What Is Digital Asset Management and How to Leverage It

Choosing the right tools and resources for a holistic digital marketing approach can be a challenging task, but luckily digital asset management can help you find the right mix and balance for your business.

Digital asset management or DAM, is a storage and sharing solution for enterprise content management. From marketing to human resources, product management and more, DAM systems manage information and processes in a centralized location.

With a good DAM software your organization can ensure better workflow automation, usage tracking, backups and more, all done through a cloud. Since businesses are more mobile today than they were before, such systems can provide them with better ways to manage, access, share, track and backup all their digital assets.

In this article, we’ll go into more detail about what digital asset management can do for your business and how to leverage it. More specifically touching upon the ways in which it benefits branding, SEO, team collaboration, and marketing automation.

How DAM Fits Within the Martech Stack?

In any organization’s Martech stack, there are multiple management systems, such as Content Management System (CMS) and a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and they all play a specific role when it comes to managing data and files.

A CMS, like WordPress, has a built-in media manager from which a webmaster can edit and optimize data from a central source. A CDN helps ensure that static files are optimized for faster load and response time. Whereas, a DAM system can offer similar opportunities for businesses but on a much larger scale, not only for assets used on the website, but also for consistent product content and imagery across all channels.

Using a DAM enables businesses to have better control over their assets and ensure that they are kept up to date. It gives marketing teams access to all the media available, and makes sure that correct files are used by the right internal or external team member.

Now that we’ve covered what DAM is and what it’s capable of, let’s look into the specific areas of the marketing process it can be most beneficial to.

1. Improve Business Mobility and Workflow

Digital asset management essentially offers a centralized system where all digital files of an organization are stored and secured, ready to be accessed at any point.

Thanks to the cloud technology that most DAM systems use, business teams are able to work remotely using a variety of devices. Thus allowing for a much more dynamic and efficient workflow to be achieved.

By enhancing team collaboration and making internal processes more efficient, the centralized management of digital assets allows business units to devote more time on core specialized work that can bring in more revenue. Incorporating it in your processes will ensure easier access to any asset and respectively reduce the time a file needs to get a review or approval, for example.

A DAM system also helps prevent common proprietary rights issues. By providing permission-based access and digital rights-management controls, this system can ensure that all published information has a credible source, and as such is a valuable asset. This in turn can improve the quality of a brand’s communication, protect brand investments and even manage business risk.

Sales teams can also use DAM to organize their processes better. By centralizing proposals all team members can review and collaborate on each project. Agencies can create private and secure web-portal sites tailored to the needs of individual clients, and even track traffic to produce timeply reports and client billings.

2. Optimize Omni-channel Strategy

A robust digital asset management can offer plenty of benefits to the content lifecycle stages and help organizations fight the challenges of modern content marketing. From ideation and creation to management, distribution and storage digital asset management can offer much better cross-team collaboration. It allows internal teams to produce content that can be more easily customized for multiple channels, thus reaching more customers on various platforms.

More and more companies are putting significant effort into improving the value of their shopping experience across channels and automating the content delivered along the process.

When it comes to omni-channel marketing strategy, using digital asset management can have wonderful benefits for your business. It makes it significantly easier and faster to repurpose and distribute content across platforms and devices, which can also open up opportunities for new streams of revenue.

What is more, DAM can be integrated into a marketing resource management system, product information management system, customer relationship management system and marketing automation solutions. This gives companies a single resource platform for managing projects, allocating resources, creating targeted and personalized content and understanding which assets perform best across which channels.

3. Support SEO

When it comes to SEO, DAMs can be a valuable tool to use and according to Search Engine Journal, this is done in four important ways.

Image Dimension Optimizations

Visuals are an important part of any website. Usually when trying to optimize for website loading speed, image size optimization comes first to mind. However, it goes beyond that and also requires good optimization. Using a DAM system, businesses can take advantage of dynamic rendering that happens directly on the web page. It can shorten image loading times and ensure that they are properly sized for different devices.

Lossless Image Compression

If there’s still a need to compress an image’s file size, then a DAM can help do that without losing the quality of the imagery. Lossless compression of images is a part of the image optimization for search engines and involves reducing various file types sizes and is typically related to sacrificing unnecessary metadata from the image file. However, with a DAM system, such metadata can be inputted and then managed at a central location, ensuring that the SEO requirements are met.

Metadata and File Renaming

Because we know that metadata is important for organic ranking, when optimizing images for SEO, common practices include: optimizing file names so they are descriptive, adding an ALT attributions, providing image captions and source.

While these techniques are quite effective for yielding good ranking results for websites, they can be ineffective when it comes to speed efficiency and especially when having to repeat them at scale. Luckily, DAM can help by automatically rewriting file names of products and metadata. This helps search engines better process and understand the content of the images, thus boosting their SEO performance.

Asset Protection

Many businesses, especially in eCommerce or luxury products, invest heavily in images to ensure that their products are presented at their best, which is why they also strive to protect these images at all costs. Images not only help drive conversions, but they also help users judge if the offer can meet their needs.

A DAM system can automate the process of protecting image copyrights and stock imitation. It can add watermarks to visual content, thus lowering the risk of product imitations or false claims of stock products to deceive users.

4. Monitors Asset Performance

Digital Asset Management systems give users greater control over their assets. They allow tracking of various changes like file names, asset dublications, file adjustments, use cases and so on. On an even bigger scale, they can help businesses check if a file has been tampered with or if any of the embedded information has been wrongfully modified.

Moreover, DAM tools can help businesses comply with content regulations. Rights management has been prioritized by many organizations and with the help of a DAM system, users can configure workflows better so they can solve any issues related to data protection guidelines.

5. What to Consider Before Adopting DAM

Before an organization adopts a digital asset management system, there are a few things to consider ranging from vendors to infrastructure and system integrations. It’s important to review the overall requirements of a DAM, such as the format of the files it should support, the volume of the content it should handle, as well as the capabilities it must have like security features, remote proofing, job tracking, etc.

When it comes to integration, businesses should think about how the DAM system would fit with the workflow solutions and software tool already in place. They should also assess if their network and hardware infrastructure would be able to handle a DAM software with all the data it would have to transfer. What’s more, they will have to ensure that all digital assets will be protected in case of a system failure.

Another very important aspect when adopting DAM is planning how it will be adopted internally by team members. Businesses have to be aware of who will be able to manage the system and how they can effectively onboard and support employees.

Conclusion

Utilizing a digital asset management system can bring significant benefits to an organization. It can improve file management, storage and transfer. It can also ensure better cross-channel customization as well as digital asset protection and file optimization.

Acquiring a digital asset management system calls for significant up-work. However, the effort is well worth the hassle as it can make a great impact on a business’ content investment.