Startup Guide: Digital Asset Management System is the need of the hour for organizations

Businesses across verticals have now moved online. Ease of access, better network coverage, download speed, and significantly better user devices contribute to this trend. These factors have also contributed to the increasingly rich visual experiences that we now experience online. Every online business uses different digital asset - high-quality images and videos to content on social media, flashy sales banners, advertisements, and email campaigns - it aims to keep its audience engaged and improve its conversions.

And this trend is likely to continue with just a shift in the type of content and platforms. For example, just in the last couple of years, existing social media tools and leading online businesses have started leveraging videos in a more significant way than before. If we are serious about our online presence and the experience we offer, we should be focusing on creating media-rich experiences for our users.

The problem with managing digital assets

To deliver a great experience to every user on their device or platform, we need to customize the digital assets for each one of them. A single sale banner now needs to be customized for different social media platforms, laptops, mobile devices, network speeds, and screen resolutions. And if you run A/B tests, multiply this already massive number of digital asset variations with the number of tests to run.

The fact is that with the advent of richer experiences, we are creating a lot more content now than ever before. Multiple stakeholders across different teams (and now even different time zones) collaborate to create several assets that deliver a perfect, homogenous online experience. It would be safe to say - we are at the centre of a digital content explosion that's bigger than what it ever was. And to stay on top of it and help our teams execute their plans better, it is imperative to adopt better methods to manage and collaborate on the digital content that we create.

This is where a Digital Asset Management or DAM system comes in.

Why do we need a DAM solution?

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution acts as a storage and collaboration centre for all the digital assets like images, videos, documents, PDFs, etc., for your entire team.

Traditionally, teams would collaborate and share content via emails or storage solutions like Google Drive or Dropbox. But these tools are not primed to solve the problem we face now. For example, it would be a nightmare to find in an email chain the last comment the VP of Marketing left on a banner shared with him. Or for the tech team to know which of the five “logo-final.png” files in a Drive folder is the actual logo that should go live.

A good DAM solution offers many solutions built to ease management, collaboration, and distribution of digital assets, making it a better tool for your organization and help improve efficiency. Let's look at a few examples.

Better organization capabilities

The first step towards managing digital content better is to be able to organize them better. Good digital asset management solutions, unlike Drive or Dropbox, go beyond the simple storage of files in folders. They would help you organize your assets by their attributes.

For example, when you upload a file, the DAM solution would be able to detect if it's an image or a document. If it is an image, it would also store attributes such as its dimensions, orientation, format, and associated metadata information like where the image was clicked. Some advanced DAM solutions would go a step further and leverage AI to automatically detect the text in the image, its dominant colours, objects present inside an image and associate these attributes with the image.

One could also manually add tags and additional metadata to a file. For example, adding tags such as "Sales Banner," "New Year 2021", or metadata like "Device = Mobile" would help develop custom organization methods that are far more useful than storing files in folders.

Better Search Capabilities

Research says that employees spend almost 20% of their time searching and gathering information. That's one full day a week. This statistic does seem believable if your team has to sift through several emails and folders to find something shared with them a week back. Or worse, if they cannot find it, someone on the team has to rework it. DAM solutions build upon their organizational superiority to deliver a better searching experience.

Let's say you have to find banners for mobile devices that were created a few weeks back by a designer on your team for a specific sales campaign. Sounds difficult? Not at all. Different attributes such as banner dimensions, created by, created at, tags, and custom metadata ("Device: Mobile") would make this search very simple. Your team would find the assets they need quickly and then download them or share them with other team members. This time saved on searching for assets helps your team execute campaigns faster, avoid rework and improve efficiency.

Versioning and Workflows

Digital asset creation has a lifecycle. The graphic designer creates the first version with a few stakeholders for feedback and approval. Multiple iterations later, once the team approves the asset, it is passed on to the tech team or any other team responsible for publishing the asset on the right platform. In a solution like Drive or Dropbox, there is no concept of versioning. The user's responsibility is to collect comments from the previous asset, replace it with the new one, and ensure that only the latest one is uploaded.

A Digital Asset Management solution helps you create an entire workflow and automate how the content flows through it. Imagine getting a notification on your laptop to approve an asset that your graphic designer uploaded. You give some feedback which is automatically available to the graphic designer for further iteration. Previous versions are accessible but do not take focus away from the latest one. When you approve the final version, the system notifies the tech team that the asset is available for upload on the website.

And this happens inside a central tool making cross-team collaboration a breeze compared to attaching zip files on email.

Publishing assets

The last step in an asset's cycle is to publish it on a platform.

When the tech team has to publish the sale banner on the website, they have specific requirements. While your graphic designer might have created a high-res banner to ensure that it loads fast, the banner must be compressed, converted to the correct format, and resized according to the device where it will get used. You cannot build a great visual experience by compromising on the load time of your website.

One option is to go back to the graphics team and ask them to generate different variants of the banner again. But that would mean a lot of rework and time wasted. A DAM solution helps in the final delivery of assets by giving you URLs ready to use on the web and have built-in features like real-time compression, format conversion, and transformations. Your team would need to grab the asset's URL, use the DAM's specifications to transform the asset, and start using it on the web. Everything in real-time, without involving any other team.

With all these examples, it is pretty evident that a Digital Asset Management System can help you build more efficient teams and better processes for the content that you publish online. If you are serious about the experience that you deliver to your customers online, having a DAM in place with proper organization, collaboration, and delivery capabilities would be of immense value. It will make your teams more efficient and allow them to execute growth experiments faster without pulling their hair out. And if that's not a win for a business, then what is.

Note: The author of the article is Rahul Nanwani, CEO and Co-Founder, ImageKit