A Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution is much more than a tool that finds and organizes your digital assets. DAM systems help organizations to streamline the digital asset workflow, and improve collaboration between teams and customers.
In this article, you’ll learn what digital asset management is, as well as types of solutions and the latest trends.
What is Digital Asset Management?
Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a set of tools and practices that enable you to manage digital assets like images, videos, and documents. A DAM solution organizes, stores, filters, shares, sorts, and distributes digital content. In addition, A DAM system functions as a centralized hub that enables collaboration and access to digital assets at any given moment.
Digital assets are not just rich media files like videos and images. Modern DAM systems can work with many different content types, including audio, PDF, GIF, Microsoft documents, and more.
DAM policies and practices ensure that only authorized parties can access and use your digital assets and DAM tools. DAM policies define what type of licenses you can use for any file type, who can access your files, and what they can do with the content.
What are the benefits of DAM?
There are several benefits to using DAM over a traditional asset management strategy. The review below can help you figure out if a DAM can be useful for you.
Maximizes ROI
Graphic designs and images are constantly used by marketers to add visual appeal to content. DAM solutions improve the collaboration between marketing and creative teams by making important designs accessible to the content owner.
DAM also improves efficiency and productivity by storing all digital assets in one location. The design team can focus entirely on creating new assets, instead of wasting time searching for assets. This prevents unnecessary work on assets that are already ready for use, and reduces design requests.
Maintains brand integrity and consistency
Company logos, videos, and photos, are frequently shared across marketing mediums. As a result, marketers often use outdated photos and old logos because the latest version was not distributed. A central hub for all branded assets ensures teams and clients always have access to the latest file versions.
Content backups
DAM systems enable you to revert to an older version of a file whenever you want. The system saves all previous versions, including the file's history. You can recover these versions at any time. You can use version control as part of your backup and disaster recovery strategy, and also as a means to revert back to previous versions if any mistake was made.
Provides security
You cannot always know who has access to your files when images and files are constantly shared in emails and documents. DAM systems and practices can help you protect your digital assets by setting up permissions and different access levels to files. This can help you achieve a level of control over who has access to which files, and provides guidelines on how and where to use these files.
Types of Digital Asset Management systems
There are three DAM deployment methods: on-premise, SaaS and Hybrid.
On-premise
On-premise DAM is deployed on your company’s servers. The IT department is responsible for managing all the infrastructure and networking aspects of the system. On-premise DAM provides more customization options and control over the data. However, you need to take care of things like security, updates, support, and infrastructure.
SaaS
Software as a Service (SaaS) DAM systems are deployed in the cloud and managed by the vendor. SaaS systems are usually ready-made products that you cannot modify, but they provide significant benefits. The benefits include short deployment time, global access, lower cost, and transferring the support and management responsibilities to your cloud provider.
Hybrid
Hybrid DAM solutions combine the advantages of both SaaS and on-premise deployments. Hybrid solutions use on-premise servers and cloud environments to provide easy global distribution of SaaS as well as the customization and control of hosted solutions. However, hybrid operations are typically complex to operate and require an advanced skillset.
Digital Asset Management trends 2020
There are a few new technologies that are expected to dominate the DAM landscape in 2020. Some, like Artificial Intelligence, have already been applied successfully in many solutions. Others, like blockchain, are still in the early stages of research.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables you to replace manual workloads in digital asset management. DAM systems use AI technology to scan content and automatically create corresponding metadata tags to automate the tagging of visual assets. Automatic tagging enables users to find assets faster while saving hours of organizing content.
Experts predict that AI will get more effective and accurate in 2020. It will help DAM systems to better understand assets and users by leveraging visual recognition to predict users’ needs based on past behaviors. In addition, DAM systems will incorporate AI for video to provide content recommendations based on previous searches.
Personalized video content
Consumers are becoming more connected across multiple devices like smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, and tablets. Brands need to build a meaningful customer experience and journey by effectively communicating with consumers.
One way of improving your user experience is displaying customized content and calls-to-action for different types of visitors. During 2020, marketing and creative teams will focus more on creating personalized user experiences and delivering them authentically to consumers.
Companies will also need to store and organize large amounts of personalized and individually-targeted digital assets. DAM systems can catalog personalized variations of videos, photos, and layouts to enable fast and efficient storing, sharing, and retrieval.
Automation
Automation is set to be the main focus of marketing departments and digital asset organizations. Digital marketers need automation to quickly access relevant digital files, which improves customer service and productivity. Over 2020, DAM systems will use more machine learning algorithms to recommend specific assets for specific tasks.
Marketers can then choose the most suitable asset for their task-based on analytical insight or personal preference. DAM software will be able to pull more appropriate assets from the system by learning from historical data and usage patterns.
Syndication
Content syndication is when you give permission to third-parties to post a copy of your content on their digital channels. Syndication is a popular method for exposing your content to multiple relevant audiences.
DAM systems help companies to quickly access and manage syndicated content. Marketing teams can retrieve and share syndicated content by adding metadata that links product information with syndicated content. DAM solutions can store, retrieve, and share syndicated content like blog posts, videos, or any other web-based content.
Blockchain
Blockchain is a series of immutable records of data that are managed by third-party computers. Each of these data blocks is secured and linked to each other using cryptographic principles.
Blockchain can prevent the misuse of digital assets by protecting their ownership. Blockchain technology verifies the integrity of people requesting to use your assets before giving them access.
Experts believe that blockchain has created a new type of Internet by allowing the distribution of digital assets without copying them. Blockchain will play an essential part in the exchange of digital assets between marketers and their clients, with this type of integration automating the task of tracking and recording asset usage.
Conclusion
Digital asset management systems can help marketing, design, sales, and development to better manage digital assets. You can deploy DAM systems on-premises, in the cloud, or even build a hybrid solution that suits your infrastructure.
2020 is geared to see more automation, syndication, and personalization of digital asset management. The result should be maximized ROI, brand consistency, improved access control, and an organized backup and recovery position.
