Digital Asset Management Best Practices: Organizing Your Assets Effectively
Looking to optimize your use of a digital asset management, or DAM, system? Discover the digital assessment management best practices that can transform your content operations, thereby driving faster timelines for creating and distributing high-quality content.
Choosing the Right Digital Asset Management Option
Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for effective DAM. In order to find the right fit for you, comprehensively evaluate your organization’s needs and constraints to create guidelines for your software search. Thoroughly vet options for DAM systems and find one that addresses your company’s specific needs, prioritizing your must-haves throughout the search process.
As asset search and discoverability features are the primary purpose behind a digital asset management system’s value promise, make sure that your chosen tool has features that make assets as easy to find as possible. Learn early on about a software’s integration capabilities with your current tools, as this will be an essential factor in how long your implementation process might take.
Take the cost into account. See if the cost structure, available storage space and user slots, and upgrade processes will fit your budget now while meeting your future needs for scalability.
Consider the cybersecurity measures that the platform will use to keep your data safe, like asset encryption or penetration testing after major updates. Your customers need to be able to trust that their data is safe with you.
Ask about customizability. For example, find out if you can build complex workflows in a system or create custom integrations easily.
Work with a stable digital asset management company that has positive user reviews, has been recognized in the industry, and doesn’t have news of recent layoffs. Partner with a team of experts you feel will be dependable for a smooth implementation process and timely help when obstacles pop up. Choose a provider that emphasizes continuous innovation so you can count on your system’s capabilities growing as tech advances.
Implementing a New DAM Platform
A successful implementation relies heavily on you setting the proper groundwork ahead of time. When you move from the purchasing phase to implementing your new DAM software, follow these steps to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible:
- Work with your IT team and your software provider to understand the people, tools, and skills needed for a successful implementation and ongoing use of the system.
- Specify what information will be needed for asset classification and easy discoverability within the new system.
- Define and plan for all of the processes across an asset’s life cycle that will occur in the platform.
- Merge or remove duplicates from your current asset library.
- Delete old or irrelevant asset files prior to migration.
- Update files that are poorly named with more logical naming conventions.
- Mark which assets need to be migrated over immediately and which can wait, so you can complete the process in phases rather than trying to do it all at once. This will help mitigate issues from any errors in your first upload and help make the system useable more quickly.
- Complete integrations so the new software communicates seamlessly with the other marketing tools you use in day-to-day operations. Make sure to discuss integration processes in detail prior to execution so you know the timeline and any potential issues that may occur.
Training Employees Well & Encouraging User Adoption
Convincing personnel to learn how to use a new tool and change processes they’re already comfortable with can be challenging. Follow best practices to improve pre-existing workflows for your employees in a new DAM system rather than impeding them. Prioritize consistency and communication during training to confirm that all teams are on the same page about new processes.
Conduct training sessions that give users a foundation for understanding the system. In larger organizations, appoint a “software evangelist” in each locale or department as the point person for educating fellow employees and answering their questions.
Make sure employees are frequently given the opportunity to express any concerns or ask any questions about the software. Encourage employee feedback and innovation on your starting processes so you can make tweaks to improve your organization’s use of the system.
Organizing Digital Assets
While DAM platforms have many functionalities, their main purposes are to organize your assets, add background information to them, and make them easier to find. The following eight best practices can help you and your team organize assets effectively.
- Design a folder hierarchy that matches your organization’s workflows and asset use cases.
- Set naming conventions that follow a consistent logic.
- Make sure initial decisions on the system’s organization follow advice from each department and leverage the knowledge of their pre-existing processes.
- Decide which information needs to be added to metadata — or the background information of each file — every time a new asset is uploaded.
- Create a taxonomy, or specific verbiage used to categorize items in the platform. For example, set specific campaign names and ask users to add them to the metadata for related assets.
- Set consistent organization logic to empower teams to store assets intuitively.
- Enable intelligent asset management features like suggested smart tags based on your taxonomy and optical character recognition (OCR), which adds text on images and in videos to metadata.
- Create comprehensive training materials and spend time thoroughly training each team on the new processes.
Building a Good Taxonomy
Taxonomy plays a huge role in organizing your assets well in your DAM platform. It determines how your team will assign metadata, insert tags, and file assets into specific folders.
Essentially, taxonomy is like the structure of a physical filing system. Think of it like the filing cabinets, drawers, and named folders containing your assets. In this metaphor, consider metadata as a summary sheet at the front of each file folder that describes its contents.
Follow these four best practices to build the most effective taxonomy for your organization:
- Understand the teams that will be using the platform the most: find out what their current processes are, the problems they face, and their ideas for improvement.
- Conduct an asset audit: understand your current assets including what they are, how they’re named, and how they’re organized to see what you want to keep, what you want to get rid of, and what you’d like to change.
- Brainstorm options of categories or tags: create relevant categories like different brands, product lines, departments, asset types, and more, then list the tags that fall under each category.
- Solidify your taxonomy: Decide which categories are most relevant and usable, then formally document them in a resource for your entire organization.
Controlling Asset Versions
Version control is a tool used to track and manage revisions in assets. These best practices can help you make the most of version control features:
- Choose a DAM platform that has the ability to track and list version history.
- Find out how your specific DAM software handles version control and follow best practices for it.
- Set up notifications for asset owners to be informed if they’re uploading a duplicate of a current file.
- Find out if your chosen solution includes integrations that pass version updates within the DAM platform to other applications, like the content management system (CMS) on the backend of your website. This guarantees that customers are not accessing old information like expired sales offerings or out-of-date product information.
- Set asset expiration dates for any digital assets that are only relevant for a short period of time.
