Top Digital Asset Management Features for Creatives

If you’re a creative industry professional, working either in e-commerce, retail, media, a marketing agency, or any other business alike – you’ll understand the headaches of scattered digital assets, broken communications, and delayed delivery times.

The ultimate cause of disorganized chaos and disrupted creative workflows.  

And no matter which tools you invest in, you still find yourself navigating through multiple platforms to create, store, locate and share your digital assets.

So, here you are. Because you’ve obviously heard that digital asset management tools help streamline your creative operations. And we’re here to tell you exactly more of that.

Digital asset management (DAM), is also commonly referred to as the ‘virtual hub’, ‘a single source of truth’ or ‘a truth repository’ where you can store and manage all your brand’s assets on one centralized platform.

What type of brand assets do digital asset management store?  Your brand assets are considered your visual and creative assets – from images, photos, videos, audio, graphics, and even brand documents needed for creative processes.

Globaledit’s digital asset management features have been creatively designed and developed to capture the stages of the asset content production cycle and to best cater to the needs of creative professionals.

What are the features of digital asset management?

Here we’ll dive into the core digital asset management software features that’ll help you scale your creative operations with streamlined workflow processes:

Search

One of the most powerful digital asset management features – is the search tool. DAM systems have enriched metadata which makes it extremely simple to store and locate digital assets.

This is done by customizing your assets with tags and keywords most related to the content of your assets. By searching relative tags, such as file type, date, location, or keywords associated with the asset, you’ll be able to see the results in seconds.

This feature is especially popular because it saves tons of time by no longer needing to spend hours trying to find what you’re looking for.  

Upload and download

Part of digital asset management products is Syncing multiple assets in real-time onto the DAM system as content is being created and captured.

Bringing in the element of metadata, by adding simple tags, keywords or rules, DAM will automatically sort the assets under preferred collections. Sparing the extra need of spending hours sorting and renaming files.

When something goes up, it must come down. Equally, with uploads, there’s also a smooth downloading feature. At a click of a button, you can bulk export your files as an XMP file.

Sharing and automated distribution

Once the production process of your assets has been finalized and approved, you’ll be able to set up a workflow automation rule in your DAM to instantly share the finalized assets with team members, stakeholders and clients.

This streamlines communications and speeds up distribution times.

Flexible permission and user controls

DAM has secure user control and protective rights features, meaning that you won’t compromise your assets and system when sharing externally. 

Protecting your assets with watermarks is also an effective way to make sure that your assets can’t be reproduced when landing in the wrong hands.

Asset version control

When you work with 100s and 1000s of assets, it means that there are quadruplicate versions of the same assets lying around. Increasing the risk that the wrong version may be sent to distribution.

Digital asset management’s capabilities stretch to cater even in these situations – by preventing them from happening! DAM’s versioning control features keep every team member or stakeholder that is part of the creative process in the loop when changes on a specific asset are made.

Fast-tracked approval channels

You’ll agree when we say that the approval round is the largest roadblock when trying to get your assets to distribution quickly.

DAM’s unique features include the ability instantly annotate or approve or kill an asset version before it gets stored in the asset library and reaches other stakeholders.

Headless API integration

The new era of digital asset management has become ‘headless’ in the sense that it can easily integrate with your existing tech stack of most-used systems and favorite apps and tools.

Some of the popular types of systems used by creative professionals are WordPress, Slack, Google Cloud Storage, Photoshop, Akeneo, but there are so much more to choose from.

Connecting these programmes with the use of respective API keys is smooth and painless.

How do I organize my digital assets?

The beauty of a digital asset management system is that it has a built-in visually intuitive asset library that organizes your digital assets for you.

But – only if you have used the right platform integrations and workflow automation rules to effectively organize assets, as well as provide a clear portal of comms between collaborators to ensure assets are produced without any hiccups.

Managing your creative workflow and digital assets shouldn’t be hard. And with globaledit’s powerful digital asset management tools, it won’t be. Get in touch with us to chat about flexible and affordable solutions to elevate your creative operations.