Tell me: Do you sometimes look at your content production schedule wishing things were just a little simpler?
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I’m not surprised.
After all, as the production grows, (and it does, rapidly,) so does the number of digital assets we have to somehow manage.
And let’s face it; that’s getting harder and harder to do.
Keeping track of it all – digital files, documents, video assets, brand assets – plus collecting and managing feedback, getting approvals, and routing the content where you need to go can take an awful lot of time and effort.
That’s why so many of us turn to digital asset management solutions.
But if you’re still on the fence as to whether they are the right solution for you, well, keep on reading. I’ll show you 17 incredible benefits you get from using digital asset management systems.
It’s a lot to cover so let’s get right to it.
(By the way – If you aren’t familiar with the concept of digital asset management, read this guide first. It covers everything you need to know about DAM systems. Then, once you’re done with it, come back to this page to discover how these systems can help your business. )
13 Advantages and Benefits of Using Digital Asset Management Software and Systems
#1. All your digital assets in one place
Let’s start with the obvious. One of the DAM’s core capabilities is asset storage, organization, and management. A digital asset management system will help you organize all your content assets – and that includes almost anything, from content drafts, digital files, audio and video, to pretty much anything else that you need to produce the content.
But that’s not all. With DAM, you will also be able to organize those assets using folders, metadata, tags, naming conventions, and other strategies.
The result – All project stakeholders will be able to easily find and access whatever assets they need, whenever they need them.
#2. Easy asset sharing and distribution
A DAM system will also allow you to send completed content assets wherever they need to go.
CELUM (disclaimer: this is our tool) for example, let’s you manage assets end-to-end, and put content in front of the right audience automatically through several powerful features and integrations:
Dynamic file format conversion so that you don’t have to spend time doing that manually.
Distribution automation so that you can publish the content where you need to – be it on your website or social media – without any effort.
Bulk sharing. You can also create branded download portals, at CELUM, we call them Smart Views, for ad-hoc distribution of multiple files.
Integrations. A DAM will also let you maximize your productivity by integrating with the tools you use everyday – Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office 365, etc.
#3. Streamlining and workflow automation
A full-scope DAM system will also allow you to easily build and manage custom workflows for content production. With that, you’ll be able to streamline every aspect of your creative process, from brainstorming new ideas, content production, review and approval processes to final signoff and distribution.
What’s more, DAM platforms like CELUM give you access to powerful automation capabilities. With those, you and your team will be able to spend less time on manual tasks and managing the process, eliminate bottlenecks, and focus more on what you want to love doing the most – the creative part.
#4. Saving time on locating assets
Isn’t it scary how much time we lose locating assets? And it’s not an isolated problem. According to research by Harris Interactive, 83% of us face these challenges daily!
DAM is all about helping you organize, manage, and retrieve files with ease. And so, because a DAM system enables you to organize assets within folders, collections, and other systems, and then assign labels, metadata, tags, and use naming conventions, your teammates will spend less time trying to locate whatever assets they need.
The result? Your company will save a ton of employee time that would normally go towards just trying to figure out where a particular file has been stored.
#5. Reducing document collaboration errors
According to the same research by Harris Interactive I quoted earlier, 81% of workers have found themselves working on the wrong version of a file.
This means that as many projects got halted or went into production with significant errors in them as a result.
I don’t even want to think about the cost of these errors to businesses!
A solid DAM system helps you prevent these, and many similar challenges, by allowing you to organize files and label them correctly so that no one gets confused about which is the final version of the file to use.
#6. Ensuring brand consistency
Another common problem resulting from document and asset collaboration errors is lack of brand consistency. When files lie scattered across employees’ shared drives, various dislocated servers, etc. it’s easy for teams to use different brand assets.
A DAM system will allow you to control how branded assets are being used, ensuring that all content creation teams and other stakeholders always use correct on-brand assets.
Plus, online proofing capabilities and workflows will ensure that you have the opportunity to spot and correct any other mistakes that could hurt the brand.
#7. Avoiding compliance issues
If you’re using photos or other digital assets with licensing rights, you also need a system to monitor how those assets are being accessed, by whom, and prevent any unauthorized use.
Luckily, a DAM system can help you with digital rights management too.
With DAM, you can stay on top of license rights. You can also set restrictions and expiration dates for various assets, and even ensure that copyrighted images are being used only as intended by the license.
