Any marketing agency must leverage digital asset management tools. Why? Let me break it down for you.
Firstly, digital asset management (DAM) tools provide centralized storage for all marketing assets. No more searching through scattered folders or drowning in endless files. With DAM, everything is organized in one place, making finding and sharing assets with your team a breeze.
Digital Asset Management tools enhance productivity. By eliminating tedious tasks like searching for files or recreating assets, your team can focus on strategic marketing initiatives.
In conclusion, leveraging digital asset management tools is a no-brainer for any marketing agency.
So, why not equip your agency with the right tools and soar ahead in the digital marketing landscape?
PROBLEMS WITH DIGITAL ASSETS
I’m sure we’ve all faced similar situations at work and I can easily summarize the problems of sourcing, retrieving, storing, and sharing files that are images, videos, artworks, presentations, and other important documents – also known as Digital Assets.
Here’s a list of problems to begin with –
- Most Assets remain stored in individual laptops or desktops of team members and due to the lack of a central repository system that allows access to Assets available on these devices, the files are as good as lost when the devices pass through many hands.
- FTP servers don’t have an intelligent Search. You have to know the file names and the indexing architecture to locate a file. Everyone who uses the FTP server needs to understand the filing convention followed by the team. At times, due to a lack of education about the convention, Assets end up in the wrong location on the server.
- Agencies, printers, and other vendors do not store Assets for long. When you disengage with an Agency, it’s next to impossible that an Asset can be retrieved.
- File Storage & Sharing Platforms are no substitutes for a Digital Asset Management tool. They have several limitations. As you read through the article, you’ll understand the benefits of a Digital Asset Management tool and can compare it with the File Sharing Platform that you’re using.
- Copyright infringement is a grave concern and attracts penalties and lawsuits. Images, videos, and content have to be scrutinized before being published. How to track the use of Assets is an important question that organizations are grappling with.
There’s a reason why they’re called Assets. They have a value attached to them. Have you ever wondered what the cost of recreating an Asset would be?
But I can assure you that it’ll exceed the cost of creating it in the first place. The time taken to retrieve it, and the time invested in creating it if the original is missing amounts to a large expense.
IMPORTANCE OF DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT
Content is produced in abundance daily!
If you’re still wondering what is DAM, it’s essentially a centralized system that helps teams store, locate, and collaborate on their ever-growing library of digital content with far less friction.
You would have noticed that in your organization, the content (social media posts, videos, other digitally generated creatives, PowerPoints, etc) that was produced last year would have outweighed what was produced the year before.
Several indicators that make a persuasive case –
According to datareportal.com, “Our latest data show that 4.14 billion people across the planet are using social media in October 2020, equating to 53 percent of the total global population”.
According to HubSpot, “70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing’’.
The following McKinsey also seems to point in the same direction.
McKinsey Report on Digital Asset Management
PRODUCTIVITY, GOVERNANCE AND COLLABORATION
Okay. Let’s get to the point. What can this tool do?
I can list down a multitude of benefits of the tool, but I’ll cover the ones that I like the best; the ones that are most often used by members of a team.
Central Hub for Creative and Media Content
The Digital Asset Management tool functions as a central repository for all your digital Assets. Call it ‘the vault, the single source of truth, the window of discovery…’, you get the idea!
Controlled access to Digital Assets
Governance prevails. Provide ‘regulated’ access to team members, external agencies, and vendors. Set rules on Asset Use, Download, and Shares. After all the Assets belong to the organization. Permissions can be assigned to various individuals or groups to –
- Add Assets to Folders and Collections.
- View Assets
- Share Assets
- Download Assets
- Rename Assets
Intelligent Search
The crowning glory. Search with Keywords and other metadata. Discover an Asset within seconds with an Artificial Intelligence (AI), Image-recognition Search. Smart tagging using AI identifies objects within an image. It’s an effortless, time-saving way to search and upload Assets.
Drag & Drop
I love the usability of the thing. It even gets better when Upload with a simple drag and drop whether it’s a single file or a bulk upload.
No licensed software required
View Photoshop, and CorelDraw files on your Laptop or Desktop without having to install the creative software. The tool supports thousands of image, video, and file formats.
Thumbnail Previews
Don’t bother, streaming the whole video file to determine its content. Get a sneak peek at the thumbnail preview feature.
Metadata & Versions
Every file, be it an image, video or document has a Metadata description (as per ITPC, EXIF, XMP fields).
You can filter Assets by using descriptive metadata (Titles, authors, etc). At times we may have ended up using the wrong version of a file.
Now, with the Digital Asset Management tool, you can identify the right version of the file that you wish to use.
The file name, date of the versioned file, and annotations are provided along with other Asset details. An Asset can be downloaded in a specific file format and size, e.g. if the Asset is for a Facebook post, it can be sized for the post.
Create Folders & Collections
Imagine using containers for collating Assets. Folders are containers where the Asset is saved in a specific folder path. Collections act as personal containers and don’t follow a hierarchy.
Easy Sharing For Digital Asset Management
Eliminate the use of third-party file-sharing tools once you start using this feature. There is a control to set the file size, till when the file can be shared (date of expiry) and the number of downloads for the same file. Share Asset files with single Users or a group of Users.
File Approval Workflow
Some Digital Asset Management software is equipped with an artwork approval feature that allows various stakeholders to follow a collaborative process of approval. The approval process is a configurable workflow that requires an action to be completed by authorized stakeholders at various stages of the workflow.
Say you’re an agency professional who needs approval on a creative, you can go to the workflow feature and upload the file. Once uploaded it’ll be assessed by relevant stakeholders. Each stakeholder leaves a comment or annotations and highlights areas to be edited. You view the comments and resubmit the iterated file for approval.
Work From Home
Considering today’s new normal, Digital Asset Management software fits into the scheme of things. You can operate it from anywhere as long as you have access and an internet connection.
FLEXIBLE DEPLOYMENT & PRICING
You can opt for a SaaS, On-Premisee, or Hybrid deployment. SaaS, on a pay-per-user per month, is usually preferred by smaller teams as the entire onus of hosting, uptime,e, and maintenance of the tool lies with the software provider (vendor).
The pricing of the tool has various components to it –
- Application (software) usage fee – charged on the number of subscribed Users
- Data storage plan – an important component and is dependent on the quantum of Assets. There are Active
- Assets that are used regularly by teams and Legacy Assets that are archived to be retrieved when required. Your choice of a plan will have to factor in both. The storage plans range from 500 MB to 10 TB.
SECURITY
Measures such as 2FA (Two-factor authentication), encrypted shared links, and controlled accessibility to assets, are measures in place. Your data is secure at all times.
ANALYTICS
The tool’s administrator has a bird’s eye view of Assets and Users on the tool. Alerts and Notifications are triggered on events. The Administrator can allocate storage limits to each User and capture the cloud consumption patterns.
Conclusion
The Digital Asset Management digital tool is the best cloud-based solution for collaboration within a team and across diverse groups. It offers flexibility in deployment with minimal vendor support. Initially, quality time has to be invested in defining the File Architecture, training Users, and populating the tool with Assets.
Overall, this article should give you a good idea of what digital asset management is and why marketers or marketing companies need to include digital asset management tools into the mix!
Also Read:
Spot on and good points raised – showing the manufacturing process improves consumer buy in, and its important manufacturers keep their digital assets up to date with both video production and photography (something I really don’t see very often in all honesty!)