Project management solutions are essential for any high-production team, helping them to organize resources and people to hit their deadlines. But despite the ability of these solutions to coordinate tasks and campaigns, creative teams are still stuck centralizing their source material, work-in-progress files, and final assets to keep them accessible to all.
Over the last 30 years, digital asset management (DAM) tools have continued to evolve to meet the changing needs of high-volume content creators. With roots in media management, DAM is now an essential part of nearly every marketing technology stack and a trusted ally in storing, organizing and distributing final marketing assets across the globe.
But in recent years, digital asset management has become about more than managing final assets. It’s become a key player in the entire content lifecycle, from creation and approval to distribution and archiving. This shift in use made it a viable option to address the centralization issues faced by creative teams using project management solutions.
Here are three ways that integrating a DAM into your project management system can power your operations and improve your workflows.
Ensure brand consistency across projects
Marketing projects require the perfect coordination of resources and people to ensure that projects get done on time and on brand. While this can be difficult even with small, isolated projects, when dealing with large teams, multiple projects, and extensive libraries, the challenges multiply. Marketing and creative operations are charged with ensuring the right people are working on the right project with the right assets.
While your work management system can help with the coordination of people and projects, you still need an effective way to ensure each team is using the right assets. For any given project, the marketing team needs to send campaign assets to the appropriate project manager, who then uploads them into the work management solution and applies it to the correct project. While this system is manageable, it increases the probability of human error and off-brand marketing material.
When project managers can pull assets directly from an enterprise DAM into the appropriate project, they provide their creatives with pre-approved marketing material for any given project without having to upload new files or leave the work management solution. They can then associate these assets with specific tasks, campaigns, and users to ensure everyone has what they need to complete on-brand visual projects.
Give quick, instant access to assets from a familiar platform
Content creation is seldom a one-and-done project — it’s a continual process that requires submitting work, receiving feedback, and applying changes — over and over until everyone is satisfied with the completed piece. With this in mind, creatives often need ongoing access to new working files as the project scope and design change.
In a traditional creative workflow, you would request new assets from your marketing team, putting the project on a temporary hold and taking up time in the marketer’s day. While on a small scale, this may not take long, over time, this can result in wasted hours.
When a DAM is integrated into your project management solution, your creatives can quickly access their assets on their own within a system they’re already familiar with. They can use tasks to share the assets they’re working on with other teammates and relevant stakeholders, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
Streamline time-to-market with instant publishing
Even when organizations have both a DAM (or file management solution) and a project management solution, when the two can’t communicate, you run into challenges ensuring final assets actually make their way into the DAM for distribution.
This is because, despite having processes in place, an individual or team has to download the final assets from the work management system and upload them into a storage system. If someone misses a project completion notification or thinks that it’s already taken care of it, that asset is now stuck in limbo until someone notices it’s missing. This can and often does lead to missed deadlines and a flurry of emails from the marketing team.
When the two solutions are connected, uploading final assets into a DAM takes a mere click of a button in your project managers’ workflow, requiring minimal changes to how they currently operate. They’re even able to add relevant categories and keywords to the asset from within their project management solution, ensuring the assets are easily discoverable for the marketing team whenever they’re ready to publish it. There’s no lag time and no room for human error.
DAM and project management systems: A match made in heaven
When working with creatives, the name of the game is streamlining and simplifying. By integrating your project management system into a DAM, you’re adding the final piece of the puzzle to ensure the content’s entire life cycle, from creation to distribution, flows smoothly.
MediaValet and Wrike have partnered to help marketing and creative teams marry the best of digital asset management and project management, saving you time, increasing brand consistency, and maximizing the impact of your assets.
Ready to start streamlining your workflow? Download our eBook, “The Collaborative Work Management for Marketing Teams: A Buyer’s Guide,” to help your team select the right project management tool for your team. Hint: The best project management tool will easily integrate into your other key tools, like your DAM!
Author Bio: Carlie Hill is the Marketing Manager at MediaValet, a leading digital asset management system in Vancouver, BC. With expertise in DAM and marketing, she strives to provide organizations with the tools they need to maximize the ROI of their digital content.
