According to Demand Metric’sThe State of Digital Asset Management 2020, 51% of marketers are wasting money on producing or recreating assets that don’t get used — all because people don’t know the assets exist or because they can’t find them.
Additionally, 46% of marketers report that they waste time downloading and uploading assets into different marketing tools.
54% of companies state that they are prioritizing digital transformation in 2021, and digital asset management is an important part of that transformation. More than ever in this remote workforce environment, we need digital assets accessible instantly from anywhere. A digital asset management tool is the premier way to make that happen.
What Is Digital Asset Management?
Digital asset management (DAM) can be thought of in two ways — a discipline and as a technology solution to handle digital assets, files that have value to an organization or an individual.
First, DAM is all about the control, flexibility, portability, access, and reporting of digital assets — especially between organizations and their partners, customers, and teams. DAM ensures that the right content gets to the people who need it on any device, mostly at the moment they request it. Additionally, DAM makes sure that engagement with these digital assets is trackable and measurable.
Digital assets are about so much more than just media files like graphics or videos. To grasp the full value of a file or collection of files, organizations need information about the asset, which is compiled in the form of metadata.
Secondly, DAM is a valuable technology solution for your organization. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a system for organizing, classifying, and storing digital files. In digital marketing, these types of files include copy content, design layouts, imagery, and videos which may come in a variety of formats, such as Word documents, PDFs, JPGs, and PNGs. A DAM tool provides efficiency, control, and flexibility in managing, editing, and distributing these creative assets.
DAM systems give enterprises a secure repository to create, manage, categorize, produce, distribute, and (hopefully!) monetize media files as digital assets. Like other kinds of content management technologies, DAM systems offer basic storage services, including a centralized, secure place to store, organize, and maintain files. But DAM takes it a step further, offering additional features for core process services like management, manipulation, transformation, security, movement, and processing of rich media files and their data. Additionally, many DAM tools available today also offer integration with other tools.
Organizations and marketing teams need a reliable way to share their assets because they are just that: Assets. A DAM system gives you a way to do so securely so you can provide printers, vendors, public relations firms, web designers, and others with the files they need.
What Can You Do with a DAM System?
What can you do when you implement a digital asset management system? It comes down to making the most of what you have, keeping it secure, and sharing it with the people who need it.
Without a central place to store and manage assets, images, and media, files grow stale, and creative and content teams can get swamped by requests for items they've already produced. When these files are in a DAM system, you can not only share them internally and with outside vendors, but you also have access to the metadata — and a record of all existing versions of each file, plus a detailed account of how they have been used.
As an example, Sitecore Content Hub, one of the leading providers of reliable digital asset management tools, is enabling enterprises to own the entire content management and delivery lifecycle from plan to publish across all channels, giving them the power to greatly expand their market reach and footprint.
With Sitecore, your organization can:
- Manage virtually all digital asset file types
- Reduce the time it takes to tag, locate, use, and share assets
- Employ machine learning to tag your content
- Preview images, videos, layouts, and other file types in context
- Reduce risk by enforcing digital rights management protocols
- Move assets back and forth from design tools like the Adobe Creative Cloud with ease
Easy Web Integration
With DAM tools like Sitecore, you can integrate all your media files with your website directly. Sitecore Content Hub allows you to implement your files directly from the hub into your website, including photos, packaging, videos, source files, and more.
This means your web editors and digital and content marketers can access and choose from assets stored in Sitecore and integrate these files on any website and on any website hosting platform including WordPress, Sitecore, Drupal, and more, streamlining workflows and making your web management practices simpler and easier than ever before.
Unparalleled Compliance Support
One of the benefits of Sitecore’s DAM system is that you can use it to mitigate compliance risks. Sitecore allows you to document content usage rights and automatically enforce rules that keep manual tasks surrounding compliance at a minimum.
An example of this would be to document an asset that can only be used in a social media campaign during a particular month in a particular country. For global brands who may face different compliance regulations with certain goods and services, this can make a major difference in the way you create and share compliant assets.
Why DAM Matters
When you use a digital asset management system, you work from within a single location to create and distribute all of your content; it’s a master content hub for all types of marketing content, assets, and product master data — with the ability to distribute across any channel.
A DAM system offers one unified user experience, with role-driven user interfaces designed with tailored capabilities to address each unique role in marketing from creators to editors to marketing operations, merchandisers, and more. DAM tools help with governance, workflows, and brand consistency across your entire organization.
DAM also matters because it allows you to enable personalization at scale. Your organization can easily manage the creation of voluminous content required to deliver highly personalized digital experiences to end-customers while maintaining complete version control.
Here at Engine Room Tech, we’re committed to helping our clients excel in an increasingly digital world — and we believe that DAM is crucial to successful marketing online and in the real world because great marketing needs great technology to support it.
We are well-versed in what it takes to create captivating websites, digital solutions, and marketing solutions. We want nothing more than to help you implement digital asset management tools as part of a well-rounded digital transformation. Want to see what we can do for you? Contact us today!
