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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

Talk to a DAM expert

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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

Every organization produces a lot of content every day to sell or market its products or services. The proliferation of content creates some serious issues if you don’t have the right system in place to manage the related media assets like images, audios, videos, etc.

Without the right Digital Asset Management solution, it becomes difficult for you to share the assets with internal and external users of the company. Also, you cannot help users to locate and access the exact assets whenever they need them.

By considering a Digital Asset Management platform, you can start managing the media assets from the moment they are created, and throughout the asset lifecycle. Ensuring the secured and structured management of your critical digital assets, DAM allows businesses to save time, effort, and resources to recreate, search, distribute, and retrieve the assets.

Before making your mind about any DAM solution, it is very important to get clarity on your business requirements. Every company has different customer demands, content needs, and feature set requirements. So, to pick the right DAM, you require a proper evaluation, planning, and guidance.

This post is a must-read for you if you want to know about how to select the right DAM for your company and what aspects you should take care of during the platform selection process.

Table of content

• 7 signs that prove your organization needs a Digital Asset Management solution
• What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?
• Know your objectives for Digital Asset Management implementation
• What are the capabilities of Digital Asset Management?
• How does an ideal Digital Asset Management platform work?
• What can you do with the Digital Asset Management solution?
• What are the major benefits of Digital Asset Management? In-depth breakdown
• Key business consideration while selecting a Digital Asset Management solution for your company
• What are the Digital Asset Management essentials?
• Questions to ask while selecting a Digital Asset Management solution

Let’s first focus on whether you require a DAM solution or not. Here’re the top challenges that you might have been facing in your day-to-day operations without a DAM system.

7 Signs that proves your organization needs a Digital Asset Management solution

1. You have no idea where to look for digital assets

How do you manage your media assets presently? There are three most common ways to manage digital assets. Here you go.

• On online file sharing sites
• In individual computers
• In random folders on the intranet

If you are managing your assets through any of these methods, then it becomes a time-consuming task to find a single asset from such a huge data. There is no single way for your internal and external users to find the asset quickly, download them, and use them as per their specific requirements.

How DAM makes a difference?

DAM allows you to store, manage, and catalog all the data in a single place. So, it becomes easier for your teams and partners to find, download, share, and use the assets they want in a matter of seconds.

Say sayonara to myriads of long email threads and file-sharing apps.

2. Anyone can access your digital assets

If everyone across your organization can access your digital assets, then it’s not the right way to manage indispensable assets. This causes you some serious issues like damaged and missing files.

To address this inefficiency, you need to define the access rights for your internal and external users to ensure only limited users can access your digital assets.

How DAM makes a difference?

Digital Asset Management solution enables you with features like user role and permission that allows you to define access rights for each user for digital assets.

3. Finding the right assets takes too long

For example; you have uploaded an image of a red background in your cloud storage. How could you search for that image? You probably save the image with the file name “21st January 2022 red background for a marketing campaign”.

Are you able to remember this file name after a couple of months? Or in your absence, will any other user be able to find it?

Of course, not.

Storage of digital assets in the cloud server, intranet, internet, and individual computer makes asset finding difficult and time-consuming.

How DAM makes a difference?

A renowned DAM platform allows you to manage, organize, and sort needed assets through thousands of files in seconds. It allows you to create a good metadata structure for your digital assets to find the assets even when you don’t know what exactly you’re looking for. Additionally, to simplify the asset searching, you can apply filters by author, category, date, type, and more.

4. You cannot share the assets with internal and external stakeholders

Most of the time, only selective individuals have access to specific files. So, those individuals need to invest considerable time in sharing the asset files with others who need the assets but don’t have access to them.

How DAM makes a difference?

Why pass-through this pain when you have a more sophisticated way to share the asset quickly. Yes. I am talking about Digital Asset Management governance that allows you to define who can access what. DAM solution comes with built-in governance systems that allow you to define specific user groups with specific rights and provide granular control over file permissions.

You can share the digital assets with anyone regardless of your customers, external vendors, or internal teams with greater security.

5. You never know who supposed to do what with the assets

The content creation process involves many steps including briefing, creation, storage, validation, enrichment, conversion, and distribution. During this process, you never know who needs to do what to which asset file.

How DAM makes a difference?

Implementation of Digital Asset Management enables you with the history feature that allows you to access the history of all your assets. This feature also helps you keep workflows under control and manage media files with precision.

6. Your teams cannot access the digital assets remotely

Your team needs to work remotely in four scenarios.

1 – You are a multinational organization that has offices and employees across the world
2 – Your team members travel often
3 – You work with remote contractors and third party companies
4 – You might have other reasons for your employees work outside of your office

In all the above-listed cases, when it comes to sharing digital assets, it becomes an arduous task. To share digital assets, employees need to send several emails and wait until they receive a response from another party. This impacts negatively on their productivity, especially when your team needs to work in a different time zone.

