What is Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software?
The world has gone digital, and with social media taking over our lives, businesses have needed to keep up. This means creating images, videos, and interactive content that keeps the masses engaged and their attention focused on what brands have to offer.
However, this has created a rather significant problem. Now, it’s likely that you have folder upon folder of images, fonts, templates, designs, word documents, videos, and other digital assets, which have no doubt cluttered up everyone’s workstation.
This often results in communication gaps that can negatively impact your brand’s integrity, so what can you do about it? You can adopt a Digital Asset Management (DAM) plan to help keep everything organized and your entire team on the same page.
What is Digital Asset Management or DAM?
Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the process of, well, managing your digital assets. In most cases, a company will use software to do this; otherwise, keeping track of everything your company has is pretty challenging.
Properly managing your digital assets keeps you from looking through endless folders of junk to find what you need, and it also helps keep everyone on the same page. There’s nothing worse than wasting hours on a project only to find out that someone wasn’t using updated resources.
This results in a massive waste of time and money eating into your company’s bottom line. So, what kind of assets would you want to manage with digital asset management? Here are a few examples of things a good DAM software product can help you keep track of.
Types of assets that you can manage with DAM
- Fonts
- Images
- Important documents
- Secure files
- Logo variations
- Audio files
- Video files
- Design templates
- Brand standards information
- Important sales or product data
- Training materials
- Press kits
- Media rights and legal information
- Customer service scripts and help guides
Why Is It Important For Brands To Manage Their Digital Assets?
The benefit of using DAM is that it allows you to quickly and easily find your digital assets, but if you’re not yet convinced, here are a couple more reasons why it’s important to have a good hold on your brand’s digital assets.
1. Build trust with your consumers
Building trust over the internet can be tough, but having cohesive branding is the first step in that long journey. It’s also essential for improving conversion rates for your marketing campaigns!
If a customer follows your ad to a landing page that seems off or doesn’t correctly display your branding, they could hit the back button and never return.
There are lots of copycats out there looking to steal information from unsuspecting users. You build trust with your audience by having cohesive branding across all platforms.
Unfortunately, it’s tough for your team to keep your branding consistent if they don’t have the necessary resources to do their jobs. Offering easy access to things like brand guidelines, fonts, templates, graphics, and design files can help you get the desired results.
It also helps you to achieve the same results from outsourced workers as you’d get from an in-house employee.
2. Employees are never working with out-of-date information
If you use a Digital Asset Management (DAM) plan to handle your resources, you can be confident that everyone is working with the latest versions of your materials. If any of your training materials, templates, or branding changes, you can update everything once without needing to check with everyone individually.
Employees in every department can access these updated files anytime, usually from anywhere. This allows them to work more efficiently, and it saves them from interrupting others to ensure the information they have is correct.
Using cloud software to manage your digital assets
Using a cloud-based DAM solution to manage your assets has several benefits that make everything much easier for you. Here’s why you should consider it for your company.
All assets are searchable and organized
A good digital asset management plan means you’ve taken the time to organize your assets and make them easy to find. With the help of a great software product for DAM, you can organize photos, files, videos, and documents by typing or saving them into specific groups.
You might use the group approach to make sections for assets used by your developers and then create a separate group for your marketing department to help them create cohesive banners and social media advertising graphics.
Fewer mistakes when creating new assets
DAM software allows you to store commonly used text easily. This means there’s no need to keep proofreading these documents and checking to ensure the correct ones are being used.
In fact, some software packages can be set up so that only certain portions of a template can be edited. This helps to ensure that important information is not altered or left out and that the correct images, like logos, will be used correctly every time for brand consistency.
Secure your file management system
Your files are important, and not every employee should have access to all of them. If you have files that need to be protected, with a good DAM software package you can easily restrict who has access to what.
Cloud-based solutions are also very secure, and if you have to protect sensitive files, then you can offload that responsibility to a software provider. This allows you to take advantage of world-class security without the price tag of managing and securing your own servers, which can be a very costly venture.
Cloud software doesn’t require any special hardware to run, and it doesn’t require you to have an on-site IT team to manage it. You’ll also benefit from the fact that cloud software is opex rather than capex, which means you can write off the cost of it immediately rather than depreciating it over time like you would have to do with a hardware digital asset management solution.
Collaborating is easier
Many software DAM packages, like our Enterprise solutions, are cloud-based tools. That means that you can access them anywhere and from any device. Today’s business environment is fast-paced, and many employees work remotely.
Using a cloud-based digital asset management tool like this one allows your employees to work from anywhere, and it allows them to stay updated on important changes on the go because the software will notify them if anything changes. This helps to avoid mistakes and waste time for people who don’t often check their company emails.
Workflow problems can be eliminated
Your employees need digital assets to do their work, and you can easily improve workflow efficiency by having an excellent Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool available for them to use. This allows for greater levels of communication between departments and cuts down on wasted time.
Bonus tip: Using a DAM solution can also allow you to bring marketing campaigns and other workflows into the market much faster. Having standardized templates for people to work with reduces the time needed to construct new materials since they can build from existing campaigns.
Some tools come with free content for you to use
Every business needs a content marketing plan to create helpful articles featuring high-quality images. Unfortunately, the waters of navigating “royalty-free” images can sometimes be murky.
If whoever you’ve hired to write for you uses an image that they think is royalty-free, but it turns out not, then you could have a legal problem. Depending on the copyright restrictions, you could get sued over the usage.
However, some DAM tools actually offer you access to totally free images, icons, and fonts for you to use. You can instruct your content creators only to take resources from this database, and then you can be certain that you won’t face any legal troubles over the images.
Your assets are protected from corporate knowledge and resource losses
People change jobs an average of 12 times during their careers nowadays. This means that companies will spend more money frequently to find and train replacements, but there’s also a hidden cost to this loss that you may not have thought of.
Loss of corporate knowledge and resources
If you’re not using a cloud-based solution, your digital assets will likely be scattered across various employees’ screens. That means that when those employees leave, they can take your valuable assets and knowledge with them.
By implementing an online digital asset management tool, you can help to preserve these valuable assets long after these employees have moved on or retired. Branding assets that are edited in the cloud are there to stay, and you can even have these employees create training tools that you can use to help their replacements get up to speed when it comes time for them to leave.
All this information will be stored in your DAM software, which keeps a disgruntled employee from running away with the keys to the castle.
Want to know more?
Check out our Enterprise solutions, our Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform built for all sorts of businesses, large and small. Now you can equip anyone on your team to design and customize your marketing materials without compromising your brand identity.
Feel free to leave a comment or ask a question below.
