With every company transforming into a media company or at least having a very strong marketing presence in the modern social media-driven world, marketing has become much more than a secondary function. It’s an inherent part of your organization’s ecosystem that impacts the bottom line.
This turns what was once thought to be a trivial problem, into a very real – the management of digital assets.
Digital Assets need to be stored, shared for approval then shipped to a particular distribution channel for the audience. And for future reference, you definitely will require to organize it.
And let’s face it, your teams will be tasked with producing thousands at one time, which means it will be a nightmare to keep track of everything.
It’s justified to use traditional manual methods for small operations. But with a company like yours where thousands of marketing materials are shipped every month, it’s an expensive hassle.
Unsolicited Man Hours, lost files, delayed distribution, the list goes on.
This is where Digital Asset Management systems come in.
What is Digital Asset Management?
On the face, it’s software that allows you to manage your digital assets.
But in a larger more technical sense is a comprehensive process where all the digital Assets of a company are safely stored, organized and ready to share.
It is supposed to centralize your entire digital content library giving quick and easy but permission-gated access to employees, clients, teams, contractors and other different stakeholders.
The Structure of a typical DAM can be split into four parts:
Asset Standardization: Standardizing your assets into templates prepares the digital files to be encoded. It segments your whole digital file system making it easier to retrieve and share.
Asset Indexing: Digital content can be identified with certain attributes such as asset type, file version, media type etc. – making the search easy and streamlined. An Index is created grouping all the assets with common tags. This helps you to filter and look and easily find specific assets.
Automated Workflows: Task & process automation can be implemented to streamline your workflows as per the index.
Permission-Gated Access: The whole workflow and every digital asset is governed by the DAM owner with the file access gated with permission. This ensures every moving part of the digital file ecosystem is safe from corruption, theft-free and safeguarded from accidental deletion.
Why do you need Digital Asset Management?
A Digital asset management system has a huge upside overall, the primary importance being helping organizations keep track of their digital assets and ensuring that they are accessible when needed. Other than that, there are a few distinct advantages of having systematic Digital Asset Management in place:
Save man-hours: Research suggests that the percentage of files lost in an organization is between a whopping 2% and 5% on any given day. Reassembling time in man-hours works out to be approx 25 hours.
With digital asset management, you will be able to centralize all of your digital files and make it easier for your team to find and use them when they need them. This process, once streamlined, can save you money enough to impact the bottom line – saving man-hours flushed down the drain of duplicating files and cumbersome workflows.
Restricted File-access: Traditional or manual asset management tends to have a very weak file security system, where almost everyone can access the files with no control or record of the sharing.
Digital asset management software usually comes with solid file tracking and a permission-gated system where the owner can decide who gets access and for what purpose.
This can help improve security by protecting your assets from unauthorized access or changes and as a plus point, ensuring that you have a backup of your files in case of an emergency.
Improved Collaboration: It’s very difficult to collaborate efficiently when your digital files are scattered all over the internet. Digital asset management solves that by providing a central repository for all team members to access and share files. This can help reduce confusion and ensure that everyone is working with the most up-to-date versions of files.
Streamlined Workflow: Digital Asset Management systems are highly flexible and allow you to have a streamlined flow, which means your workflow can be customized to fit the specific needs of your organization. Unlike the traditional methods where your workflow can be haphazard and a bit elongated at times – DAM can help you define your own workflow with the least amount of resources allocated to it saving you money & effort.
Choosing a DAM setup
There are some specific things you need to keep in mind before choosing a DAM setup to ensure you are investing in a perfect fit. Here are some things to look for while choosing an ideal Digital Asset Management Software:
Rock-Solid Customer Support: Your Digital Asset Management System should come with robust customer support with included onboard training and readily backend assistance. It is a plus if they provide static resources for quick troubleshooting.
Intuitive UX: The user experience should be quick and easy to grasp with an in-built intuitive to ensure adoption. The primary reason for choosing DAM software is to cut the redundancies and make workflow efficient. So a DAM with a minimal learning curve goes a long way to solve that purpose.
Smooth tool integration: Ideally, you want your DAM system to be the central dashboard for the entirety of your workflow. The more tools the DAM setup is compatible with, the better it is.
Fly with Kytes
Kytes super-secured Digital Asset Management platform provides a unified content experience becoming the centre of your marketing content. Without any attachments, links or scattered files – it allows you to centralize your content experience streamlining the entire workflow. From sharing the files with teams to distributing them to the entire world – everything is possible with Kytes.
