requirements for the digital assets they receive from manufacturers. For example, resellers’ formatting requirements for an image could include variety in image resolution, dpi, file naming, file type, image width and height, and more
To address such a wide range of asset formatting requirements, medium to large scale manufacturers engage a full-time resource to fulfill all the needs of resellers for the digital assets they require.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Consideration of DAM solution automates the end-to-end digital asset formatting process. The platform allows you to
- Create the profile of each reseller that consist of the details like
- Which products do they sell?
- Which digital assets do they need?
- What is the formatting specification of the resellers for the digital assets?
- How frequently do they raise the request for assets?
- In which format they expect to receive the assets (online file sharing, DVD, FTP, etc.)
- DAM solution allows you to store and manage assets with all type of formatting and send it to the respective resellers directly from the system
It improves the time-to-market of digital assets as the resellers have everything in hand that they need to sell the products or services. Eventually, it boosts the sales for resellers.
24. Tracking of missing digital asset is complex
Digital assets play a critical role in eCommerce as all the assets like product images, videos, guideline documents, etc. are quite essential for sales and marketing teams. If any of the digital assets are missing, then you are losing the business.
And, if you have digital assets scattered across the disconnected systems, then it is extremely difficult to determine which digital assets are missing.
For example, you are a large scale manufacturer that produces more than 10000 products. It is very obvious that you need to manage product-related assets including videos, pictures, documents, PDFs, information sheets like how-to videos, brochures, flyers, catalogs, and more. All the products have more than one image to enable consumers to display the product from different angles.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
DAM platform ensures your products have all the required assets. It becomes simplest for your teams to navigate through the assets as well as manage and find them. Also, you can hire a full-time employee for the structured and organized storage of assets.
All the digital assets are managed centrally in a Digital Asset Management platform. Most of the assets are associated with the products. Your teams are responsible for ensuring that the asset library is complete. They can access the software to generate reports on which assets are misplaced. Later on, based on the reports, the missing assets can be reproduced.
If you are using product workflow systems, then the DAM solution can be integrated with the systems in order to track asset production in real-time.
25. Having excessive admin procedure that slows down the productivity
In an ideal business world, employees are hired to perform a specific job. They need to focus on the activities which are relevant to their role.
If analyzed closely, almost every employee across your organization requires to perform a lot of other tasks every day. This distracts their focus from their primary activities and drains their precious time in performing the least important tasks.
Some of your teams are performing a lot of admin work that they are not supposed to do. Sometimes, the administration tasks eat up more of their time than the core job. This results in frustration as the resources are not able to utilize their skills and they need to do mundane tasks.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Implementation of the DAM solution automates varied time-consuming tasks for you such as resizing and cropping the images and videos.
For example, you have uploaded a high-resolution image to Pimcore’s Digital Asset Management solution. It will automatically resize the image as per the predefined range of resizing and formatting options.
It benefits you in different ways such as
- DAM eliminates all the manual steps of assets reformatting and resizing
- DAM reduces your dependency on any additional software
- DAM enables you with access to the finished assets that your team can use quickly
DAM simplifies the various admin tasks such as editing, locating, and distributing assets and saves a lot of time for your team. It helps your team to focus on more creative activities, create strategies, and generate revenue.
Do you want to allow your team to be free from the excessive admin tasks and focus on the more creative job? Select and implement the right DAM system.
26. Asset quality control processes are inconsistent
Digital assets are highly used in varied sales and marketing processes. Therefore, it is essential to ensure consistency in asset quality. To maintain asset quality, you need to set up a workflow and standards for the quality control of the digital assets.
Quality control becomes a difficult task in the below-listed scenarios:
- Assets are created by varied user groups at a different time within the organization
- Assets are available in scattered across the disconnected systems throughout the organization
- Absence of workflow tools for asset QA before they are published
Let’s understand the above points through an example.
Brands have thousands of product images that are captured over a while by different user groups such as cataloging, marketing, sales, eCommerce, etc. These images are used for marketing productions, distributing to the resellers to publish the products on their respective eCommerce platform, creating catalogs, and many other sales and marketing initiatives.
Images that are captured for marketing purposes contain high quality. On the other hand, the production shots are taken at lower quality. When all these mixed quality images get displayed on resellers’ product catalog and site, it hurts your brand image. With these images, you cannot convey a consistent brand message to your customers. This also results in poor sales.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Most of the DAM platforms have built-in QA functionality that allows users to review the quality of assets before they get published on any catalog and site of resellers. It also contains an Asset History feature that allows users to view the versions of the assets.
Advanced DAM platforms like Pimcore allow you to connect any of your existing software like Image Production Management systems in the quality control workflow.
