Everything you need to know about digital asset management (DAM)
In this article, we'll cover most of the questions you may have about digital asset management systems and how it can impact your business.
What is Digital Asset Management?
A digital asset management solution centralizes the storage of digital assets like images, videos and documents. With it, you can search for all of these assets within a single repository rather than searching through disparate solutions.
The core concept behind these solutions is that an employee can log into the platform and easily search for assets like images and files rather than searching multiple legacy solutions.
Why do you need digital asset management?
When asking "why is digital asset management important," the answer is it's a must-have for making sure employees don't waste time searching for assets so that your process for managing assets can become more efficient.
Here are a few other reasons:
Improve brand management
Transparency over creative content is critical for optimizing brand management. Support brand consistency by providing employees with access to metadata across multiple systems, so they can view content in context and make the right decisions.
Recapture market shares
As the number of small niche brands explodes, using a DAM is vital for CPG manufacturers that want to capture the attention and launch products to capitalize on emerging trends. Recapture lost market shares by automating inefficient manual processes and building the operational agility necessary for creative teams.
Accelerate product development and launches
Connecting products with complete product information through a product asset management (PAM) platform opens the door to creating a whole host of product-related content. Enable your creative teams to produce product-related content faster and speed up the time-to-market of new products.
How to build your DAM strategy
Step 1: Prepare for your DAM project
Building a DAM strategy is a long-term process that requires lots of initial research so you not only know whether your organization needs it, but you also know the type of questions you need to ask your vendor, how others in your industry are using DAM, and what are the best practices to implement for long term success.
So sit back, relax and learn a few steps to build your strategy…
Know when it’s time to replace your existing DAM system
The first step on the road toward digital transformation is to examine your existing processes and evaluate if they’re serving your business needs. In other words, that means understanding when it’s time to replace your existing system.
Leaders, CIO’s, and digital innovators who need to start a strategic DAM replacement or consolidation initiative can read this free guide.
Ask these 10 Questions to your DAM vendors
Another key step before committing to purchasing a new solution is communicating with prospective vendors to see what type of experience they can offer you. When looking at vendors, there are 10 main questions you want to ask to your DAM vendor :
- 1. How to get people on board?
- 2. Are the benefits enticing enough for users?
- 3. How easy is it to learn the new system?
- 4. How quickly can you add support for new content types?
- 5. How easily can you add new distribution points?
- 6. How easily will you adapt to our business changes?
- 7. Will it reduce or reinforce our silos?
- 8. Will it underpin or undermine my digital transformation?
- 9. How easily can you take advantage of cloud capabilities?
- 10. How easily will it integrate with my current and future stack?
- 11. Asking these questions will tell you if the provider can offer you a scalable system that’s easy to adopt, cloud-ready, and integrates with your existing technologies.
Read digital asset management analyst reports
Analyst reports provide a valuable source of information you can use to find ways to enhance your core business processes and future-proof your organization.
Learn from others in your industry
Every industry is different, and examining how the top players in your industry have used Digital Asset Management to boost cost-efficiency can provide you with the blueprint to enhancing your operations.
Below we’ve listed how some industries examples:
- DAM for food : As regulatory requirements increase every year, food companies need to develop operational agility by ensuring that employees have global access to product shots so internal and external creatives can find the content they need fast, making it easier to reuse assets.
- DAM for apparel : Modern apparel brands need video, image, 3D and product information to flow quickly from photoshoot to e-commerce use Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform to automate time-consuming manual processes and automatically add tags and product info.
- DAM for luxury: From pop-up shops to unexpected new collaborations, today’s luxury brands are at the leading edge of bringing creativity to store shelves. Our platform adds value to your creative and product content to conquer trends and crush the competition.
- DAM for beauty : Companies in the beauty industry are beginning to streamline the digital supply chain and ensure all products sold on e-commerce sites are featured alongside complete product information like ingredients.
