Why Digital Asset Management matters
Does everyone on your team have the same access to all the assets they need to do their job? What about your third-party collaborators or your remote team members?
Here’s a fact:
In one study examining how digital assets are managed, 54 percent of survey respondents reported using Google Image Search to locate their own company logo.
Managing assets like photos, PDFs, and videos isn’t as easy as it sounds when your organization requires multiple teams to collaborate on content creation and publishing. At its best, this collaboration needs to be optimized with software to ensure that their sales team, for example, always finds the latest version of a file, like a logo, at the right size and resolution.
This is where Digital Asset Management comes in. So, what does this kind of tool do—and why does it matter? Here’s a look at what Digital Asset Management can do for you and your team.
What can you and your organization do with a DAM solution?
- Share files via a cloud-based platform at any time and from any place
- Organize all of your digital assets in a centralized location
- Collaborate, share, and create content from a single set of shared updated assets
- Empower your team and your third-party partners to locate assets quickly and easily
- Manage rich media like audio files, videos, and high-quality images
- Keep everyone on the same page regarding branding and current versioning
- Streamline digital publishing and distribution
- Track which assets are being used and when, assign metadata to each asset, and understand how your content is being used
With a Digital Asset Management solution, everyone is on the same page within your internal teams and when working with outside vendors and other partners. For example, your creative team and marketing, sales, packaging, technology, and legal teams have access to the same assets. Moreover, sharing these assets with external users like agencies, distributors, and other collaborators is easier and more secure.
Why it matters: The benefits of utilizing a DAM solution
The demands of today’s digital landscape are constantly increasing. As brands look for ways to make the most of their content and the lifecycle of their digital assets, Digital Asset Management offers myriad benefits shaping how these assets are used.
- Rich in Metadata: Metadata is the perfect opportunity to bring order to chaos. A system of assigning keywords and other metadata makes it easier to find assets later. It tracks important information embedded alongside each asset, including copyright and licensure dates, technical specifications, origin, keywords, and more. At a glance, you (and your team) can manage your asset metadata and know if the asset you are viewing is up-to-date and usable, which campaigns it’s been used for already, how it’s been used, and who created it.
- Advanced Search Capabilities: An effective Digital Asset Management solution means your entire organization can explore your digital assets in new ways via advanced search capabilities. Using a traditional file storage system, you might only be able to search for files based on their file name or date—but a DAM gives you the power to use filters, categories, subcategories, keywords, collections, and more to find what you need.
- Control Who Has Access: One of the essential features of a DAM system associated with asset governance is that the platform makes it simple to manage who has access to your assets. Administrators have control to establish how different users from different groups interact with your company’s assets and even track who uses or makes changes to assets—and when. A DAM solution allows you to set separate access rights for creators, sales and marketing teams, and even third-party collaborators. Hence, everyone has access to what they need, and you can limit access to all your other assets to keep them secure, protected, and used only for the proper use cases.
- Manage Security: Outdated file-sharing methods don’t give you the same level of security over our assets the same way Digital Asset Management does, and more labor-intensive file-sharing wastes valuable time. DAM systems boost your cybersecurity strategies, storing everything securely to protect your assets and ensure your entire organization is adhering to the regulations or guidelines you must follow for digital rights management. You also save time because your teams don’t have to waste time establishing access permissions—because it’s already done for you. In addition, DAM simplifies secure sharing without the time and hassle of encryption or file transfer protocols (FTP).
- Uphold Your Brand Reputation: Thanks to a single, centralized repository for all your assets, you can rest easy knowing that everyone on your team will use the most updated version of all your assets. You don’t run the same risk as someone using a low-quality or low-resolution asset or an outdated asset that no longer fits with your current branding. Everyone is working from the same page. The result is consistent output and strong branding from everyone on your team to present a professional, consistent image.
- Save Time and Money: Employing a Digital Asset Management solution saves you valuable time and resources. How? As you create and use new assets, you risk misplacing files. Then time is spent searching for—and sometimes even recreating—these assets simply because they aren’t easily accessible. But this doesn’t happen when assets are stored in a DAM solution. Instead, you create an asset once, which can be published anywhere. As a result, a DAM platform streamlines your processes, quickens your time to market, and simplifies collaboration.
- Take Advantage of Analytics: How are your assets performing? How often are they getting used? With an intuitive DAM solution, you can access all kinds of analytics about where your assets are going, who is using them, and which assets are used the most. It shows you what kinds of assets are most useful to your brand—and paints a picture of the most beneficial assets to create moving forward.
- Work From Anywhere: Because DAM software is accessible from any web browser, your team can utilize your brand’s assets from wherever they are. There’s no waiting to access files from an office computer or for someone to set up a secure FTP; everything is securely stored in the cloud to keep your work in motion.
The importance of governance in Digital Asset Management
When managing your assets, governance is one of the most significant benefits of using a Digital Asset Management tool. Governance is an essential strategy to keep track of your ever-growing library. Asset governance is about establishing and evolving standards, policies, and best practices for how you plan to manage it all as an organization. This not only includes the assets themselves but also everything surrounding these assets, including:
- The people who use them
- The processes of how different assets are used
- The technologies your organization uses
Establishing a well-defined governance plan gives you a clear path to move forward in managing your assets and sets you up for success with implementing a DAM platform. It sets the information, guidelines, and policies to keep your DAM running smoothly.
Why does this matter?
On the one hand, a clear definition of policies will help you use a DAM system optimally and securely. In addition, these guidelines can be a helpful guide for adjusting your operations in general, since a critical part of DAM management involves optimizing a continuous and collaborative workflow with your entire team.
Governance can be an oft-overlooked part of setting up or maintaining a DAM system. After all, in establishing your organization’s DAM platform, you’re already thinking about systems configurations, user permissions and access, taxonomy, metadata, and legal compliance – not to mention training everyone who will use the DAM solution.
But DAM governance is just as important as the nuts and bolts of it all. Think of it like the rulebook for your favorite board game. While you might have all the right playing pieces, the dice, and the cards to get started, the rules – in this case, your governance structure – help you keep things moving.
Your organization’s governance structure may include considerations like:
- What kinds of assets belong in the DAM
- Who has access, what they have access to, and what they can do with it
- What naming conventions will you use organization-wide
- What metadata standards and requirements do you have
- How to handle versioning
- What licensing and compliance requirements do you need to consider
- How to communicate changes and updates with users
- How to handle expired assets and how to archive out-of-date assets
Making things pretty DAM simple
Comosoft’s LAGO DAM solution is the ultimate in Digital Asset Management: It’s powerful, easy to use, and a media-neutral repository to keep your brand’s most valuable digital files, images, and videos secure and usable.
Thanks to an expansive, standards-compliant approach to metadata, LAGO by Comosoft takes the burden of asset management off your team so they can focus on more important tasks. Together, you can import and maintain assets in one secure, central location, manage access, stay compliant with brand guidelines, and help everyone be more collaborative and productive.
Plus, LAGO eliminates time-consuming requests and asset silos through collaborative workflow tools that enable you to create, edit, revise, and approve print and digital marketing communications all from the same place with the most updated assets. In fact, LAGO automatically updates active media campaigns whenever assets are updated or replaced to make your work more efficient than ever. Are you ready to see LAGO in action? Book a demo today!