- Conduct an asset review from time to time to ensure no outdated assets are marked as usable within the system.
Controlling Access to Assets and User Permissions
Robust DAM software empowers companies to secure digital assets with role-based access. Create roles that protect your company from legal issues by:
- Creating highly customized roles with permissions to access different types of assets to keep your sensitive information more secure.
- Avoiding use of pre-set or more generalized roles as these will likely not fit your organization’s hierarchy and needs.
- Requiring a user to request permission to access an asset instead of giving too much permission upfront and jeopardizing data.
- Making sure you understand how to properly share assets to outside parties so they can access them without trouble. Many DAM platforms will offer options like creating temporary public links and one-time use passwords.
Integrating with Other Systems
Using DAM-specific software may seem like an intimidating change for companies already using several other marketing tools. In actuality, DAM systems that integrate easily with other essential programs can help companies streamline workflows for asset creation, discovery, revisions, approvals, and distribution.
Leverage as many powerful integrations as possible by following best practices like:
- Before integrating, clearly define your goals. If you know the current pain points an integration can address, then you’ll be better equipped to work with your software provider to properly connect the new system with existing tools and create new efficiencies.
- Integrate with email or social media software for access to updated and easily findable images, videos, and graphics stored by your DAM platform.
- See if your DAM solution has the ability to run campaigns automatically on various channels through integrations once an asset is approved. Use features like this to make your distribution processes more efficient.
Promoting Brand Safety
A digital asset management system can help you achieve a consistent brand image, avoid legal hot water, and remain compliant with stringent rules with these four best practices:
- Keep your brand guidelines up to date and well organized within the platform so they’re easy to find and reference.
- Add automations for legal teams and compliance reviewers to check new assets.
- Match review and compliance processes to your organization’s specific needs, like all campaigns to be distributed in the EU triggering a GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulation) review, or the uploading of PHI (Private Health Information) in an unprotected place in the system automatically notifying the asset owner of their mistake.
- Manage digital rights directly in the system by collecting licensing information and notifying users of its expiration date.
Managing Assets Intelligently Using AI
Artificial intelligence tools within DAM interfaces help your employees create new content, refresh and repurpose old assets, and classify and find files more effectively. Use all AI features available to you to maximize productivity and performance, like:
- Smart clickable tags that match your company’s taxonomy, making the process of adding metadata faster and easier upon asset upload
- AI-powered search capabilities that make the correct assets appear in results — even without properly specific search criteria
- Inspiration and ideas for new content pieces and visual assets
- Generated images and new backgrounds for old images
- Written content outlines and social media posts to go along with certain assets
- Optimized content to fit platform-specific qualifications — for example, smart cropping can quickly make versions of an image the recommended size for an Instagram post (1080 x 1080 pixels) and the same post on Facebook (1200 x 628 pixels), so it shows up clearly and properly centered on both sites
- Intelligent asset editing, which notifies asset owners of any mistakes made
Powering Seamless Collaborations
When writers, designers, project managers, and strategists work together seamlessly, your content velocity improves. Help teams move collaborative projects forward and avoid mistakes or frustrations by:
- Adding comments and marking up any assets-in-progress with suggested edits
- Creating a content board to keep your team on track while juggling multiple projects
- Checking the version history to see when changes were made and revert to old versions when needed
- Customizing automated workflows that assign asset-related tasks to the right team members with enough capacity, pass project drafts on to the next party involved, and set due date reminders
- Sharing creative assets only in the platform rather than email or messaging platforms so team members don’t have to dig for them in outside sources
- Setting up review and approval processes in the DAM system and making sure all relevant parties are set to get notifications when someone comments about requested edits or adds a new version to the system
Making Analytics-Informed Decisions
Using the analytics tools within your DAM platform effectively can help you make better decisions about marketing initiatives moving forward. Consider:
- Setting up custom analytics dashboards that address your company’s overall goals
- Tracking budget planning and spending on marketing campaigns created in the platform
- Checking in with metrics on a set, regular basis to make sure you’re on track with goals
- Testing asset performance by creating and distributing multiple versions so you can make tweaks to campaigns to include the best performing pieces
- Reviewing metrics involving the DAM tool and users’ productivity within it regularly. During these reviews, try to answer questions like who your best platform users are, what the most frequent asset searches are, and which searches came up with no results
Planning for Backup and Disaster Recovery
Backup systems create a separate copy of each asset that can be accessed if the original is damaged, destroyed, or otherwise inaccessible. Disaster recovery means recovering multiple assets in a larger event in which multiple or all assets are destroyed, like a natural disaster that damages hardware, a cyberattack that corrupts files, or similar.
Best practices for creating robust backup and recovery plans include:
- Backing up critical assets frequently
- Testing and refining disaster recovery methods regularly
- Storing backups in multiple locations
- Creating recovery plans tailored to different situations to ensure your system will be ready to face any threat
- Choosing a DAM solution that includes additional protections against loss or damage of valuable assets
Continuously Improving Your DAM Use
Optimizing as time goes on can help you make sure you’re getting the most out of your investment. Focus on:
- Setting reviews at regular intervals to discuss further optimization of your organization’s use of the system
- Gathering employee feedback prior to these reviews so you can consider it in strategic plans
- Researching and staying up to date on new features as they roll out so you can take advantage of them
- Measuring efficiency gains created by the system and the overall ROI so you can gain better stakeholder buy-in for scaling it in the future
Get the Most Out of Your DAM With the Right Provider
Aprimo’s strong core DAM offering and dedication to pushing forward with AI advancements has continuously caught the eye of Forrester in its industry-respected Wave Reports. Select a solution you know you can count on — book a demo to see how our system can make your team more productive and supercharge your creative processes.
