What are the Best Practices for an Effective Digital Asset Management System?
OK, so you’ve heard a lot about digital asset management systems, and that they can help you better scale the creative operations of your marketing, e-commerce, retail or agency business.
But it’s a tech new to you, you’re a little wary – worrying if it’s the best fit for your business and teams – also it’s a big investment and can be daunting without the right guidance. We get it.
So in this piece, we hope to relieve some of the pressure.
Consider this your simple ‘digital asset management best practices guide’. And you will see here why and how it’s something that you really need to add to your tech stack.
First, let’s rewind a little bit.
What is a digital asset management system? (If you know this already, feel free to skip this part).
A digital asset management system is an integrated space where you can easily store, organize and manage your digital assets. It’s a platform where team members and stakeholders can cohesively collaborate.
What are digital asset management examples?
A DAM system is a hub for all your visual- and medial-like content assets. While it mostly focused on digital, visual and creative assets, DAM systems also make space for storing documents with Google Drive or Dropbox integrations. Examples of your digital assets are:
- Images and photos
- Videos or audios
- Graphics and illustrations
- Document reports, contractual agreements, KPI’s, etc.
What are the core elements necessary for an effective digital asset management strategy?
As with any type of system, it can’t work efficiently and serve its purpose when there isn’t a proper strategy in place.
In the motoring era of digital transformation and the constant pressure to produce and deliver eye-catching content in a churning market – an agile strategy is a must to maintain a serene and creative ecosystem.
Here we identify 5 steps to help you navigate and update your digital strategy when implementing DAM solutions.
- Define your objectives
First, ask yourself why you need a digital asset management system.
You can do this by identifying your pain points and measuring them against DAM’s best products and features to see how they can help you solve them.
Some of your pain points might look like:
Constant disarray of digital assets
Communication gaps between your teams and stakeholders
Drawn-out editing and approval processes
Increased distribution times
Once you have determined the issues, you can structure the DAM system and its workflow automation recipes to better support and streamline your existing processes.
- Audit your existing assets
Take a look at your existing assets that are stored on the current systems, platforms, or apps you and your team use. You’ll need to establish an organizing and sorting process at the start to see if you want all your digital assets to be transferred to the DAM or only parts of them.
Ideally, you’d want all your assets in one place – and with metadata, you can. DAM’s rich metadata cancels out all of the laborious processes of sorting and renaming your assets.
- Create a structure for your assets
You’ll need to create a structured naming convention for your assets to ensure that they are searchable and discoverable for all team members that use them.
Enforcing this asset taxonomy will ensure that your asset will never be misplaced again.
- Make a list of the existing tools and systems
Not only do you need to look at your assets, but also the tools and systems that are currently used. If you were worried that you’ll need to do away with platforms and apps that are used on a daily basis – don’t be.
DAM systems can seamlessly integrate your most used platforms onto the centralized platform with API keys. No migrating teething issues – seriously, pain-free.
- Allocate system project and management responsibilities
While DAM is a unanimous system to encourage collaboration, you can control who sees and who does what.
Because there are different stages in a digital content production cycle, there are different roles and responsibilities allocated to team members, stakeholders and clients.
Accordingly, the digital asset management process caters to each step in the production cycle. Meaning that you can allocate access and responsibilities to the relevant parties – giving clear expectations and manageable tasks.
How do you practice digital asset management?
To master any system is an art on its own. But what sets DAM systems apart, is the simplicity and ease of use.
So, what are some of DAM’s best practices?
To really get the DAM best out of your asset management system, you’ll obviously need to maintain a clean house to be able to maximize the benefits of a DAM system. You can do this by:
Audit your assets regularly to address and maintain asset taxonomy.
Maintain consistency of your assets, workflows, and processes (but always improve where you can).
Leverage data and insights to identify your high vs low performing assets. By analyzing data and insights, you can copy or rewire methodologies to get the best out of your assets and boost ROI.
Maintain licensing and compliance so that the security of your assets and the work of your team members are protected at all times. This is however taken care of by your DAM system provider.
Let us know what your creative business’ pain points are and we’ll show you how globaledit’s digital asset management solutions can intuitively and affordably, elevate your creative operations.