Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions offer benefits for businesses of all sizes. However, large enterprises have even more to gain than most. These companies have specific, demanding requirements for their DAM platform, particularly in terms of scalability, security, and technical capabilities. Not all enterprise DAM solutions meet these requirements, which makes finding the right DAM solution absolutely critical for success.
The unique needs of large enterprises stem from the simple fact that they have more to manage — more people, more projects, and more assets. This expanded scope means their DAM solutions must be particularly feature rich, accommodating a wide variety of project types and user demands. They must also be flexible, accommodating all the variation and unpredictability that large teams and big projects generate. Ways they can do this include:
- Advanced access permission controls
- Automatic data security safeguards
- Easy facilitation of project workflows at scale
- Smart automation options for repetitive tasks
- Tools to enable users to quickly find the correct and most current assets
- Automatic monitoring and maintenance of brand consistency across all channels and platforms
- Creation and publishing tools that reduce friction throughout the content lifecycle and enhance team collaboration
- Providing a single point of reference, accessible to users and teams across the organization and updated in real time
With these general needs in mind, the question becomes what specifically large enterprises should seek in a new digital asset management system. Let’s dive right into the seven most important criteria to consider when looking for an enterprise DAM solution.
7 Criteria to Help You Choose an Enterprise DAM Solution
When thinking through the following criteria for evaluating enterprise DAM solutions, remember to consider each option from multiple perspectives. Ask “Who will be interacting with this software?” For many large enterprises, their DAM platform will be accessed by stakeholders at multiple levels including C-suite executives, marketers, and creatives.
If external partners and clients will also access the DAM, then their experiences should be considered as well. It’s also important to consider the safety features and access permission controls because external users will likely need to be restricted in their access more so than an internal user.
Finally, it’s important to step back from time to time during your evaluations. Only by considering each system as a whole can you be certain that you’re pursuing the right solution for your entire business. Don’t let the niche appeal of any one sophisticated feature outweigh the overall experience for your users, customers, and business partners.
With those bits of wisdom in mind, let’s get into it. Here are the top seven criteria you need to consider when choosing an enterprise DAM solution.
1. Data Security and Compliance
Cybercrime is on the rise. In the U.S. alone, it accounted for more than $12 billion in monetary damages in 2023. Considering this, there can be no debate: Enterprise-grade data encryption is a critical feature in a DAM, especially for large businesses. In fact, it should be one of the very first things you consider when evaluating new DAM solutions.
By choosing a platform that boasts best-in-class security capabilities, you can rest easy. You’ll know your data will be protected by advanced security measures, both automatic and customizable. Look for platforms with comprehensive security features, such as:
- Audit reporting: Enterprise DAM software should support regulatory compliance by offering audit tracking capabilities as well as retaining records and reference links.
- Native CDN: This allows for improved network access restrictions and expiration tokens, which can help increase asset protection on a global scale.
- Certifications: Your chosen software should meet the strictest industry security standards such as SOC2 Type II, GDPR, FINRA, and FedRAMP. Following these standards will help ensure your data is kept safe and is managed according to research-based best practices.
- System status updates: Real-time updates on system status and security will keep stakeholders notified and up-to-date in the event of any data breaches or security risks.
- AI data security: AI integrations can come with vulnerabilities if your data is being used to train the underlying AI models. Look for platforms that don’t use your data to train public AI models.
- Data protection and backups: An enterprise DAM system should automate and store frequent backups to prevent data loss and have comprehensive disaster recovery plans in place.
2. Maintaining Brand Integrity
The best enterprise DAM software ensures every user can access and even create quality brand content, even those who may not have a creative background. It will foster participation in content creation while helping to monitor and control for brand integrity.
Look for software with tools that help automate certain aspects of the content customization processes, like localization and content personalization. These tools will allow a wider range of users to create basic content that meets brand standards and will help free your creative experts to focus on more complex, high-reward projects.
Other brand-management benefits an enterprise-level DAM solution should provide include:
- Security features: Think beyond just data protection. To improve brand integrity, a DAM solution should allow for things like granular permission levels, digital watermarking, and user rights tracking. These types of features help protect assets from misuse, both accidental and malicious.
- Easy access to key references: The harder it is to find the rules, the less likely it is that they will be followed. A great DAM solution makes resources like brand assets, guidelines, and templates quick and intuitive for users to access. This allows marketers and creatives to speed up the content creation process and stay consistent with the most up-to-date brand guidelines.
- Centralized content hub: Sales teams should be able to access, review, and deliver brand and campaign content from a centralized location. This hub should also integrate granular access permission controls. Finally, the hub should be accessible from anywhere to help avoid miscommunication and security lapses in any work structure, from 100% in person to 100% remote.
- Support for external users: When outside collaborators have access to your DAM, it supports global consistency by ensuring they only use approved, on-brand assets.
3. Scalability
The best enterprise DAM solutions should be able to handle large volumes of digital assets without a noticeable impact on performance. The importance of scalability for large enterprises goes beyond the size of an asset library. It includes scaling to support rapid business growth with tools like:
- Multi-language support to facilitate content localization strategies
- Localization features that cater to the needs of diverse regional teams and markets
- Real-time or near real-time processing for efficient asset management and team collaboration across regions and time zones
- Robust access controls to make sure data security isn’t compromised with user growth
4. Integration With Existing Tech Stack
An enterprise’s DAM solution should break down information silos, not build them. That’s why it’s important to choose a software platform that integrates with the tech ecosystem that you’re already using.
