An efficient digital asset management system isn’t merely nice to have these days – for most modern companies, it’s a necessity. But what makes a digital asset management system efficient? When you know what to look for in a digital asset management solution and implement best practices, digital asset management becomes a strategic advantage for your company, rather than a cumbersome, complex process.
Features to Look for in a Digital Asset Management System
An effective DAM solution goes beyond the storage repositories you’re used to, such as Dropbox and Google Drive. While those repositories can gather assets in a central location, they fall short of providing the single source of truth that today’s content-driven companies desperately need.
Digital assets are the foundation of integrated marketing campaigns that span multiple online and offline channels, and successfully implementing those campaigns requires the ability to easily locate and distribute assets to applications like your content management system (CMS), your social media channels, Adobe Creative Suite, Salesforce, and more. But with traditional storage repositories, your team is still faced with spending valuable time finding the digital assets needed to fuel those campaigns. The right digital asset management solution transitions your team from finding to searching, with features including:
- Search and Metadata: With a structured system to classify and organize your assets, locating the right assets at the right time is drastically simplified, and the time it takes to do so significantly shortened.
- Sharing and Permissions: Managing usage rights and permissions for stock photography and other assets can be complicated and time-consuming. With the right DAM solution, you can easily ensure that assets are only available to authorized users for approved uses.
- Collaborative Workflows: Creative teams often struggle with lengthy, complicated workflows when it comes to creating digital assets. You might be working with writers, graphic designers, and developers on a single asset, and that’s not considering the multiple levels of management that may need to approve assets at various stages. Look for a DAM solution with built-in approval workflows to take the hassle out of the production process.
- Lifecycle Monitoring: Get the most out of your digital assets with a DAM solution that supports lifecycle monitoring. You’ll have information like when, how, and by who an asset was created at your fingertips, along with important usage data such as when and where the asset was distributed. And with versioning, you’ll ensure that only the most recent versions of important brand assets like your logo are available to your team, enforcing brand consistency regardless of the size of your team.
Simple storage repositories and file sharing services have their place, but why not leverage a DAM solution to simplify your workflows and meet deadlines more efficiently?
Best Practices for Efficient Digital Asset Management
Companies that implement these best practices get the maximum benefits from a DAM solution:
- Choose a DAM solution that integrates with your existing tools. A DAM solution that integrates with Adobe Creative Suite, your CMS, and even your CRM software speeds up workflows by making important digital assets easy to find and distribute where they need to go, whether they’re supporting sales, marketing, or both.
- Appoint a DAM champion. Gaining buy-in from key stakeholders is crucial, but it’s equally imperative to have champions who advocate the use of DAM in each department and can serve as a point of contact should other team members need support.
- Use consistent metadata tagging practices. Metadata tagging is what makes your digital assets searchable in a database, and it works most efficiently when it’s used consistently.
- Incorporate a consistent feedback process. A robust DAM solution improves transparency throughout the asset lifecycle, from ideation through multiple iterations and eventual approval. When all key players can easily see where assets are in the pipeline, next steps, and necessary approvals, your team will save hours of time otherwise spent chasing down emails or phone calls. Taking the time to configure workflows for repeatable processes will save you – and your team – many an unnecessary headache.
- Leverage asset, user, and activity reports to make improvements. The ideal DAM solution is one that offers custom reporting and analytics to help you understand your content library in full.
If you’re ready to take team collaboration to the next level, an efficient DAM system is a must. A single source of truth for quickly finding and retrieving assets and ensuring brand consistency, MerlinOne eliminates common roadblocks and paves the way for your marketing and creative teams to hit goals and exceed your loftiest expectations. Schedule a demo today to find out how MerlinOne can transform your marketing and creative operations.