Three Ways Digital Asset Management Can Boost Your Productivity
DAM, or Digital Asset Management, is a relatively new concept, but it can be absolutely invaluable to all sorts of companies. Digital asset management is especially effective for companies with websites, those that launch large-scale marketing campaigns, and businesses that require a lot of multimedia ‘on tap’.
This multimedia could be images, music, web content, articles, or anything else. Each of these items is known as a digital asset, and becomes so as soon a company puts a value on it. For example, photographs of a company’s products for use on a website are valuable, so are known as digital assets.
The issue that DAM seeks to solve is when a company has so many digital assets that they have a hard time keeping track of them all. In these cases, digital asset management can be incredibly useful. There are lots of great reasons for you to invest in a digital asset management system, and one of them is to increase productivity. So let’s look at three ways in which digital asset management can boost the productivity of your company and make the DAM system really pay for itself.
Instant, On-Demand, Access To Digital Assets
In companies that have many multimedia items, such as businesses with lots of products on their website, there is often a high demand for images. The same is also true for those companies that run ‘magazine’ style websites. A digital asset management system can help because it allows centralized access to every image in the business’s database.
Whether that’s a photo of an old product, or the latest snap of a celebrity, DAM is a highly effective way of categorising and storing images. Some businesses know how much of a problem it can be if employees have to search through their computers to find the specific image you need, but with a DAM system this problem is completely solved.
Brand Asset Management
In large companies, it can often be difficult to ensure that everyone is on the same page, particularly during re-brands. Whether you run a music label or a website used to compare public liability insurance, DAM can help. For example, the marketing department could be creating a piece of direct mail featuring the company’s new logo, whereas a web designer in another department may be using the old logo on the website. This kind of thing is an unfortunate side effect of being a large and successful business. But with a digital asset management system, this problem is a thing of the past.
Users across the business can be granted unified access to a central repository for the brand. That means all logos and other rebranded multimedia items can be stored in one place, and ensure that whatever goes out to the public is consistent and in-line with the company’s current branding. A sloppy re-brand can make a company look quite bad, but with a DAM system in place, this issue disappears.
Flexible Access Rights Internally And Externally
A digital asset management system can obviously be a huge benefit within a company by allowing employees quick and easy access to all digital assets; but there may be times when a company needs to allow third party access, too. This could be to suppliers, advertising agencies, or anyone else that requires the use of the company’s multimedia. With a fully-featured DAM system in place, you have complete control over who can access the assets within it. So you can allow full access to all catalogues for employees, then create more limited accounts for third parties to access only specific catalogues or repositories within the system.
By implementing a company-wide digital assets management system, you’ll find that your productivity will increase. With quick and easy access to every piece of imagery, music, video or anything else, your employees will waste less time searching and spend more time implementing new ideas. You’d be surprised exactly how much time can be wasted by performing image searches and the like, but with a digital asset management system in place, you’ll no longer have to worry. This will allow your company to focus on the future, and spend more resources on growth and profit generation.
Guest Post by Neville Thatcher
Neville is a Digital Asset Management specialist living in Norfolk, England. Having worked with some of the internet’s first reputation management experts he’s got a good grasp of the importance of responsible and competent asset management. It’s as valuable now as it was in the nineties.