When looking for an enterprise DAM solution, check whether it can work seamlessly with your existing tools and platforms, such as:
- Analytics software (Tableau)
- Collaboration tools (Slack)
- CRM systems (Salesforce)
- E-commerce platforms (Shopify)
- Design software (Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva)
- Marketing automation tools (Mailchimp)
- Social media management systems (Hootsuite)
- Any other software regularly used by your teams
Every existing tool that you can connect with your chosen DAM platform represents time and resources saved. These integrations eliminate obstacles between migrating assets and data from one platform to another.
If your enterprise DAM solution of choice doesn’t support a specific integration that you need, check whether it has a flexible API that will let you customize the platform according to standard integration protocols such as REST or GraphQL.
5. AI and Automation Capabilities
Automation has been a feature of enterprise DAM software for a while now. However, the rise of intelligent automation capabilities has completely re-written expectations and possibilities for DAM solutions.
With intelligent asset management, you can supercharge your automation workflows. You can reduce the time and effort needed to create, manage, and distribute on-brand content. And you can better track and ensure adherence to brand guidelines.
Look for these advanced automation features in your short-listed enterprise DAM solution:
- AI-powered metadata creation: When you upload assets, intelligent asset management can fill out metadata fields and recommend tags for you. This is a radical timesaver, especially for teams that upload high volumes of content. You can even train Aprimo AI to recognize your products or brand names all on its own.
- Automated content creation and transformation: Intelligent asset management makes cropping or converting files as simple as clicking a button. What’s more, with generative AI capabilities, you can streamline the creation and editing of images, videos, and text for use in social media or blog posts.
- Workflow automation: Team productivity will increase by creating workflows and automation triggers for changing asset statuses and notifying reviewers to begin approval processes.
- Intelligent asset discovery: AI-powered search functions can surface the most relevant results more quickly and accurately, saving time and reducing work day interruptions.
- Automated brand safety and compliance: By training models on your own data, you can identify AI-influenced content and trigger review workflows, checking for compliance with data regulations.
6. User Experience and Support
Coaxing team members to use a new DAM platform requires more than a 20-page spec sheet and a website link. On the other hand, it would be prohibitive for large enterprise leadership to work with each user individually to secure their buy in. The best enterprise DAM solutions combine a compelling, intuitive user experience with world-class support to incentivize and guide employees through onboarding.
Here are some questions to ask when evaluating enterprise-level DAM solutions:
- Is it easy to upload and organize assets?
- Is it easy to find and share the assets you need?
- Does the system facilitate and enhance collaboration?
- Does the system help combat information silos?
- Is the user interface visually appealing?
- Is the user interface easy to understand?
- Is the user interface enjoyable to use?
- Does the vendor have 24/7 customer support?
- Does the vendor provide a dedicated account manager for troubleshooting?
- Does the vendor offer a comprehensive onboarding process?
- Can the system be customized to meet your specific needs?
- Does the system have an active online support community?
7. Pricing and ROI
Every large enterprise has particular structures, modes of operation, and levels of DAM needs. Consequently, if a DAM software provider is charging one flat price for all its large-scale clients, that’s a red flag. There’s a strong chance that a one-size-fits-all price equates to a one-size-fits-all design, with no available system tailoring to meet your specific requirements.
A fully customizable enterprise DAM solution should be priced according to your usage, based on metrics like:
- Number of users
- Number and type of product modules
- Number of integrations
- Data storage requirements
When it comes to calculating the ROI of an enterprise DAM solution, it’s important to understand the relationship between quantitative and qualitative metrics. An enterprise DAM system’s cost isn’t just about the dollars spent. The value that it will bring to your business also needs to be factored in.
For example, let’s consider a global publishing enterprise with hundreds of thousands of digital assets. First, we need to factor in the productivity cost of searching for content on an outdated, inefficient DAM platform. How much time would the enterprise gain by implementing a streamlined, modern platform with AI-assisted automation tools for search and retrieval, fixing duplicated assets, and tracking versions? All those savings need to be balanced against the dollar amount of the new platform before the true cost can be revealed.
It’s also important to look past the quantitative advantages of cost savings and increased productivity and consider the qualitative benefits. What’s the value of enhancing your brand reputation by publishing higher-quality content that’s more consistent across all your marketing platforms? What’s the value of improving your reputation as an employer by providing a superior tool set and fostering easier collaboration and workflow among teams?
Common Challenges Enterprises Face When Implementing a DAM Solution
One more thing to consider when choosing any new software is which potential obstacles you may face during implementation. For the very last of our tips for choosing DAM software, let’s summarize some of the most common software implementation challenges. When choosing your DAM solution, look for one that addresses these upfront.
- User resistance to transition: Moving to any new system usually requires overcoming resistance from users who have adapted to existing workflows. Overcoming this on an enterprise level requires comprehensive training and strong stakeholder involvement from the start.
- Data and workflow loss: To ensure uninterrupted productivity throughout implementation, it’s critical that all existing digital assets, users, teams, and permissions can be transitioned without error into the new DAM solution.
- Integration problems with the existing IT ecosystem: Large enterprises already have complex IT systems in place. The existing web of tools and software needs to be carefully assessed and navigated when adopting a new solution.
- Scaling and performance problems: Large enterprises require new software to handle large volumes of digital assets and user traffic, immediately and in real time. A new system must be capable of meeting this demand from day one.
The best enterprise DAM solutions will have resources for handling these challenges in addition to the advanced DAM features they provide.
Next Steps
That’s all the core criteria to consider during the selection process of a new enterprise DAM solution. But reading through a software’s documentation can only get you so far. It’s crucial that you and your decision team try out the DAM system and get a sense of whether it would truly work for your organization.
To see our enterprise-grade DAM solution in action, get in touch with our team. We’ll help you schedule your live, personalized demo. And for even more information, check out some of our customer success stories and learn more about how our leading DAM system has helped enterprises optimize their asset management workflows to fuel business growth.