5 Reasons Your Company Needs Digital Asset Management

Whether you have a creative team in-house or work with an external agency, you likely have a number of colleagues working together to develop, produce, and use a variety of assets across your brand. Agencies working with several brands at once can especially attest to the challenges this brings when it comes to staying organized and efficient.

Keeping track of assets, client feedback, and asset usage can be time-consuming and feel impossible without a structured organization. That’s where DAM platforms come in. As your organization grows, managing digital assets is critical, and adding a DAM platform can help make this easier.

Read on to learn about what a DAM is and the top five reasons your business needs one today.

What is a Digital Asset Management Platform?

The digital asset management (DAM) platform will allow you to store, organize and access your organization’s assets, such as images, video, rich media, and more. These software systems are designed to help you manage your digital content, increase campaign productivity, and ensure brand consistency.

DAMs can store these assets and help you to automate workflows, so users can collaborate effectively and securely on content. These users can edit assets and share digital files, making it easy for creatives, contributors, curators, and other members of your marketing and advertising teams to work together.

Why Your Business Needs a DAM

Assets your brand may be managing can include audio recordings, videos, images, text files, or other branded content or media in a variety of formats. Ensuring these assets are properly named, cataloged, accessed, and used can be made easier by using a DAM. The top reasons your business needs a DAM to include:

1. Keeps Your Assets Organized and Reduces Waste

The primary purpose of a digital asset management platform is to give you a place to manage your assets efficiently. DAMs allow your teams to organize digital files within collections or folders, assign labels and tags, sort and filter for items, designate custom fields, dates, and other criteria, and ultimately make it easy to find and use what you’re looking for.

Not only does this help your creative services team, but also other team members, like digital advertisers, who need quick and easy access to build digital campaigns or other products.

This expert organization also ensures you don’t lose or forget files, decreasing asset waste, which otherwise would waste both time and money. Because the files are built for easy retrieval, users have multiple ways to search for exactly what they need, improving workflow efficiency regardless of where you’re working from.

A DAM platform can also help reduce the waste of employee time and resources. Searching is fast and easy, and because the DAM is centralized, the teams can use one system instead of multiple and the workflows can be managed more effectively.

2. Streamlines and Automates Workflows

Many DAMs use AI to allow you to automate tasks within the platform. For example, you can extract metadata and use AI to add relevant tags to brand assets based on what’s in the asset. This cuts back on the manual intervention necessary to properly name, sort, and tag assets, especially if you have hundreds available.

This software can help ensure review and approval processes are efficient as well. You can set up notifications when an action needs to be taken or when feedback is ready. You can even move tasks from one person to another automatically once a task is completed, streamlining this process.

DAMs also can show the status of assets, feedback, revisions, and next steps, which can optimize and automate workflows throughout the creative process.

Additionally, a DAM platform can help prevent one-off design requests. When assets are centralized, teams can shift their focus to developing new designs and it’s easier for them (or others) to find existing pre-existing ones as needed.

3. Ensures Brand Consistency Across Teams and Channels

Using a DAM platform allows you to share and work with colleagues across teams, both internally and externally, improving overall collaboration. These users don’t need additional software or platforms to view or work on assets, which makes it easier and more efficient to work together.

Because it’s easy to share these assets, it can also help ensure brand consistency throughout teams and channels. Especially if you work with multiple brands, staying organized is critical. DAM platforms allow you to store any file you’d need, many allow you to restrict access to certain files to prevent them from being accidentally used, and others let you create templates for users to ensure key brand elements are consistent.

Plus, with the labeling and filing system, you’re able to easily direct team members where they need to go or provide instruction for searching for assets they need.

4. Secures Assets and Minimizes Risk

DAM platforms usually feature things like encryption and single-gateway hosting to ensure data transfers are secure and assets are protected. This prevents unauthorized users from acing the assets you have stored within the platform, protecting you and your clients.

Additionally, these platforms can help you protect licensed content by setting license expiration dates and protecting copyrighted images. Especially if you’re working with multiple teams, it can be easy for compliance risks to slip through the cracks. A DAM can help you place protections to minimize that risk and keep your brand out of trouble and prevent your team from using outdated, unapproved, or low-quality assets.

5. Measure ROI and Performance

Many DAM platforms allow you to access analytics for assets, including views, shares, and downloads. Knowing which assets your team is using the most, and how those assets are performing, can help you determine asset ROI and optimize your creative efforts and dollars. This can be especially helpful when using a variety of assets across channels and campaigns.

Measurement is a critical part of ensuring success across channels and having a firm grasp on asset performance can help you determine what you should make more of, where to cut back, and how your audience communicates and resonates with your brand. The more locked in you are with your audience, the greater number of leads and sales you’ll bring to the brand.