How DAM makes a difference?

DAM eliminates this back and forth. It allows every authentic user of the solution who is working remotely to retrieve the assets quickly whenever and wherever needed, on any device.

7. Many people are involved in the digital asset creation process

Usually, graphic designers, photographers, marketing and sales teams, copywriters, content creators, etc. participate in the asset creation process. This list can be longer for you as per your content creation process. To manage digital assets effectively, you need a good process for collaboration.

How DAM makes a difference?

DAM solution allows you to annotate, tag a specific group or user, and store comments on what is required to be changed. This makes you sure that you are always using and working on the latest version of the digital asset as well as you can collaborate with the different stockholders in real-time remotely.

There are many more signs that you might be experiencing when it comes to digital asset management. Above I have covered the most common ones.

If you are dealing with any or many or all the challenges listed above or facing other issues related to Digital Asset Management, feel free to connect with our DAM experts.

Let’s discuss

What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

Digital Asset Management is a process for storing, managing, organizing, and sharing digital assets securely and efficiently. Using a reliable DAM platform, you can perform this process seamlessly along with managing the user rights to ensure only users with permission can access the assets.

To get detailed insights about Digital Asset Management, read An Ultimate Guide to Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Know your objectives for Digital Asset Management implementation

Rather than selecting a Digital Asset Management platform randomly, I would suggest to make a well-planned decision by

• Defining your objectives
• Prioritizing the objectives
• Determining who are the DAM users and stakeholders
• Understanding how their participation in the DAM selection process will help you in achieving these goals

In turn, the users and stakeholders help you in deciding the capabilities and components that are required to streamline and simplify your asset management processes.

Here’re some goals related to Digital Asset Management that you want or achieve for your organizations knowingly or unknowingly.

• Attain brand consistency
• To have a “system for master record” of all your digital assets to help your teams not to worry about where to find the assets, what is the most current, and what is approved.
• Reduce the asset integration time in digital marketing campaigns by improving customer experience
• Streamline the digital asset production process
• Make it easier for your marketing team to work and coordinate with external design agencies
• Improve the consistency and quality of assets being created in the company with distributed marketing teams
• Eliminate the manual process of requesting certain assets to groups and people specific files (headshots, logos, collateral, product images, camping assets, etc.) for your marketing team

Are you trying to achieve the same business objectives? Let us help you understand how a Digital Asset Management solution meets your business goals.

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What are the capabilities of Digital Asset Management?

Most common capabilities of DAM

Asset repository

Digital assets, managed in a scattered way in different systems, won’t help companies to achieve efficiency. Implementation of a system where every individual has their own stash of images and/or documents will result in inefficiency, chaos, and waste.

Thus, every organization must have a centralized repository where they can manage and control all the digital assets with next-level security. This is what Digital Asset Management helps you with.

Asset creation

Using the built-in workflow management tools, Digital Asset Management helps organizations in the asset creation process. You might be thinking not to consider these tools as according to you they might be nice-to-have solutions.
If you have multiple agencies and/or departments working together, workflow management tools make the review, approval, and revision process faster and easier. It also simplifies the asset creation process by

• Predefining roles and stages
• Allowing you to know the status of every asset
• Tracking the status of assets
• Determining what required to be done with assets immediately based on the asset status

Consideration of the workflow management tools enables you with more efficient and faster asset creation that eventually saves a significant amount of money.

Asset consumption

The main objective of any organization for DAM implementation is to provide a way for its users to search and download the required digital assets on their own. Rather than wasting the time in responding to the asset-related requirements of marketers and creatives separately, DAM allows everyone to get the required assets on their own.

DAM saves time for the individuals who spend half of their time distributing and sharing digital assets with different departments, agencies, and partners. They focus more on productive tasks. This ultimately contributes to your ROI.

Along with managing the brand consistency, DAM allows employees to work independently by finding what they want, ensuring what they are using is the latest version, and promising that they are using the approved assets only.

Functional capabilities of DAM

Mobile-first

An advanced DAM supports all the latest technologies. It not only allows you to store and manage the assets but also distributes and displays them attractively on any device regardless of screen size. To achieve this, the DAM contains the capabilities like intelligent resizing, adjusting, and cropping of assets on the fly.

Cloud deployment

Cloud-based DAM is trending due to its capabilities like sharing of assets and effective global collaboration.

Digital asset delivery

DAM optimizes the digital assets and creates URLs for them. It utilizes Content Delivery Network for asset delivery to allow users to use the digital assets directly in mobile apps, websites, or other platforms. It allows users to access high-quality assets that also enables customers with fast loading.