27. Management and standardization of asset metadata is challenging
Before delving into the main point let’s take a background of the digital asset metadata.
What is Digital Asset metadata?
Metadata is the data that is embedded in the asset itself such as exchangeable image file format. Else, you can add the metadata directly to the digital asset such as tags, description, keywords, ownership, etc. through automated upload or manual data entry.
What happens in Digital Asset without metadata?
Without metadata, the assets are not digital assets at all. It is simply the electric files or rich media. These media files could be a product picture, a video, audio, a brochure, a flyer, a banner, a graphics file, and more.
Digital asset files that do not have metadata are difficult to manage and search for. Also, it slows the sales process a bit. Thus, it adds value to your business.
What happens with the Digital Asset with metadata?
A media file that contains metadata becomes the digital asset as it is manageable, searchable, and adds value to the business.
Metadata is a very important element in the DAM for the effective management and standardization of digital assets. When your assets are scattered across the different systems across the company, you won’t be able to apply metadata for the effective standardization of the assets.
Moreover, every asset has varying degrees of quality and complete metadata attached. Therefore, it becomes difficult to search, manage and share the assets with internal or external users.
How a Digital Asset Management helps you?
Implementation of DAM allows you to manage the media files with metadata in order to convert them into digital assets.
- Create the metadata for each digital asset by using a built-in metadata form. It becomes easy to add and modify the asset metadata at any point in time
- Using the metadata forms, you can enforce and define the standards for adding and managing asset metadata
- Generate the reports for digital asset missing metadata
- Empower users to collect the data and update the asset accordingly
DAM automates the process of updating and importing the metadata for digital assets
28. Personalization
Personalization is the key to success in today’s business. Content personalization is what every business is constantly working on. Along with content the relevant assets creation, management, and distribution gaining popularity as well.
In the absence of the right digital asset management system, it will be a mess of scattered and unorganized assets that negatively impact your sales and marketing initiatives.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
With a Digital Asset Management system, you can manage each asset that is created to address the need for personalized content. You can manage the different edited versions of the same image or videos within the DAM to address the personalization needs. You can organize your assets effectively and have them available whenever needed.
29. Designers waste time in recreating and reformatting the artwork file
In an organization, designers need to handle some small tasks related to or resizing the images. Sometimes, they need to recreate the digital assets from scratch if the original file is not found. All these image editings, formatting, and redesigning take a considerable time for the designers and hamper their productivity.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Implementation of Digital Asset Management eliminates this problem completely. It automatically resizes and converts the media files into different formats and saves considerable time for the designers. In addition to that, DAM allows you to access the latest source files quickly whenever needed.
30. Longer time-to-market of each digital asset
Before delving into the main point, let’s understand the time-to-market in the context of digital assets. Time to market of digital asset can be defined through
- Define which assets need to be created
- Create digital assets
- Quality Analysis and publish the assets in your DAM solution
- Send the assets to your external users (resellers or customers) and to your internal users (eCommerce, sales, marketing, cataloging teams) through internal systems
We have already mentioned that digital assets are very crucial for sales and marketing assets. If your team can find the assets quickly, then they use them immediately to accelerate their sales and marketing process. Eventually, you can generate better sales for your business.
If your digital asset management process involves multiple departments, resources, non-automated workflows, and disconnected systems, then your asset time-to-market will be considerably longer.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Using the DAM solution, you can easily and quickly identify which projects require digital assets and generate the reports for missing assets. By connecting the Digital Asset Management solution with your exciting production workflow systems, you can raise the request for the asset creation and monitor their progress.
Advanced DAM platform allows you to create assets within the solution by allowing you to integrate the third-party design software and has the built-in QA functionality. It allows you to check the quality of each asset before they are approved for publication and shared with the internal and external users for sales and marketing purposes as well as reselling of the products respectively.
Do you want to improve the time-to-market of your digital asset by implementing the right DAM solution?
31. Anytime, anywhere access to assets is not possible
If your assets are available across the disconnected systems, your team won’t be able to find and use them when needed. In this situation, your team has to deal with
Sales loss
In the absence of needed digital assets, your team won’t be able to provide any sales or marketing collateral with the client to enable the customer with a better understanding of intended products or services.
Asset duplication
Your team needs to create the new assets that result in asset duplication as an asset is already there in any of your systems. Moreover, the new asset is created in urgency so there are chances of potential inconsistency in terms of asset quality.
Ineffective accessibility of assets limits the search capabilities and your team cannot find and locate the assets they require. Also, asset duplication is the biggest issue as you have to invest time, effort, and resources twice to create the same asset.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
DAM platform works as a centralized repository of all your assets and simplifies the search and locate assets for the users whenever they require them. It allows you to manage the assets with proper tagging and categorization that enables you to search efficiently.
