.png)
Managing digital assets is more than just storing content versions in a library. Good digital asset management ensures easy access, use, and distribution of all of your digital resources.
Managing digital assets can never be the sole responsibility of your marketing department or, worse, your advertising agency.
While words like ‘assets’ and ‘content’ usually conjures up notions of marketing and creative production the truth is that ‘content’ and ‘assets’ are a part of almost all business processes throughout a modern organization.
It is of course true that managing digital assets is often focused on managing videos, images, graphics, boiler plate copy, and advertising materials used for marketing, it also includes things like contracts, email templates, agreements, invoices, and the list could go on.
This of course adds a level of complexity to managing digital assets that needs to be addressed and as a result of new challenges arising due to version control, copyrights, GDPR compliance, brand identity, and much more, digital asset management is essential to all modern organizations.
In this guide we’ll cover everything you need to know about managing digital assets and how to select the best digital asset management software.
The process of managing digital assets and their lifecycle from ideation and creation all the way to distribution, customization, localization and termination is called digital asset management (or DAM for short).
While the process is most often focused on managing digital assets used by marketing teams and advertising agencies, it actually involves managing assets across your entire organization.
The process is most often handled using a digital asset management solution, which is a system or software that helps store, organize, filter, and retrieve digital assets.
While the specific assets managed depends on the organization in question, most modern business generally need to manage digital assets in the form of copyrights, permissions and licenses, personal data and GPDR consent, in terms of personal data, in addition to digital assets related to marketing activities.
Read more about best practices in digital asset management
The days of managing digital assets in a stand alone application are fading. And while there are still many agencies that provide a DAM service for their clients, the increased need for content, accessibility, and affordability, has heightened the requirements put on any digital asset management solution.
Essentially, where the task of managing digital assets previously fell on production, content, and advertising agencies, there’s now a much bigger benefit for retailers and brands to move their DAM in-house.
But without the right tools for the job, there’s no real benefit to moving the task in-house. So, before you start shopping around for a product, you need to answer the two questions:
The reason the task of managing digital assets has historically belonged to agencies, is because the content creation process itself has been carried out by the agencies as well.
But over the past decade more and more companies have moved a big part of their content management and content creation in-house, so it’s only natural that the task of managing the digital assets should follow.
But this also means that defining who is involved in creating your content, is an important step in finding out which tool is right for you. For instance, brands usually have multiple agencies—and agencies almost always work with multiple brands.
Because of that, the system you choose to manage digital assets rarely stands alone, which means that you need to find a system that can integrate with other systems.
What you are looking to find out is:
This is probably the most important question you need to answer, as different user types are bound to have different needs when it comes to how you store and manage digital assets.
For instance, the general user will most likely benefit from an intuitive and straightforward interface, so they can find what they want quickly and easily. Creative and production users often have a higher need for transparency and easy version control than they have for interface design, while super users/platform owners has a bigger need for easy backend operations and customizations, because if they aren’t able to do this, the experience for the other users will lessen as well.
To accommodate all three usegroups you will need a system that includes:
Additionally you need to consider how the users are located and what their language preferences might be. With more companies operating globally, users will potentially be located all over the world, which means you might need a tool that is easily localized and accessible from multiple countries.
As with most other areas, AI and machine learning seems to promise a huge improvement in what you are capable of achieving with your digital asset management system.
For instance, digital asset management tools with AI capabilities could potentially assign keywords to assets based on the content itself, or convert asset formats to make it easy to distribute across multiple platforms without adding more work.
Another example could be using AI to make the content library automatically suggest content to users based on things like trends or milestones to improve ad performance.