Rich media management

Leverage the DAM capabilities of transforming the traditional file formats into the next-gen 3D models, image formats, 360-degree images, videos, and more. The built-in tools of the platform automatically resize, crop, transform, and transcode the version and creates multiple versions for different use cases.

Dynamic asset transformation

DAM allows you to create different variations and layouts for the assets to meet the changing needs of websites, mobile apps, and marketing processes. The platform generates variants by providing resizing, cropping, and image effects automatically.

It also allows generating new assets from the existing ones. For example; using the AI capabilities of DAM, you can create a short preview of a video. All these happen within the DAM so you do not need external tools for asset editing or downloading.

Non-functional capabilities of DAM

Integration

This is one of the most important capabilities of the DAM that you must consider during the DAM section process. Make sure that the platform comes with built-in connectors that allow the solution to connect with different types of systems including

• Product Information Management (PIM) systems
• Content Management System (CMS)
• eCommerce platforms
• Social Media
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems
• Digital Experience Management (DXP) Systems
• Business Process Management (BPM) systems
• Marketing tools, and more…

Performance

Do not miss to check the performance of the DAM before making a buying decision. The platform must be able to handle the heavy loads.

To check this, you can upload demanding files such as M4V video files with an H265 codec, TIFF files with 100+ megapixel, multilayer PDF files. Check if you could upload small JPEGs and a heavy video simultaneously and if the DAM platform contains multiple renders. Also, make sure the system handles concurrent downloads with five different users.

I would like to suggest you go for a Cloud/SaaS-based platform that allows you to build and implement dynamically scalable Digital Asset Management systems to ensure the excellent performance of the system.

User experience

Choose a DAM platform that has a web-based, user friendly, and seamlessly working user interface. There are many Digital Asset Management platforms available in the market that contain high-tech features and functionality but they have a steep learning curve that ultimately reduces productivity.

Do you want to implement a DAM solution that enables you with all the above listed common, functional, and non-functional capabilities?

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How does an ideal Digital Asset Management platform work?

Import the assets

DAM allows you to import assets either one by one or in bulk using convenient applications of images and metadata.
Asset security

After importing the digital assets, you should utilize DAM security privilege. The platforms ensure asset security with Access Control Lists (ACLs) and permissions that define which users can access or modify the digital asset based on their roles and responsibilities.

Asset storage

It allows brands to store and manage a large volume of creative assets and their metadata. Also, it facilities the users with fast retrieval of the asset.

Asset transformation

Advanced DAM converts the image formats automatically as per the requirements and creates the native thumbnails, without smart cropping or resizing.

Well, you won’t find this ability in all the DAM. There are a few platforms that allow users for manual editing of documents and images in the interface.

Asset enrichment

Once you have assets in place, you can enrich them easily using the metadata and generating analytics on asset usage.

Asset aggregation

You can track relationships between assets and versions or variants of the original assets using the DAM. Asset finding, bundling, and management become easier for you and your users.

Asset management

Each DAM system has its own structured process for working with assets that starts from asset creation, approvals, versions, to publishing.

Asset search

Implementation of DAM enables you with easy ways to search the required assets quickly. You can search for assets through metadata, workflow stages, collections, and image attributes.

Asset preview

DAM allows users to preview, videos, images, or other digital assets before downloading them.

Asset publishing

You can share the asset files with other creative users by using a link generated by the DAM.

Looking for a Digital Asset Management platform that allows you to perform end-to-end activities related to asset management and streamline your day-to-day business processes?

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What can you do with the Digital Asset Management solution?

File management

• Store, manage and catalog videos, images, audios, and other creative assets
• Search assets by description, metadata, and title
• Share the digital assets with every individual inside or outside the organization
• Enable the end-users with dynamic URLs that support fast CDN delivery and on the fly image manipulation
• Rather than sharing the file with another team who is responsible to upload the assets to a website or send the assets to the customers through emails, DAM allows you to add a dynamic URL link in the email or website
• Leverage Artificial Intelligence to tag the video and images automatically in order to promote reuse and improve searchability

Marketing

Product marketing

• Save all the creative files such as advertising materials, pack shots, 3D models, branding creatives, campaign material, SKUs, product data sheets, specifications, etc. related to products and their designing
• Organize all these assets seamlessly and share them with distributors and retailers using DAM
• To meet the specific needs of different marketing campaigns of retailers, DAM dynamically transforms advertising and branding material, product images, and packaging. For example; if you want to promote a badge your brand has earned, DAM allows you to add the badge to a product packing, poster, and advertisement without human intervention
• Tagging to marketing assets happens automatically through AI. It allows to reuse assets for other marketing campaigns if required and improve searchability

