The 7 Most Important Practices for Managing Your Digital Assets

Is your current way of managing your brand’s digital assets truly serving your goals?

By many accounts, it can be difficult for teams to find what they need quickly and efficiently, even from within their organization. In fact, 26 percent of workers between the ages of 35 and 44 spend up to 5 hours each day looking for the data, assets, or information they need to do their job.

Even with an intuitive digital asset management (DAM) system, finding the assets you need can be challenging without smart practices. But in many cases, this can make a massive difference in the work you put out and the people you have on your team; 43 percent of polled workers shared that they would consider leaving their job to find another if they worked for a brand that didn’t have a simple, streamlined way to access the information they needed to do their work correctly – and this statistic is likely to increase as younger generations become the majority of the workforce:

Your digital asset management system is an ever-changing entity. However, you and your team can take charge of your DAM system by implementing these smart practices to ensure your data is findable, accessible, and usable.

1. Conduct Regular Audits

Is everyone on your team adhering to your brand’s established naming conventions? Are they following your metadata standards? If not, you might not be able to locate the assets you need within your DAM system. Naming conventions are one significant way to prevent spending collective hours looking for the right digital assets or researching prior use.

A great DAM system can help with this, pulling important information like:

• Keywords
• Metadata
• File names

Additionally, remember that when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), your digital assets’ file names and metadata are essential for search relevance. Moreover, when a DAM system is integrated with your PIM system, it can share this data, making it all part of your SEO ranking. That’s why ensuring your team keeps up with these standards is so important.

2. See If Things Are Where They Should Be

Are your assets going to their proper places within your DAM system? If not, it can be far too easy for the assets your company relies on to go missing.

How your assets are managed is essential not only to brand continuity, freshness, and efficiency but also to your security. You may be mistaken if you think your assets are stored where they should be. Here are some shocking statistics that should be the push needed to audit your DAM system and determine if your brand’s assets are stored in their proper places:

Even worse, ninety percent of marketers confessed they had lost confidential assets within the past calendar year. Your DAM solution can help you work smarter and more securely.

3. Eliminate or Archive Older Versions of Your Digital Assets

Whether you’ve updated your branding, refreshed important digital assets, or let certain copyrights lapse, “expired” digital assets that are old or outdated can send the wrong message or even put you at risk of copyright infringement.

That’s why it’s essential to correctly catalog or remove older versions of your digital assets from your DAM system so they don’t accidentally get used in your next campaign.

Your DAM system can help ensure that everyone on your team has the most updated version of your digital assets – provided you catalog older versions. It’s how you keep everyone on your team working from the same page so you can share a consistent output and strong branding with your target audiences.

4. Check Permissions

One of the most significant things you can do with a DAM system is control who has access to your assets – down to the specific assets they can access. However, a simple misconfiguration can allow everyone on your team – and all outside partners – to access more than just the assets they need.

This creates a security issue and could be another way that internal teams or third-party partners wind up using expired assets. You should routinely examine your permissions to ensure your teams can access the assets they need to do their jobs well and that they don’t have access to outdated or outside of their jurisdiction. Generally, the industry guideline is to give each user the minimum level of access needed to do their job to protect brand consistency and data security based on things like department, geographic region, or product line.

Your role set types may include:

5. Teach Your Team

Brands typically do an excellent job of educating their team on digital access when they implement a new DAM system so that users understand the functionality and the workflows – but this training should not stop once a DAM is officially launched.

Not only will you need to plan to educate new users as part of their onboarding and existing team members if they take on new roles in your company, but any time you update or enhance your system or your taxonomy, you should train your whole team on what that means for their daily operations.

Training should be tailored to each team’s specific roles and based on their needs and level of access to your digital assets. Overly technical jargon or unnecessary information can overwhelm your employees and may compromise the impact your DAM can have. Training should include things like:

• Naming conventions
• Practices for properly filing digital assets
• Expectations for how assets from your DAM systems are used

6. Analyze Your Assets and Your Usage to Maximize Impact

When you examine the analytics in your digital asset management system, you will feel better knowing you are taking steps to use this solution to its full potential. You will want to look at things like:

• The number of users who access your DAM and how regularly
• Who uses your DAM the most
• How many assets are being used in your brand content, and which are used most often
• What search terms and filters are used most often
• What search terms do not have any results

With this information, you can consider factors like user access management, what kind of assets you need to create to fill a branding need, or what kind of metadata is helpful to assist your teams in finding the right assets.

However, your DAM audit should continue beyond the analytics within your system. This is also an excellent time to listen to your users and find out what works for them and what challenges or frustrations they might be facing. You can use all of this information to support your teams and determine what enhancements might add even more value to your DAM.

7. Streamline DAM and PIM with Comosoft

It’s estimated that around 35 percent of employees tab between multiple work apps four or more times every hour – and this figure jumps to 50 percent for those in the 18 to 34 age bracket.

This is where Comosoft can help you manage your digital assets with far more ease. As the only integrated PIM DAM system on the market, Comosoft not only makes it simpler to manage your digital assets (and access control, metadata, and all analytics) conveniently and securely but also supports a collaborative workflow from the first draft through versioning optimization and both digital and print publishing. With Comosoft’s DAM solution, you can: