Digital Asset Management: Is It Necessary for a Marketing Agency Client’s Success?

Digital asset management will continue to grow exponentially as digital content creation and sharing increase. With more brands turning to marketing agencies to support and grow their digital initiatives, the need for organizing and pulling multiple digital assets across various brands becomes more prominent. Your clients want to be able to find specific content pieces, categorize them, and use them when and where they want – and they want to do all of this across multiple devices.

This rapid increase of digital data stored in the company’s corporate network often creates difficulties in finding the necessary data. The research found that most employees spend a quarter of their time looking for information they need to do their jobs. In addition, they need to save metadata for images, audio, and video files, track their versions, and convert them to various formats. That is precisely when the digital asset management (DAM) systems come in to perform all these operations.

What Does Digital Asset Management Mean?

In the digital media boom age, any business must organize its digital assets. A digital asset is not only a digital file. It includes various content such as product images, stock photos, audio files, video files, logos, presentations, documents. Losing or misplacing digital assets costs you money, time, security, and energy.

DAM is a set of activities for adding, annotating, cataloging, storing, extracting, and distributing digital photos, animations, videos, music, and other media data. Files placed in DAM systems are provided with various metadata: tags, categories, statuses, which allows you to increase the speed of working with them significantly.

The digital asset management system goes far beyond a simple file-sharing system. It is an effective tool for organizing marketing campaigns, managing corporate identity and brand that allows Disiyou to get the maximum return on your investment in marketing materials.

Top Benefits of DAM Systems

On average, a DAM platform features the following:

• It helps to search for the desired asset quickly. Google-style sophisticated search capabilities will give you precisely what you are looking for and will not keep you waiting.
• It ensures content security. You always know who has access to your assets and easily manage rights between employees, departments, and even partners.
• It shares media content quickly and efficiently. You will be able to automate the publication and distribution of materials in a couple of clicks.
• It improves communication between departments. A single platform will allow you to combine different departments, despite the variety of data types. The system automates workflows and enhances team creativity.
• It saves on data storage. The functionality allows you to avoid data duplication and increases system reliability while saving money on IT infrastructure.
• It integrates the system into the corporate environment. Most of the tools can be integrated into various elements of the corporate IT infrastructure, complementing and expanding the capabilities of already used software products.
• It saves time on filling in metadata. A platform helps keep the folder names as metadata and index them, allowing you to instantly use all the system’s functionality.
• It monetizes content. Support for international metadata standards allows you to distribute content to partner agencies and mass media, receiving a royalty.

Suppose you are looking for flexible management of digital assets. In that case, a DAM platform allows you to create and structure digital assets using individually customizable metadata and collections and distribute images, videos, and other media files, optimizing them for each device and channel.

DAM systems are a kind of corporate software. Large companies develop their digital asset management systems or buy them from famous manufacturers. For example, Coca-Cola acquired Content Manager, a digital asset management system with advanced features, from IBM Corporation. IBM is one of the reputable manufacturers of DAM projects, and the cost of their products ranges between 250 thousand and 5 million US dollars.

Canto DAM is an example of an excellent solution for a marketing agency that helps in terms of internal centralization, external distribution, and internal storage. However, to determine the best software for you and your business, you must first evaluate your needs.

Why Should DAM Be a Priority for Marketing?

Marketers need to quickly create content at the request of their clients and provide them with access to all necessary materials at any time. Larger brands with a more extensive content library require strict naming conventions for all of these assets to stay organized and promptly pull assets. However, for organizations with an ever-growing volume of media resources, many users, and remote departments, it becomes challenging to implement these tasks. 

Using multiple programs and applications increases the risk of information loss and creates chaos in the interaction between employees and partners. To optimize the management, use, and distribution of media resources throughout the company and beyond, companies need a convenient digital asset management system. DAM helps marketing agencies and other businesses keep track of all their digital assets elegantly and efficiently, going back to their earliest files and preserving their digital history. Each such solution is a corporate media library, in which the algorithms for file search, content systematization, and user rights management are optimized.

Here is a real example: time yourself and see how long it took you to find the graphic used in your blog post that went out the second week in February of this year. At the drop of a hat, your client could want to tweak their digital assets. And, what happens if you are a marketing agency managing multiple clients with tons of media content in your workflows? 

Let’s check another situation. A new employee got a job with you and accidentally deleted some files. And then it turns out that it was precisely the banner as of February 12, 2020, which was a favorite of your clients. And the designer who created this banner has not worked with you for a year, relocated to a different country, and does not use social networks. What are your actions? Redo everything from scratch and go through numerous rounds of approvals? But a banner is not as scary as a custom advertising photoshoot or more complex marketing works.

Fortunately, the market offers modern solutions that will help you keep your internal assets organized, consistent, and easily accessible through digital asset management.

Conclusion 

Any marketing agency managing relationships with many clients will confirm how difficult and even overwhelming it can be. You can email the logos, brochure layouts, and website designs, and somehow your client will lose the email or files. Then, after, you are getting bombarded with requests for files.

The need for more flexible, scalable, and accessible asset management solutions became very apparent. It allows brand managers, creative teams, and marketers to manage, store effectively, structure digital materials, work together in a single cloud space, and bring content to the market faster.

Make the most of your time and let Agency Vista be an extended version of your marketing team through our upgraded plans — get started today!