Local marketing

• If your brand is distributed in multiple locations, then DAM works as a storage of distributed brand assets to allow you to sell the product independently
• Different teams can access the brand’s assets and use them in the local marketing content such as email marketing, store-front graphics, website creatives, and advertising
• An advanced DAM extends and modifies all your generic brand’s assets and transforms them into the specific ones to help you serve the local marketing purpose
• You can replace the text or graphics using DAM
• Leverage automated transformation of brand images into a new format or size for local marketing creatives

Print and offline marketing

• DAM allows creatives to search and access the assets to meet the printing requirements
• Integrate the DAM that contains a web-to-print feature that allows you to send assets on an appropriate printer
• Create different versions of assets with different images, different messaging or text, or different design rules and layout
• DAM automatically generates the correct resolution for printing or image format

Brand management

• Along with being a centralized repository of media assets of the organization, the DAM also serves the purpose of creating and managing the instructions and guidelines about using assets for the brand
• Effectively manage a large number of brand assets/files for different campaigns, audiences, and channels
• DAM allows you to extend brand assets with dynamic digital asset transformation. For example; the platform automatically removes the background, resizes or crops logos, and/or creates variants of an image to meet the specific requirements of multiple social media channels without the help of graphic designers

Media management

eCommerce

• You can use a DAM for your online store where you can store, manage, and repurpose the product-related images, videos, and other media assets
• You can easily address the quality-related needs of the eCommerce platform in terms of product images, sizes, colors, and other variants
• DAM ensures to create and deliver high-quality images that are highly essential for the success of an eCommerce solution
• Consideration of a highly advanced DAM platform facilitates the automatic transformation of product images into the correct format to make the display attractive. For example; high-resolution images for a product page or compelling thumbnails for a gallery
• DAM creates a URL for each asset and allows you to add the required DAM asset URLs to the respective pages of your eCommerce solution

Website

• You can easily generate, store and manage videos, images, and other creative assets for large scale websites
• If you own a large-scale media, corporate, and news website that contains thousands of pages with millions of assets, then you can definitely consider the DAM. You can use these assets at different places in a website such as navigation, layout, and in between the page content
• Distribute the assets across different devices having varied screen sizes using the DAM. It allows you to update the asset design across numerous pages automatically. For example; DAM automatically adjusts and crops the featured images for blogs.
• Determine navigation icons and edit the icons directly from DAM without making any changes in website code

Want to discuss what else you can do with an advanced Digital Asset Management solution?

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What are the major benefits of Digital Asset Management? In-depth breakdown

Workflows automation

Define custom workflows

A feature-rich DAM allows you to design and configure custom workflow as per your specific operational requirements.

Asset approval workflows

Automate your asset approval workflow using the DAM. Once the digital assets are ready to get approved, respective authorities will receive a notification that the asset is ready for approval.

Reduced human error

The automated workflow of asset management, asset approval, and marketing processes allows you to eliminate the overhead cost caused due to human error as well as save time for your team too.

Project management workflows

Utilizing the product management workflow, you can easily consolidate the files and processes you required for successful project completion. DAM allows you to manage all the needed digital assets in a single location and access them on the fly.

Improved brand consistency

Complete control over the approvals

DAM facilitates you with approval and assigning capabilities to make sure that every piece of content that gets distributed physically and/or digitally is correct, accurate, and approved. It becomes easier for your marketing team to know how and where to track the campaigns they are working on.

Stronger brand presence

DAM allows your different teams to work together in multiple campaigns by managing the varied assets in a single repository. This helps you improve your brand consistency by spreading the same message across different output channels.

Consistency in creative assets and messaging helps you create a stronger impact of your brand on the customers. It also impacts your brand recall value as your brand stays top of the mind when a customer is determined to make a purchase.

Lower operating costs

Consolidate different platforms

A comprehensive DAM helps your team to complete a project by using all the required digital assets from a single source. Users from different departments know exactly which platform they need to use for the required assets. This saves them from performing an irritating process of finding the right information by logging in and out of multiple platforms.

Allowing you to manage all your projects from concept to customer effectively, DAM enables you with full control over each and every action. It saves time for your team for switching between various platforms. And, most importantly, it reduces the cost that you spend on platforms that you may not need any longer due to the ultramodern capabilities of DAM.

Advanced search capabilities

A user from your team with the access rights can use the DAM and search for the needed assets quickly and easily using the features like folder categorization, search-by color, keyword search (just like Google), and more.

Leveraging the search capabilities of a DAM, the users won’t spend extra time in finding the assets and being confused about where the required asset is stored in the solution.

