Whether you are new to digital asset management or are already familiar with it, the following tips can help you optimize processes to get the most out of your DAM platform and to learn more about digital asset management systems.
Benefits of DAM solutions
Digital asset management software is beneficial to your company:
- Brand consistency: DAM systems help your team members work together without sacrificing consistency. It allows teams to regularly and appropriately use branding assets as they are intended.
- Maximizes return on investment: DAM platforms help your creative and marketing teams work together. This will decrease your team’s need to complete work more than once and decrease the amount of time it takes to find file types and manage content.
- Content backups: DAM platforms allow for the easy recovery of documents. In addition, it makes document changes trackable and recoverable.
- Control of asset allocation: DAM systems offer centralized, unified control over where company assets are stored, used and who can access them.
Creating a DAM strategy
Although creating an effective DAM strategy takes time, it is well worth the effort and cost. The following steps should be used to create your strategy:
Define Objectives
The first step to implementing and creating any effective strategy is to determine objectives and goals you wish to reach. Understanding why you want to adopt digital asset management software is a key factor.
In this case, these should be relevant to DAM software and how it will fit into your business. It should be easily incorporated into the existing goals of the business.
Talk to stakeholders
The next step of the process is to coordinate stakeholders and come up with an effective way to approach implementation. This should include conversations about how assets are stored, where they are stored, what should be stored and who is responsible for managing assets throughout the asset’s lifecycle.
Taking inventory of your assets should also be a part of this process. This will help your company understand the resources your company needs to house and manage your assets.
Create Consistency
Because DAM solutions make the management of assets consistent, you must understand your organization’s workflows and distribution channels.
DAM best practices
Once you have created your DAM strategy, these are the best practices you should follow to ensure the programs run smoothly.
1. Conduct an asset audit
Although an asset audit should be part of creating your DAM strategy. If your organization has not done this already, you need to conduct an audit before taking any other steps.
This includes understanding the assets you have, who creates them, who can access them, where they are stored and what they can be used for. This information is necessary to pick the right DAM platform for your team.
2. Integrate digital asset management solutions into workflows
Your business workflows and DAM solutions need to be integrated to allow the DAM platform to be at the center of company asset use. This includes training your employees to use the program.
Workflows within your company’s digital asset management solutions should address the following when it comes to your assets and files:
- How you access, modify and save files
- File sizes and format guidelines
- Notifications when the file is changed or used and who should be notified
- The tracking of file changes and requests
3. Versioning
Most businesses will have multiple versions of the same asset over time. This may be because of branding changes, different strategies and campaigns or from updating or changing platforms. Make it easy to differentiate versions and to archive them.
4. Use Analytics
Most of these tools come with ready-to-use, built-in analytics features to track and evaluate asset creation and use. These features may also use artificial intelligence to help you tag assets, as well as to help you understand and identify asset value.
This information can be leveraged by creative teams, marketing teams and more to create assets and campaigns that are more effective. These analytics can also tell you when an asset was last used and the purpose it was used for. DAM analytics make it easy to understand what assets your team is using most and will allow you to recognize any gaps in your current assets.
5. Standardize naming
To increase the effectiveness of the DAM, create a clear and standardized naming system. This will make assets easy to search for, in addition to making them easy to find and manage.
Standardizing this process should include folder names that include what the asset is used for and what the folder contains. This may include using metadata, keywords and tags to make your assets remarkably easy to find within a searchable database.
6. Implement roles and permission
If your organization is large and has many different departments, roles or divisions, DAM solutions can be used to control access and permissions of the program. Using roles and permissions can not only make the digital asset management software easier to use but will also add extra security.
When used effectively, you can control what roles or departments have access to certain information. In addition, it can be used to prevent certain users from having access to company assets. It can also be used to restrict access to documents currently in development or not approved for company use.
Why your company needs to utilize DAM
Digital asset management solutions can do a lot for your company. Including enhancing the customer experience that can save your company time and money. It is vital to company workflows and can help your company better manage its assets.
InterOperate is a technology leader in the Digital Asset Management industry, contact us today to see why some of the largest companies trust us to manage theirs.
