Workers spend an average of 2.5 hours per day looking for up-to-date files—costing companies upwards of $2.5 million in lost productivity a year. This inefficiency can mean a significant loss in productivity across your team.
Without a central place to store and manage important business assets, images grow stale, and your creative team can get swamped by requests for items they’ve already produced.
Active digital asset management (DAM) enables you to have a central location where all visual assets are approved and up-to-date. DAM cuts down on wasted time and allows the design team to focus on what matters.
What is digital asset management?
Digital asset management is the process of organizing, storing, and distributing digital assets across an organization.
A digital asset is any virtual file that provides value to the organization. The most common formats are images and videos, but they can also include audio files, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.
According to MediaValet, a digital asset has three key components:
- It has to be a digital file
- It must provide value to the company
- It must be searchable and discoverable (usually with metadata).
A digital asset management system usually acts as a central hub for your assets. DAM software helps you store, organize, and share digital assets from one centralized location.
Source: https://opensenselabs.com/blog/articles/integrating-digital-asset-management-drupal
When should you use DAM for marketing?
As your team and company expands and grows, so do your digital assets. If you’ve reached the point where it’s becoming a struggle to track which assets have been created, find the right version of an asset, or maintain control over who has access, then it may be time to adopt a digital asset management system.
Here are some everyday use cases for digital asset management in marketing:
- Production: Use a DAM solution to request and fulfill new media needs. You can request assets and use it to ensure they’re built and approved by the right people.
- Repository: Once these assets are created, use DAM as a central place to house all digital files used across your organization. That way, anyone who needs to use these files will not have to search for or request final versions.
- Organization: With DAM, you can write metadata to tag assets accordingly, so they’re easy to find.
- Distribution: DAM allows you to easily make assets available across teams and create permissions for proprietary files. If you don’t want to give someone access to the whole DAM library, you can permit them just to view and edit specific files.
- Archiving: Use DAM to build a library for bulk storage of assets that don’t require constant updating. You can archive these files, so they’re still accessible but not cluttering up your storage.
What are the benefits of DAM?
Three core benefits of digital asset management are:
- Increases efficiency: In marketing, graphic designs and imagery are constantly used to elevate content by adding visual appeal. DAM helps boost productivity and efficiency by eliminating the need to request assets every time they’re used. By housing all illustrations and images in one location, the design team can devote their time to creating assets, not searching for them. This reduces design requests and prevents any rework on assets that have already been completed.
- Maintains brand integrity & consistency: Company logos, color palettes, photos, and videos are all frequently shared across marketing materials. Too often, old logos and outdated images are used because people couldn’t find or weren’t aware of the refreshed versions. Having a centralized repository for all assets ensures teams, partners, affiliates, agencies, and clients always have access to the latest approved versions of files.
- Provides secure asset allocation: With images and files floating around in emails and documents, it’s impossible to know who has access to what. DAM helps centralize and manage control over digital assets by setting up permissions and different access levels to files. This security allows your design team to control who has access to files, and to provide guidelines on where and how to use them.
What does a digital asset manager do?
It’s becoming increasingly critical for organizations to start managing digital assets. Many organizations have started hiring a digital asset manager to organize and distribute multimedia content across departments.
Digital asset managers are typically responsible for compiling, organizing, documenting, cataloging, and managing access to all of your company’s digital assets.
The exact duties of a digital asset managers can vary from company to company, but some common tasks include:
- Determining file naming, metadata, and storage processes and procedures
- Managing the company’s digital asset management software
- Controlling access to the software and assets within it
- Auditing software records to ensure DAM processes are being followed
- Archiving old assets
- Communicating key changes (i.e., notifying employees there is a new version of the company letterhead, logos, fonts etc.)
To succeed as a digital asset manager, you will need to be comfortable with technology and data entry. Project management skills, communication skills, and strong attention to detail are also valuable. Experience setting up file structures, creating approval processes, and managing data security are essential.
Manage brand assets directly in Wrike
One of the biggest benefits of a DAM is that it provides a central repository for digital assets – so you never have to wonder which version of a file is the right one. But, if your DAM doesn’t integrate with your other tools, your team can still face confusion, duplication of work, and inefficiencies.
Before you visit asset management software sites, consider what tools you’re already using that need to be able to synchronize with your DAM.
When you select a DAM system that seamlessly integrates with your project management software, you never have to worry about multiple versions. You can easily attach assets to whatever task, project, or campaign you’re working on.
Wrike Publish allows you to search your digital assets by keyword and metadata, or visually browse linked DAM workspaces to quickly spot and select the asset you need for your project or campaign.
You can attach the right files directly to Wrike tasks to avoid questions or confusion, and help ensure visual brand consistency across integrated campaigns. Plus, Wrike’s mark-up feature enables you to edit and review assets in Wrike, then publish the new approved file directly to your digital asset manager.
Want to learn more about how Wrike can improve your digital asset management process? Get started for free!