Boost team productivity

DAM eliminates the assets search and usage-related issues for your associates as they know where they need to go to find the exact asset they are looking for.

Rather than interacting across different users and channels as well as searching through multiple platforms, they can use DAM to get the required assets. Enabling your teams with a streamlined process of asset management, DAM improves their productivity.

Simplify asset reuse

Instead of recreating or buying the images from scratch, DAM allows you to check if you have any images in your solution that you can re-use in your on-going project.

It again provides you benefits of time and money. You can save the time of your team that they spend on creating additional design and money spent on downloading the images from the stock photo sites when you already have an appropriate image that can be repurposed.

Prevention against legal problems

DAM provides you with features like digital right management that provide you protection against the issues like license abuse and asset misuse.

It provides you total control over your digital assets where you can define when and who can download the assets. Thus, the platform reduces the possibilities of license abuse and asset misuse. Eventually, it reduces the cost that you invest to deal with the legal issues.

Improved business processes

Single source of truth for all your assets

DAM is the single source of truth for all your digital asset-related requirements. It helps you overcome challenges with siloed departments. When all the digital assets are stored in a single location, it becomes easy for your teams to collaborate effectively and focus more on the success of the campaign.

Asset and project management integration

Improved and efficient processes are one of the major benefits of DAM implementation. Consolidate your assets and projects in a single location in order to improve the efficiency of your project and asset management process.

Do you want to leverage all the benefits mentioned above? We would love to provide a detailed understanding of a robust DAM platform that improves your business operations and ROI.

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Key business consideration while selecting a Digital Asset Management solution for your company

Plenty of Digital Asset Management platforms are available in the market that offers a wide variety of features. But, to select the best one, you should focus on the outcome that the platform delivers to your organization and not the features.

During the DAM selection process, make sure you are clear about the key purpose, primary users, internal user stories, metadata, file types, API requirements and integration, distribution channels, and budget.

Define the key purpose for DAM implementation

Before starting to search for a reliable DAM, it is very important to understand your key business objective for considering the DAM. And, during the selection of a DAM platform and vendor, keep this objective in your mind to ensure that you end up selecting the best fit for your digital asset management needs.

Who are the users of the DAM system?

Administrator

You need to elect a person as an administrator of the DAM solution. They will be responsible to keep updating digital assets, ensure everything is well organized, and make changes as and when required.

Identify this person during the DAM selection process only so they can participate in the training and decision-making process during the implementation.

Departments

Determine the users who are going to use the DAM on a regular basis in order to enable your organization with operational and business benefits. Define the departments in your company who will be using the DAM.

To gain maximum advantages out of a DAM solution, you need to conduct interviews of varied users from different departments to get a profound understanding of how DAM implementation helps them streamline asset management operations and improve productivity.

Number of users

Note that everyone that uses the assets is not considered as DAM users.

Yes, you heard it right.

Who are your users?

People who need to access the DAM to retrieve and search for the images as well as assign, approve, and complete the projects are your DAM users. You need to be clear about the number of users as it impacts the pricing of DAM.

Your authorized users can share digital assets with the people who are not using the Digital Asset Management system.

Provide the user information to your solution vendor when you view demos.

User stories

Define the ways that DAM is beneficial to your business. Also, determine how it will address your existing operational and business challenges. This information helps you to check the potential of the DAM solutions when you take the demos of different Digital Asset Management platforms.

Think about the relevant user stories by contemplating the below-listed elements:

• What end result you want to achieve
• Responsibilities and departments of the users involved in the story
• All the roadblocks that users are facing contribute to complete the story
• What actions the users need to perform

Ask the DAM vendor if they enable you with the Digital Asset Management solution that addresses the issues that you are facing in current processes as mentioned in your provided user stories.

Metadata

Metadata is an essential part of a DAM as it contains the information about each asset and makes the assets searchable and configurable to your existing workflows. Before creating metadata for your DAM solution, you need to check out

• What kind of metadata are you currently using?
• What types of metadata are you going to use while adding assets in the Digital Asset Management system?

Here’re the most common types of metadata

File types

You might be using varied digital assets such as images, videos, audio, and documents in different file types. While selecting a DAM, make sure your vendor provides you a solution that allows you to manage your asset seamlessly with your preferred file type.

Here’s the list of the most common file types that are usually supported by all the leading Digital Asset Management platforms.

API requirements and integration

DAM solutions should have proper APIs and integration in place to create a seamless working experience for your team and streamline the processes they are working with.

Thus, Digital Asset Management is usually used with some other systems as it is very rare that any organization needs a solution just to store and manage digital assets. Most of the time companies integrate it to manage product-related or business-related digital assets.