There is a complete elimination of asset silos across the company as the DAM solution enables your teams with easy browser-based access to the assets.
Moreover, you can define asset permission and business rules in the DAM and group the users with the digital assets. This ensures only authenticated groups of users can access the digital assets.
32. There is no way to process new assets
Once you complete the photo-shoot of a commercial, how do you proceed further with the product images? You probably send those assets to the Art Director, then to the creative team, after that to the printing company, and so on.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
When you share the new pictures with all the different members separately, imagine the time you invest in it.
Digital Asset Management solution provides the assets to all the team members starting from top management to junior executives they need in a matter of seconds. Most of the DAM solutions available in the market facilitate you with this feature. The platform also allows you to define the unique workflow and display the most relevant assets on a dynamic homepage.
33. It is difficult to enforce and monitor digital asset security
Producing digital assets like designing the graphics for brochures and flyers, editing and photographing product images, shooting videos, etc. is a time and effort-consuming activity and expensive too. As these assets are very critical for the sales and marketing departments, the backup and security of the assets are highly essential.
If you are managing the data in the departmental database, storage hard drive, local computers, network servers, and other systems that are not connected as well. It becomes quite difficult to monitor, enforce, and implement the backup and security. Soon, the asset becomes vulnerable and the chances of asset loss are inevitable.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
With DAM, all your assets are stored and managed in a single place so you can perform regular security checkups and data backup easily. It also allows you to set up policies to govern user permissions and rights. Thus, it ensures all your data is protected under strict digital surveillance.
34. Miscommunication amongst creative teams
A team in an organization keeps changing. Old employees leave, and new people join the company. They get trained with the processes of the enterprise. Every employee in the company has its own way of working too. As the people change in the organization, the processes become more and more complex.
If you are managing the assets in the disconnected systems and the new employees are unaware of previously created work by the old team, it becomes difficult for the new team to find which assets are completed and which ones are work in progress. They even do not get clarity on which user emailed what assets to who. This causes workflow redundancies.
How a Digital Asset Management Solution helps you?
DAM solution helps you to address the communication inefficiencies that are occurring across the different teams. The platform enables you with a single archive so that all the people across the organizations can have access to the same shared resources more effectively.
As DAM allows for remote access to the assets so your teams are working remotely from a different corner of the country or world. They can view and use the file created and referenced by their colleagues. Eventually, DAM helps you to minimize miscommunication by allowing everyone to access the same asset from a single system.
35. Your existing asset management system impacting your team’s potential negatively
When your assets are scattered in disconnected systems, it definitely impacts the productivity of your employees. They need to find and manage the assets on the priority so that they can use them for their interned sales and marketing initiatives.
Repetition of this practice drains their energy in performing the least important tasks that eventually impact your business success.
For example; you are managing the assets in Google Drive. When your sales and marketing team wants to use any asset in a catalog or collateral, it becomes challenging for them to find what they need from the organization’s disorganized Google Drive. Your team spends considerable time finding the right folder and the required image.
Sometimes, after investing the time, the team members would give up searching for the assets. In such cases, they need to recreate assets.
So, all these activities are time, efforts, and money consuming for your team.
How a Digital Asset Management Solution helps you?
DAM solution allows you to store, manage and distribute the digital assets across the organization as well as the external users like resellers and customers. Your teams can access the assets on the fly wherever they are whether they are working remotely or they are in the field.
By making the assets available to the teams all the time, DAM empowers the teams and allows them to perform their task seamlessly with full potential.
Do you want to boost the potential of your different team by stealing the asset-related process through a DAM implementation?
36. Your team and asset demands are constantly growing
As your team and the number of assets increases, the possibilities of scattered and misplaced assets, asset duplication, and other issues grow. To address these issues you need to have a cartelized repository to manage your wide set of assets which is scalable and flexible.
How a Digital Asset Management solution helps you?
Digital Asset Management platform can scale as your assets and team grow. It automates various processes and streamlines asset access across the organization. It is a valuable investment for the brand that is looking forward to designing multiple workflows in order to address the increased demand for assets.
The bottom line
Are you witnessing any r many of the signs listed above in your existing asset management processes? If yes, then it’s definitely the case of DAM. You should select the right Digital Asset Management Platform and implement it soon to streamline your asset management practices.
Credencys has outstanding experience in developing tailored Digital Asset Management solutions Using the Pimcore platform as per the specific needs of their business and industry vertical. To discuss your DAM requirements, book a 30 minutes free consultation with our DAM experts.
