5 Digital Asset Management Best Practices

Currently, around 70 percent of organizations already have a digital transformation strategy or are in the process of creating one. Digital transformation is growing at unprecedented levels. Just how fast? In 2021, organizations spent $1.5 trillion on digital transformation globally. By the end of 2023, that figure is expected to climb to $6.8 trillion.

With all this focus on digital transformation, more and more digital assets are created every day, and organizations are relying more on these assets than ever before – which means brands need a platform to manage it all.

That’s where digital asset management (DAM) comes into play. A DAM platform stores and organizes all of this information, empowering workflows and making it easy for users to find and share content quickly.

What should users know about employing a DAM solution? Here are the five best practices for digital asset management.

Your visual and creative assets are powerful tools you can use to connect with your audience. In fact, over 60 percent of digital marketers share that visual assets are essential to effective marketing strategies – and there’s plenty of proof to back this up. For example, when people hear or read a message, they can recall and relay about 10 percent of this information three days later. However, when that same message is paired with some visual graphic, people can remember 65 percent of the information after the same amount of time.

But here’s the kicker: You can only use the assets that you know you have. So, there could be plenty of unused assets, or worse – your organization could wind up spending time and resources to recreate assets you already had but didn’t know were there.

One of the most important things you can do when moving to a DAM solution is to conduct an audit of your existing assets, looking for things like:

• What assets do you have?
• What kinds of assets will you need to manage?
• What are your assets used for?

This audit can help you not only make better use of your existing assets but also get a better idea of your digital asset management goals and find a DAM solution that fits your specific needs. For example? A DAM solution designed to manage videos and images over multiple channels and outlets might mean that you should choose a DAM with an integrated workflow tool that fosters faster approval, collaboration, and distribution.

When moving to a cloud-based DAM platform like LAGO, an audit will help you compile all your assets across your entire organization and bring them together in one place. Conducting such a thorough audit means everyone will have access to the same resources no matter where they are.

It’s been reported that 70 percent of companies fail at their attempts at digital transformation. Why is this? Often, they don’t bring their team on board or make their new technology solutions integral to their operations. So, over time, these underutilized tools fade into the background, and any efforts to improve their processes don’t succeed.

One of the most important things you can do is build your workflow around your DAM platform. Learn what your team members need from one work silo to the next, listen carefully to their concerns and what might help them do their job better, and choose – and use – your DAM’s workflow functionalities and automation tools to foster collaboration and communication in real-time throughout your processes, from creation to editing to approval to publishing. Well-utilized cloud-based workflows empower your team and all your partners to move through projects faster and more unified.

When you lean into the features that your DAM platform offers, like workflows and production automation, you benefit from well-designed workflow technology and ensure successful adoption across your entire organization.

DAM solutions are used to unify the work of multiple departments and many team members whom all play different roles within the same organization. Establishing things like roles and permissions not only makes it easier for everyone to use the same platform, but this process also gives all your assets an extra layer of security.

When you set roles and permissions, you can limit access to certain assets to specific campaigns or even a single team or department. This layer of permissions means unauthorized users can’t gain access to assets they don’t need, those still in development, and those awaiting approval. As a result, your assets stay secure, and everyone uses the most current version of every asset in your toolbox. Especially with cloud-based DAM platforms like LAGO, where cybersecurity is crucial, your team and third-party partners can securely access the assets they need from anywhere.

Similarly, it’s a good idea to set up access control functionalities. Often, organizations are handling photos that are copyrighted or have been created with one use in mind. When you establish access controls and restrict access to these assets, you limit the chance that an asset winds up in an unapproved use case that could exceed the bounds of copyright agreements.

BONUS: Speaking of copyright, you should use your DAM platform to set alerts on copyrighted assets to stay in the loop regarding upcoming expiration dates so you can renew licenses when necessary.

Creating – and sticking with – naming conventions is an indispensable way to organize everything in your digital asset management system. It makes it simpler to locate the needed content and avoids issues with duplicating existing content simply because it couldn’t be found due to the name structure.

Work with each department and team to standardize your naming conventions to ensure that all your assets are uploaded and stored with a shared naming structure. This exercise is also an excellent opportunity to establish a protocol for categorizing your digital assets and what metadata is included to simplify the search process. When everyone works together to make your assets easy to organize and find, everything becomes more accessible, and your processes become that much more efficient.

Some ideas for naming conventions:

• Including a date in the file name for each photo means it’s faster to find all the pictures taken on the same day.
• Insert metadata like the name of a campaign to identify all the assets used for that particular campaign quickly.
• Create keywords and tags for each campaign or use case to build a searchable, organized database of all your assets.

A robust, cloud-based DAM platform doesn’t just store your assets and all the accompanying metadata. It helps you optimize this data as well. A critical best practice for digital asset management is to utilize analytical data to your advantage. After all, a DAM not only helps you organize and locate digital assets, but it also provides information like:

• When an asset was used.
• Who used it.
• What was it used for.

Your entire team can use these features to unlock all insights about team engagement with your assets. Your DAM analytics tools can give you information about what assets are used most and discover which content gaps need to be filled, what’s working, and what needs improvement.

One example would be to discover which assets are used more or less frequently than others so you can modify underutilized and underperforming assets, so they serve your team – and your goals – better.

LAGO by Comosoft was created to help brands collaborate better. As a cloud-based, combined DAM, PIM, and marketing production solution, LAGO helps with everything from workflows to access control, versioning optimization, proofing, organization, and more.

Why waste time looking for the right solution or waiting for one team to sign off on something? LAGO provides automated task management and keeps everyone working from the same data set. In addition, it has best practices like access controls built in to empower the work that marketing and production professionals do every day.

Streamline and automate marketing production workflows. Take multichannel marketing to the next level. Keep your assets organized and protected, and make them work for you.