Implementations of DAM enables you with multiple possibilities listed below:

• DAM holds some outstanding capabilities that replace the existing software you are using
• DAM can easily be integrated with your existing software and third-party party applications
• DAM will support the scalability and flexibility for the future

Here’re the few solutions with which DAM is widely integrated and used.

Product Information Management (PIM)

Product Information Management is used to manage a wide variety of products in a centralized location. PIM also allows them to market and sell the product through websites or eCommerce.

Integrating the DAM solution with your PIM system, you can manage the product-related videos, images, audios, documents, and many more digital assets in the DAM solution.

Content Management System (CMS)

CMS is considered the best marketing platform that allows you to promote the products or services related content to inform the customers about your offerings.

Integrating DAM solutions with CMS, you can create, assign, annotate, and compare the content versions as well as publish the content across multiple digital platforms. Thus, in some of the CMS solutions, DAM is the necessary requirement.

Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

Digital Experience Platform allows brands not only to manage the content but also the marketing related activities from a single platform.

DXP and DAM integration allows the companies to manage creative digital assets related to different marketing campaigns in a centralized location and use them as and when required.

Digital Commerce Platform

Yes, I am talking about your online store where you sell and promote your products or services.

Integrate DAM with your Digital Commerce Platform to manage all your offering related digital assets in a single location. DAM is highly used by almost all the B2B, B2C, and B2B2C organizations to ensure logical and structured asset management.

Master Data Management (MDM)

Master Data Management solutions allow organizations to manage all types of business data including products, services, marketing, sales, finance, accounts, human resource, employees, customers, and more.

Integrating DAM with MDM you can manage all digital assets like pictures, excel files, documents, videos, etc. in a single platform.

Project Management System

DAM contains project management capabilities too. It allows you to manage your marketing projects from scratch starting from concept to customer. So while selecting a DAM, don’t forget to discuss it with your vendor.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Almost every organization uses Enterprise Resource Planning software to manage varied business data. Mostly, it allows to manage sales, procurement, and production-related information.

Integrating DAM with ERP, you can facilitate your sales team with the latest marketing collaterals, the procurement team with the quotation-related terms and conditions, and the production department with managing the documentation of guidelines and instructions to perform certain production processes.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management solution saves all the customer-related information for an organization. Usually, customers share the requirements documents, pictures, and videos to convey what problems they are facing and what solutions they are looking for.

DAM allows you to manage all these documents, images, videos, and other digital assets that you have received and sent to the customers in a centralized repository.

Others

If you want to integrate the DAM for other third-party software or applications, then there you have multiple options to choose from. You can integrate with any of your existing enterprise systems and third-party applications to automate and streamline the digital asset management process.

Digital asset distribution channels

Once the assets get approved, you can use them for printing, digital channels, sharing to internal and external dealers, marketing, and packaging. Define your preferred distribution channel on which you want to deploy your assets to gain maximum benefit of DAM. Digital Asset Management solution allows you to work for any, many, or all the channels listed below.

Print

Before sending an asset from the DAM for printing, check out if there are approval workflows that are aligned with the printed materials process and what file types are available with you in DAM for that particular asset.

Digital platforms

You can store and manage the digital assets that you want to distribute across all your customer touchpoints in DAM. The platform allows you to establish a workflow for asset approval, scheduling and reporting. Thus, it provides you an opportunity for consolidating the programs in a single location.

Sharing with external dealers

Are you working with the external dealers to distribute your approved assets? Then, you need to consider a DAM that contains advanced features like rights management and assets sharing to improve asset time-to-market.

Marketing channels

All the companies are using digital assets for marketing campaigns and promotions. If you want to implement a DAM to fulfill this purpose, then the platform enables you with Marketing Asset Management capabilities where you are allowed for creating, editing, approving, versioning, distributing, and analyzing the digital assets.

Packaging channels

DAM allows you to create, manage, and approve the assets for packaging related media assets. Check with your Digital Asset Management solution vendor how they help you to improve the packaging process through packaging asset management. Make sure they offer advanced packaging focused integrations.

Budget

The most important for any business is the budget. Isn’t it?

Make sure to discuss the pricing of the DAM to check whether it fits into your budget or not. Along with investment you need to get clarity on ROI aspects too. The platform must increase your income after a certain time either by improving productivity or by reducing overhead costs.

The detailed understanding and analysis of the Digital Asset Management system ensure that you gain maximum ROI with all your expected features that are suitable for your budgetary constraints as well.

If you are not sure about your DAM requirements but you have clarity on your business needs and want to get clarity on technical aspects

Connect with our DAM experts

What are the DAM essentials?