- DAM for advertising : Advertising agencies like TBWA use our tools to make it easier to search for internal content by creating a central commercial archive of content with search and filtering to accelerate image browsing.
- DAM for media and entertainment : Film and TV studios as well as gaming enterprises like EA are at the vanguard of exploding content volume, shrinking release windows and increasingly complex content creation and delivery ecosystems. DAM platforms manage assets with complex metadata at speeds and scales that break legacy systems.
Step 2: Research best practices for DAM
Once you’ve researched existing digital asset management and thoroughly evaluated your readiness for adoption, it’s time to start thinking about how you can use best practices to improve your current processes.
Although there are several best practices to implement, scroll down to read about four main best practices examples to increase your operational efficiency significantly.
Video management best practices
If you’re one of those enterprises attempting to manage an omnichannel marketing strategy and navigate huge libraries of video content side-by-side with other content, then your first action should be to implement a digital asset management solution to centralize all of these assets.
Managing videos with an enterprise platform will not only provide you with a central repository of videos but will also offer other features like video distribution and archiving that will simplify the process of managing video content.
Digital assets workflows best practices
Introducing DAM workflows is another top priority for ensuring that your team isn’t wasting time on unnecessary manual tasks. Using workflows makes it much easier to acquire approvals for marketing materials and to automate QA processes.
One way to use workflows is to use asset tags to trigger localization workflows. For example, you could create a process where assets tagged for use in France are automatically sent for machine translation and then sent to a librarian for metadata translation and localization.
DAM implementation best practices
Onboarding new technology can be challenging, which is why it’s advisable to confront the challenge of implementing a new platform by embracing new solutions as part of a larger digital transformation initiative to become more agile. Identifying which manual processes are limiting productivity and how you can use DAM to automate those inefficient processes is key to making sure you have a successful deployment.
Taking the time to consider what your desired future state is and what data you need to collect to reach that desired state, will tell you what features you need to leverage to get the best post-adoption result.
Advanced metadata best practices
Writing metadata in files is another important consideration if you want to increase your operational impact. For example, the Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform enables users to create rules that automatically assign information to assets based on who the recipient is.
Incorporating advanced metadata into your content management strategy enables you to leverage digital assets more effectively and ensures that everyone in the digital supply chain has access to all the information they need on digital assets.
What is the future of the DAM market?
Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform has been named a leader in Omdia report on the DAM market. Our vision is fundamentally different than other vendors in the market.
Here are three key trends we anticipate for digital asset management solutions.
Intelligent DAMs with artificial intelligence and machine learning
Over the next few years, digital asset management solutions will become more advanced as they merge with disruptive technologies like AI. AI reduces image hide-and-seek by automatically tagging content with metatags, making it easier for human users to tag assets with metadata.
The cost savings of AI-powered DAM can be monumental.
As Hyland research shows, in 60% of cases where an asset can’t be found, it will be recreated, which can cost up to $30,000–$50,000 per asset that needs to be recreated. So if AI can automatically tag assets and eliminate this issue completely, there are substantial cost savings to be made.
> Learn more | How CVS Health used Nuxeo Platform to drive search power and improve customer service
Migrations to the cloud
Digital asset management also has a role to play as a key enabling technology for organizations moving to the cloud. To ensure access to all assets, enterprises need to adopt platforms that support cloud deployment and upscale with user needs.
Cloud-friendly DAM is critical for creating an online repository of data that a company can combine with data analytics to gather operational insights and turbocharging existing processes.
Accelerated creative processes
Accelerating product development has proven difficult for many of the world’s largest companies.
The biggest challenge is the tangled web of processes and workflows. Leverage a DAM to:
- Accelerate product introduction to grow market share
- Identify and create opportunities in design, development and go-to-market processes
- Provide an improved customer experience
We're here for you.
From advanced search to enterprise scalability, flexible metadata models, and configurable DAM taxonomy, our Nuxeo Platform is ideal for complex, enterprise DAM applications where out-of-the-box solutions fall short.