#8. Managing roles and permissions
You, most likely, have quite a lot of people who need to access, retrieve, and use digital assets. However, not everyone should have access to everything. Your DAM will let you manage roles and permissions, and ensure that only the right people have access to the right assets.
CELUM, for example, offers the most sophisticated, flexible and smart granular access rights in the industry. With those features, you can be laser-specific about who should be allowed to see and access what files. You can even define those roles and permissions at a metadata level.
#9. Increasing data security
In today’s world, security is paramount. Unfortunately, you have little control over how secure your company’s digital assets are when you store them on employee’s hard drives, shared drives, or external servers.
The situation is different when you use a digital asset management platform. A DAM system will offer several layers of security.
First of all, with DAM, all files are in one place. As a result, you no longer have to worry about employees losing their laptops, or clients having their emails broken into. Or even them sending an email with assets to the wrong recipient.
Everything is in one place, and also, you control who has access to what.
Most DAM systems will also include encryption capabilities, two-way authentication when logging in, and a whole range of other measures to ensure that no unauthorized persons have access to your assets: monitoring for excessive login attempts, account locking after failed logins, adaptive IP blacklisting, and more.
#10. Increased security when working with external vendors
Another concern is sharing assets with external vendors. It’s quite common for companies to subcontract various aspects of the content production process to third parties. But it’s hard to control the security of your assets when various stakeholders simply email them between each other and third-party vendors.
DAM eliminates this problem completely. First of all, you no longer share files by just emailing them. You can create PIN links and use other sharing capabilities to ensure that your vendors only see and access files that you prepared for them.
The same goes for them sharing assets with you. This also happens through the DAM, with vendors uploading files to relevant folders for review and approval.
#11. Reducing asset waste
One of the things I particularly love about DAM systems is that they let me see all of my company’s content.
With DAM, not only you can see what assets you have, and what are now in the works. But you can also quickly identify content that I could reuse, repurpose or even simply, update and adapt to other marketing campaigns.
By just giving you a clear picture of what content you have, DAM allows you to:
- See underutilized assets that you could reuse, adapt, or update
- Expand the library of content without actually creating new assets
- Scale your content efforts by repurposing assets into different formats and adapt them for different marketing channels.
#12. Boosting collaboration
FACT: We rarely work on content on our own.
Sure, you might be responsible for certain tasks, but there are other people and teams involved in the entire content production workflow. You work with them, alongside them, and some of these people might also be responsible for evaluating and reviewing your work.
But this also brings several challenges to deal with. You have to share files so that everyone involved can access what they need when they need it. You also need to share your work with others, and comment and review their work. And let’s face it, without a proper system and a tool to manage it, ensuring that the process runs smoothly can be challenging.
Advanced DAM systems like CELUM incorporate several capabilities that help boost collaboration and streamline workflows. From asset management, to features allowing you to manage creative collaboration, and more, these tools provide you with everything you need to make sure that teams stay creative and the work moves forward smoothly.
#13. Measuring content’s performance
Various analytics tools tell you how your campaigns perform. They reveal each campaign’s success rate, or the ROI it delivered.
But they don’t tell you which of your content is the most effective. Or how often your teams utilize certain assets, and therefore, which assets you should be creating more of.
That’s the insight you get from a digital asset management system. You can access various data on content performance in a DAM platform – from top users, number of times an asset has been viewed, shared, downloaded, and so on.
With this information, you can identify asset types that work best and deliver the highest ROI. And also, you can see which content isn’t delivering the return you’d hoped for it.
What Features and Capabilities to Expect From Your DAM System?
After reading this guide, you know what DAM solutions can do for your organization. But let me also share with you what sort of features you should expect from it, so that you can get all those benefits of digital asset management we’ve discussed above, and more.
And so, at a minimum, your DAM should be able to:
- Store, organize, and manage even the largest asset collection in one central location.
- Store and manage multiple file formats, including documents, audio, video, and other digital content assets.
- Organize your assets using folders, collections, metadata, tags, and more.
- Create flexible node structures and asset collections so that you and other team members can go through vast amounts of files and find anything in an instant.
- Define relevant asset types and categorize your content based on a variety of formats and use cases.
- Get usage data from connected systems and visualize where your assets are and how they are related to each other.
- Allow you to control access and rights to ensure that only the right people can access the right assets.
- Assist your teams with finding similar assets, detecting duplicates and auto-tagging your content with the help of AI.
- Integrate with your favorite tools.
- Allow you to review, post comments, and get sign off on your content assets.
- Route assets to various marketing channels that you use in your campaigns.