Advanced Search

When you have plenty of assets in your DAM, searching for the right asset quickly is the biggest challenge. By managing your digital assets in the DAM, you can leverage simplified asset search, navigation, and organization.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy allows you to classify and organize your assets and related information. You can also define the structure of your asset information using the DAM. So, make sure your solution vendor provides you a Digital Asset Management that has sophisticated taxonomy capabilities.

Metadata

Metadata represents information attached to the assets. It is very essential as it makes your content searchable. You can determine metadata based on the understanding of how you are going to use your assets.

Categories

Define the categories for your assets based on how people used to search for assets in your organization. Usually, they search for the asset by entering the brand, SKUs, product identification number, color, and more.

Create a list of categories you want to consider in your DAM solution and ask the solution provider whether they can include this category in the system.

Deployment

The Digital Asset Management solution should be flexible and scalable to meet your frequently changing business needs and achieve your specific organizational objectives. Digital Asset Management solution can be deployed in three ways

• SaaS/Cloud
• On-premise
• Hybrid

Examine your business goals and DAM requirements to make the right choice for your business.

SaaS/Cloud

SaaS/Cloud-based DAM platforms are highly in demand as it enables your organization with the benefits of convenience and security.

On-premises

On-premise DAM allows you to drive your own software updates on your internal network. But you need to be dependent on your solution vendor to have full control over the system as they take care of the network connection, hardware, and initial configuration of the platform in your network.

But, the major benefit is you have all rights to run software updates and make required modifications in the system as and when required.

Hybrid

Hybrid is the right choice for companies who do not want to utilize the capabilities of SaaS/Cloud or on-premise models fully but want to consider specific elements of both the platforms. As the word itself says, the Hybrid Digital Asset Management solution enables you with the benefits of both types of models.

Let’s have a quick comparison of SaaS/Cloud, on-premise, and hybrid Digital Asset Management platforms so you can make the right choice.

Difference between SaaS, On-premises & Hybrid

Workflow management

Workflow plays an important role in any DAM as it gives you an understanding of how you can create, manage, consolidate, and distribute digital assets in different systems and multiple customer touchpoints.

When it comes to workflow management, you need to check whether the Digital Asset Management solution vendor provides you the custom or standard workflow as well as discuss the workflow usability with them too.

Custom workflows vs. standard workflows

Most of the Digital Asset Management platforms come with standard workflows that are built-in. But there are a few platforms that allow you to create a custom workflow for your Digital Asset Management system. It is better to go with the platform that provides custom workflow and gathers information on any associated implementation differences.

Usability

Check the workflow of the DAM and analyze how it is easy to configure, implement, and edit. The usability of the workflow is defined on the basis of the scalability and adaptability of the platform.

Data storage and migration

Digital asset import and upload

Before starting to upload the digital assets in the Digital Asset Management solution, it is good to get complete clarity about the asset uploading and importing capabilities of the platforms. It should contain various capabilities such as automated metadata, drag-and-drop uploads, uploading multiple files, file size capabilities, and editable metadata.

Asset storage space

Get the idea of how many assets you have right now that you want to shift to the DAM. Also, analyze how frequently and what amount of assets you need to upload in the solution. Once you have this data, discuss with the solution provider whether the solution is capable to fulfill your asset uploading requirements.

Data migration

After the DAM implementation, you need to migrate all your assets that are stored in disparate systems and local systems in the DAM. So, you need to do some homework where you need to check

• How many assets do you have?
• Where are the assets currently located?
• What types of asset files do you have?
• What kind of metadata do you want to attach with your assets while you add them in DAM?

It is crucial for you to understand the asset migration capabilities and process of the DAM platform before selecting the DAM.

Want to migrate and store your asset data from the disparate systems to a DAM and build a centralized repository of digital assets?

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User access control and management

External file sharing

DAM contains file-sharing capabilities and allows you to send the asset files to the people who need them. These people could be external users as well who need the assets but they don’t have access to the DAM for direct downloading of needed assets.

Moreover, the Digital Asset Management solution allows you to create collections of digital assets and share them with external users. But, while selecting a DAM, you need to discuss how to define permission for sharing the assets files with external users with your solution vendor.

Single Sign-On (SSO) integration

Talk with your vendor about user authentication options available with the DAM platform they offer. There is a Single Sign-On functionality available in many Digital Asset Management systems that allow users to sign in into the system with their corporate login credentials instead of using separate login to keep track of only authenticated users access the solution.

User roles and permissions

To ensure the security of your digital assets, it is very essential the DAM allows you to control the access rights based on user roles and permissions attached with each role. Integration of user roles and permission feature, you can have complete control over your digital assets and you have the right to decide who can edit, view, and organize the assets.

Scalability

Once you select a DAM you are going to use that platform for years. So it is very important to get an understanding of the scalability of the solution. Make sure that the platform can evolve as your business grows.

