Digital asset management (DAM) is a software solution where organizations can attach metadata to their images, videos, and other digital files so they are easily accessible from a single source. Using a DAM, teams like marketing and sales can search for the materials they need for a campaign or prospect by doing a simple search. Assets can be found by metadata, tags, colors, brand, facet searching, and much more.
Organizations can use DAM in different ways, but optimizing DAM means an organization will use it for several different purposes. Here are a few different ways organizations can use their DAM optimally:
- Library and Archive: A DAM acts as a library that houses digital assets with metadata so that they can be accessed, reused, and managed for sales and marketing materials, packaging, or other uses for digital assets. A DAM also acts as an archive for digital assets that are out of date or no longer used so they don’t need to be accessed regularly but need to be stored somewhere secure.
- Brand Management System: Organizations use DAM to help aid their brand management, or store their brand elements like approved logos, fonts, and images. When they have a single source for their brand elements, their teams can easily access them and know they are using the most up-to-date versions to stay brand consistent.
- WIP Management System: Organizations also use DAM for their work-in-progress (WIP) assets so they can create new versions on-the-fly or go through a defined process automatically with workflow.
- Streaming: A DAM can be instrumental for companies who need to have content readily available for streaming on-demand digital content to subscribers. In this case, they’ll probably need to carefully monitor the streaming rights so they can pull the content when their rights have expired.
No matter how an organization uses the DAM, they will typically need to take advantage of additional functionalities like workflow management, collaboration, project management, and revision control, and anything else pertinent to their organization.
- Workflows help digitize and automate processes in systems. Digital asset management workflows can be used to help route assets in the system based on metadata. Workflows can also be used to automated business processes with assets for marketing campaigns.
- Collaboration between teams is important and can be enabled by a DAM. Users can collaborate on an image by leaving comments, and they can review and approve images and videos with annotations. A DAM provides a single source for teams to access and work on the same assets.
- Project management can be enhanced with a business process management workflow in DAM. With project management workflow, managers can route the tasks in their processes so completing one task will automatically send the next task to the next team member. Managers can also view the progress to see where tasks are at and identify and correct bottlenecks.
- There can be many different versions of images, videos, etc. that need to be controlled so they don’t get mixed up. With a DAM, changes to assets can be tracked and administrators can control which version of the asset is available to casual users like sales teams.
Enterprise DAMs can be used optimally because they have a lot of technically capability. Organizations can determine what they need their DAM and what other digital systems in the marketing technology stack they need to connect to. Optimizing a DAM looks different for different organizations, so it’s important to understand the needs before implementation.
