What Is Digital Asset Management?
In short, digital asset management (DAM) is the organization, management, and distribution of any of your digital files – from images to text content and anything in between. A good DAM system will keep your files safe too. Let’s look more into what digital asset management covers to help you decide whether you need it.
Content Creation
Creating content is a big part of marketing today. By creating a system that makes it easy to find the content you’ve already created and can use, it will save time by helping you repurpose the content more easily. Plus, you can add templates, branded assets, slide decks and any content that you need to use frequently to the files.
You won’t have to sift through tons of ill-named files on your hard drive, in Google Drive, in Dropbox and your clients’ files or co-workers’ files. Instead, everything will be organized properly and be easier to find when you use good DAM processes and systems.
Management
When you have a good digital asset management system and processes, you can get so much more out of the digital assets you have created. Your productivity will increase because you’re not spending time repeating work or looking for collateral that you can use.
Well-organized files means that you’re not going to repeat work that you’ve already done. You’re not going to spend extra time looking for things that aren’t named appropriately. You’ll be much more creative when you accomplish organizing your files properly.
Distribution
All your digital assets are now in one place and available for anyone that you want to have access to them. You can easily give access in a safe way to documents, images, and other files without concern. Most DAM systems offer version protection and more. A proper DAM system makes all this super-easy.
You may want to share brand guidelines with contractors, marketing campaign materials to your Facebook Ads manager, and writing guidelines for your social media marketing virtual assistant. When this information is easy to grab and use, it will be used and adhered to.
More than likely you’ll simply share a link, and the user can grab the link to use the document or even edit the document or file. It’s going to be so much easier with the right DAM system.
Preservation
The other key to a great DAM system is that you can preserve the files better and use them for their lifetime. You can also ensure that files that should not be used are archived so that you can preserve them for history’s sake. Plus, you can include versioning, permissions, and so much more that makes the workflow easier.
Digital asset management will become an essential component of any successful business that has a lot of digital files. If you are beginning to have trouble finding digital assets and put them to use, and are wasting time wading through all your files, it’s time for a DAM system.