Accessibility

Create a list of users who are going to operate the system locally or globally. While selecting a DAM, make sure it consists of flexible accessibility options to ensure all your local or global users can seamlessly operate the solution and perform their tasks.

Language

Implement a Digital Asset Management solution that enables you with multi-lingual interfaces. It should allow users to create, manage, and distribute the digital assets in the native languages of targeted regions. It plays a key role in attracting your target audience available in different countries.

Globalization

Define your business goals and requirements for global expansion. Discuss those goals with your solution provider and understand how the Digital Asset Management platform helps you meet your international/global requirements.

Security

Security is the most important aspect for any software system and so for Digital Asset Management platforms as well. Go with the DAM solution that ensures you the high-end security standards for the safety of your critical digital assets.

Digital licensing and rights

International

Leverage digital rights and licensing to set your digital assets to adhere to embargo dates and different specifications related to international permissions.

Expiration dates

DAM allows you to define the expiration date for each asset. This eliminates the process of removing the assets manually from the Digital Asset Management system when the asset is no longer in use. Also, it ensures the users are using those assets only which are eligible for use.

Terms of use

Create terms of use that all the users need to agree to before downloading any asset from the Digital Asset Management solution.

Image and video editing

By managing the digital assets in the DAM, you can allow your creative and functional teams to make the required edits in the assets that are going to be used for packaging and non-packaging purposes such as marketing collaterals for print or digital use.

An advanced Digital Asset Management platform allows organizations to sync the images with the desktop in order to edit and enrich the digital assets on the go. As your files are seamlessly synced in the background, your creative team needs to work on their desktop only.

Project management

Creative collaboration

In a Digital Asset Management solution, when a creative is assigned to a task, they will receive an email notification. They can open the assets and start working on the assigned task.

In some of the platforms, you can utilize the sharing and synchronization capabilities of the system that allows the creative team to open the assets directly in their preferred third party software like Adobe application and start working on it right away. They do not need to work in the Digital Asset Management system.

Analytics and audit logs

Using DAM, you can publish the assets on the different output channels. Not only that, you can track the performance of each asset and understand which asset performs the best. With the help of an audit log, you check which assets have been downloaded and check the rights associated with them.

Automated workflows

Enabling you with automated workflows, DAM allows you to set appropriate sequences of the actions for your different marketing projects. These actions could be attaching appropriate images, due date, and assigning the creator to the project.

Publishing platforms

After the completion of the asset approval process, you can schedule to publish them on different sales and marketing channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.

Process control

Once you have assigned the project, you have a dashboard where you can have a full overview of the project completion status. You can check if the project is on track and meeting the deadline as well as see the bottleneck that slows the business processes.

Asset markup

Some Digital Asset Management platforms provide this feature to brands. It notifies them when the creative has completed the first draft of the design. You can review the assets and markup them with required revisions. Annotate the assets to describe the changes and edits you want to make and then provide them to the creatives for revisions.
Once you receive the new version of the asset, you can view both versions side by side and compare them in order to check the difference between the versions.

Notification

DAM allows you to set up email campaigns so that your teams are informed when you assign them a project or when an asset is ready for approval. Moreover, when any user downloads an image, you will be notified due to the copyright specific licensing limitations to control asset use.

Are you looking for the right DAM platform that can tackle your project management related challenges and requirements effectively?

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Questions to ask while selecting a DAM solution

When you have multiple options, it is quite challenging to find the right one. There are multiple Digital Asset Management platforms available in the market and to select the best fit for your organization.

To check the potential of the Digital Asset Management solution, you need to ask a few essential questions to your solution vendors whom you have shortlisted. Compare the answers provided by the different solution vendors and select the best platform for you.

Here are the most common but most important questions that you must ask the vendors.

• What is the data migration process in your DAM platform?
• How does a creative team work within your DAM solution?
• What are the integration capabilities of your DAM platform?
• What is the strength of your DAM platform?
• What kind of user roles, permissions, and rights management features does your DAM platform offer?
• Does your DAM platform support 3D image rendering?
• What kind of taxonomy, category, and metadata features does your DAM platform contain?
• What kind of hosting option do you have?
• How scalable is your DAM solution?
• How easy are your DAM platform workflows to configure?

Got the answers to the above-listed questions? Let us help you in suggesting the best DAM platform that meets all asset management related objectives.

Talk to our DAM experts

In the nutshell

Credencys has extensive experience working with Pimcore for developing a robust Digital Asset Management solution as per the specific business needs of every organization. It offers a wide range of feature sets that suit your basic and advanced requirements for digital asset management.

To learn about the hidden capabilities of Pimcore’s DAM, feel free to book a 30 minutes free consultation with our DAM experts.