What is Digital Asset Management?

Best digital asset management

What do you need the most for your next marketing campaign? A clear strategy, creative asset management, or the right mix? “Content is the king.” Companies worldwide are increasingly focusing on content to upscale their business. Moreover, creating engaging content and establishing a positive relationship with your target audience is crucial. Digital asset management makes all the difference.

The blog expounds on digital asset management (dam) and its examples, the difference between DAM and CMS, and the standard features of DAM software.

What is meant by digital asset management?

Understanding digital asset management, first, involves knowing what a digital asset is. A digital asset is anything with a value that you can store digitally and has special usage rights. Digital asset management (DAM) is either a business service or information technology or a digital asset management system for centralized storage and access of digital assets. A digital asset is an essential part of DAM.

The following are the different types of digital assets:

  • Documents
  • Images
  • Audio content
  • Videos
  • Graphics
  • Presentations

What is a digital asset management system?

A digital asset management system is software or a solution that helps to systematically store, organize, manage, edit, retrieve and distribute an organization’s data. Digital asset management services help to streamline and optimize asset management through a centralized management system.

Further, DAM has the following benefits:

  • Provides a single piece of truth
  • Improve the brand consistency
  • Reduce production costs
  • Consistent user experience

What are the types of digital asset management?

Brand Management

Marketers use Brand management software, so that team members and partners convey consistent messaging and imagery to their target audience.

Marketing Resource Management

The fundamental purpose of Market Resource Management (MRM) software is to unify marketing teams, processes, and technology into a single system. It further helps businesses to track marketing operations, resources, and processes and streamline them. 

Video Management

As the name suggests, video management helps to manage videos throughout their life cycle(from creation to archive). Moreover, the video files are huge; hence, simplifying the video sharing and publishing processes is essential. 

Product Information Management

A Product Information Management software or PIM assembles and distributes product specifications and descriptions for marketing and selling the product. It helps to make product management fast, efficient, and complete – enriching your product.

A Digital asset management platform ideally should support all these four forms of DAM in an enterprise. Although organizations might have different visions and requirements, a DAM should attain the needs of everyone.

What are digital asset management examples?

The following are a few examples of dam digital asset management software: 

Bynder

Bynder is one of the best dam software used by popular companies such as Spotify, Puma, and Canon. Moreover, Bynder helps to create consistent workflows with versioning and annotations. Also, it supports third-party tools like Google Analytics and Magento.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets

Adobe’s DAM, Adobe Experience Manager Assets, is a popular digital asset management tool in the market. Perhaps, it is an integrated solution to manage the entire organization’s assets with a cloud-native solution. 

Mediavalet

MediaValet is a cloud-based DAM solution for the Marketing and Content team. Furthermore, it helps users to create, collaborate and distribute digital assets efficiently. Razer, Brand USA, and Experian are a few brands amongst MediaValet’s customer base.

Widen

Widen is a widely-used DAM that goes beyond the traditional DAM software. Moreover, it helps to distribute the content across the web and utilize content analytics to optimize workflows further.

ResourceSpace

It is one of the open source dam that provides on-premise and cloud deployments. Hence, it is highly configurable and scalable according to the company size. Another critical feature of ResourceSpace is Enterprise Single Sign to enhance security. 

What is the difference between DAM and CMS?

Although DAM and CMS have some similarities– in collaborating and accessing specific documents, they have some differences.

The following are a few differences between dam digital asset management and content management system:

      DAM

CMS

DAM is a comprehensive system for storing, organizing, and retrieving digital assets with certain rights and access. CMS is a system that helps to create, edit, organize and publish content.
DAM helps to manage the assets of an entire organization. CMS helps to manage a website.
DAM helps to organize all the assets in a single system. CMS has an inherent searchable content library.
DAM is secure and supports self-serve access. It requires user permission for content access.
DAM can transform and reuse content. CMS supports page-builder and page templates.
Version control for efficient tracking of all the assets. And revision control for past versions of web content.

What are the Common Features of Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software?

Digital asset management tools

Besides the additional features of DAM – what are the essential features that every DAM should possess? Creative asset management entails the steps in the lifecycle of a digital asset. Creative asset management software helps to manage your digital assets and streamline the creative workflow.

Let’s understand some of the standard features of a dam digital asset management software:

1. Creation

A DAM includes standard templates and file formats to create digital assets seamlessly.

2. Collaboration

While working in a team, content creation involves editing and reviewing digital assets across multiple departments. A DAM helps to make edits, and annotations, thus, optimizing the approval and review process. 

3. Organizing

The fundamental purpose of a DAM is to organize the entire organization’s digital assets in a centralized location for easy access in the future. 

4. Searching

After organizing and storing the valuable assets– what if you couldn’t retrieve them? So, an ideal DAM also entails advanced searching capability – metadata. Moreover, metadata helps store, identify, and index files with various attributes such as asset type, media type, and technology. 

5. Version control and workflow

Version control is the ability to save and track the history of previous versions and restore their previous state when needed. As a result, version control ensures that as soon as the market material or image gets an update, the correct version of the asset digital goes forward. In short, version control helps to maintain a consistent digital asset management workflow. 

6. Sharing and access control

While working in a team, sharing large files over email is a problem. A DAM helps to share files through emails or brand portals easily. If you are working on a multi department project, providing the correct access to the right people is essential. A DAM provides permissions controls, such as read, write and modify, for a better easy access control structure. 

Conclusion

Digital asset management companies are gaining importance. The digital asset management industry worldwide will grow at 15.06% by 2027. Choosing the perfect DAM for your organization is a task, given the numerous DAMs available in the market. Moreover, the best digital asset management software possesses essential features and enhances the experience of creating, collaborating, and organizing your product. So, If you are planning to upscale your business or find a better way to organize your digital assets, then DAM is your panacea.

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