5 Best Practices to Follow In Digital Asset Management Implementation
Whether you’re implementing a digital asset management strategy for the first time or trying to refine your existing digital asset management (DAM) journey, it’s important to take a step back and see your journey holistically. Because DAM implementation is a map of connections between objectives, processes, and outcomes that needs to be managed with care to ensure the best results.
The key to mapping out that journey as effectively as possible lies in digital asset management best practices.
What are Digital Asset Management best practices?
Digital asset management software can offer creative teams a whole new world of efficiency in content production. But only if the platform is augmented specifically for your creative ecosystem. While there are undoubtedly similarities between creative workflows and production landscapes, stock standard implementation of DAM software will barely scrape the surface of the platform’s benefits.
To access the full potential of your platform and ensure you get maximum return on investment, you need to follow a number of key digital asset management best practices.
These best practices are the processes and steps that help you access the full potential of your DAM engine and maintain that efficiency in the future. While digital asset management may be focused on optimizing creative workflows, these best practices are focused on the implementation side of things and administrative tasks that need to be addressed before the production cycle begins.
Whether you’re a dedicated digital asset manager, a team leader, or a creative director overseeing the digitalization of your creative department, these are the steps you need to take to ensure the success of your DAM journey.
Best Digital Asset Management Practices to Maximize Your Return on Investment
Here is your guide to the five most important digital asset management best practices:
Best Practice #1: Conduct an asset audit
Conducting an asset audit should always be the first step. Knowing which types of assets you’re working with, where they are being implemented, and how they will be managed in the future will help you create a foundation for workflows and improved asset lifecycles.
From the metadata schemas you need to create, the automations you’ll be able to set up ahead of time, and the integrations you’ll need to streamline production and distribution – it all begins with your asset audit.
Audits also help you save valuable assets and do away with the clutter that easily robs creative ecosystems of their efficiency.
Best Practice #2: Make your DAM media library a single source of truth
DAM efficiency isn’t all based on built-in functionality. Creating a single source of truth requires teams to stick to established structures and processes, following naming conventions and folder structures that align with a production architecture. These frameworks need to be managed actively to ensure that digital assets are being created, stored, and shared the right way.
Thanks to the centralized nature of digital asset libraries, the uniformity of digital assets will echo through all the creative departments with faster delivery times and increased creative confidence, all thanks to the elimination of erratic and unorganized libraries.
Best Practice #3: Set up user access controls
Permission-based access controls will ensure that your assets are safe at every point of the production cycle and afterward. Digital asset management platforms let you grant access to people at specific stages or to limited functionalities, allowing collaboration to continue unhindered without jeopardizing the safety of assets.
When external parties require access to assets, whether they’re people from other departments or third-party stakeholders, limited access can be granted to asset collections to protect the stability of the DAM library and the assets it holds.
Best Practice #4: Establish and automate DAM workflows
For this step, you’ll need to know your team members’ roles and where they fit into the creative ecosystem. Content creation is a team-based effort that links multiple creatives together, and automating workflows lets you do away with the time wasted when projects transition from one phase to the next.
Plugging creatives into automated workflows ahead of production will help you keep productivity flowing without manual input, helping creatives collaborate more effectively as they stay notified of project progress.
But this also means automating the digital tool integrations that are needed at different stages to optimize production.
This leads us to our final point.
Best Practice #5: Integrate your DAM with other systems
Digital content production doesn’t happen on one platform. Multiple creative tools are used throughout the production cycle to create the final piece of content. And as numerous as the tools are, the comments and markups can become even more numerous.
When you integrate your creative tools with your DAM library, creatives get to stay in their editing software with full access to the markups and comments that are saved directly on assets. At the same time, edits made on third-party platforms are saved to the DAM library in real-time to ensure the latest assets are always available to all in the team.
The core elements needed for an effective DAM strategy
The implementation of a digital asset management strategy begins with you. Software and technologies come second.
You need to understand your team’s workflows, the assets they work with, and where in the marketing ecosystem they fit in. Because it’s these details and the elements that define your creative environment that will ultimately guide your implementation strategy and not the features or benefits of your DAM software.
Once you understand the layout of your creative ecosystem and where you can optimize it, you can look for a creative asset management solution that meets those specific needs. That’s why this digital asset management best practice guide should be just the start of your DAM strategy. Over time, you need to develop best practices that are unique to your landscape and workflows to make the most of your DAM implementation.
Let globaledit simplify the best practices of your DAM strategy
The simplicity, accessible automation functionalities, and straightforward nature of globaledit make it easy to follow best practices and set up digital asset management strategies to help your team create content more efficiently in the shortest time possible.
globaledit optimizes the creative journey for everyone, both on the creative stage and behind the curtains on the administrative floor. Because we know that it’s only through complete collaboration that the best content is created.
Sign up for a free trial to see how globaledit fits into your DAM strategy.