Why Using a Digital Asset Management (DAM) System is Important

Searching for files isn’t the most productive use of an employee’s time, but creative teams often waste hours searching for marketing materials in siloed solutions, regularly losing previously created assets. As more enterprises struggle to manage creative content, more marketing teams have stopped asking “why Digital Asset Management is important?” and started to investigate potential solutions.

Digital asset management systems have emerged as a critical solution for eliminating search fatigue by enabling a company to store multiple creative assets in one location so they can be found by employees more efficiently. This article will examine why Digital Asset Management is important for organizations and outline some Digital Asset Management basics you need to know about.

Why Digital Asset Management is Important

There are many reasons why using a Digital Asset Management solution is important for modern organizations, including:

• Increasing operational efficiency
• Reducing employee time wasted searching for creative assets
• Decreasing the number of lost assets
• Ensuring file security and user access control
• Increasing marketing effectiveness
• Showing usage rights
• Speeding up time to market of products
• Reusing digital content

By and large, most of the benefits of Digital Asset Management boil down to greater operational efficiency, cost savings, and transparency. The top 3 benefits of adopting Digital Asset Management solution are broken down below:

1. Reducing Time Wasted Searching For Creative Assets

As mentioned above, using a Digital Asset Management solution is important for making sure that employees can find creative materials quickly without having to search disparate systems. This is vital because it means that employees can access to the materials necessary to create compelling, on-brand marketing materials, rather than being limited to what they can hunt down.

Simultaneously, when employees spend lots of time searching through email threads and desktop folders for assets, they are neglecting other day-to-day tasks they should be doing, resulting in a loss of working hours. This can add up very quickly.

For example, if you have an employee with a salary of $50,000 working a 40 hour week with an average hourly wage of $24.04, an hour wasted a week searching for creative assets would add up to 52 hours a year, costing a total of $1248. When managing a team, the costs of wasted hours can multiply very quickly.

Learn more | Everything You Need to Know About Digital Asset Management

Watch this webinar on-demand to learn more about DAM search capabilities: How to find the right information.

2. Decreasing the Number of Lost Assets

If you spend money on producing rich media assets, photos, or videos, you also lose what you invested in producing those materials whenever your employees lose them. It is a tremendous waste of resources to spend money creating professional media assets only for you to lose them in your file system.

A Digital Asset Management platform prevents this issue by providing you with a central repository of assets where you can tag your marketing materials so employees can find them easily. Some advanced platforms even use AI to automatically tag assets with relevant metadata so that your team doesn’t have to waste time entering tags manually, reducing the risk of tagging errors.

In contrast, if you have a DAM solution with a catalog of rich media assets to search through, it’s much easier to reuse digital content to create more effective campaigns and promote new products.

3. Increasing File Security

Companies that take an ad-hoc approach to file storage often struggle to control user access to files (particularly when media files are regularly lost). Files without access controls are a security risk that could lead to the leaking of private data or your marketing strategy.

Using a Digital Asset Management solution keeps files secure by storing them in one place and offering features like user permissions so you can control which employees have access to what assets. This ensures that only authorized users have access to sensitive marketing materials.

Learn more about content & data security with Nuxeo Platform.

DAM Readiness: Typical Problem Statements

If you’re unsure whether or not your organization is ready to adopt a Digital Asset Management solution, it’s worth asking your employees what types of challenges they face when managing content. Some of the key problem statements that indicate you’re organization is ready to make the switch include:

• I often struggle to find images
• I often need files to be resent to me
• It’s challenging to match photos with photographers
• I often have to hunt down usage rights to photos
• I regularly struggle to tell what the final version of a document is
• I waste time looking for assets that aren’t tagged properly

So if you hear an employee mention one of the problem statements above, it’s a strong indicator that they’re wasting time hunting down assets and getting bogged down in administrative tasks rather than working on building engaging marketing campaigns. In other words, it suggests that you’re ready for a Digital Asset Management solution.

Learn more about Digital Asset Management (DAM) best practices here.

Digital Asset Management: A Foundation for Effective Marketing

An improvised digital asset management strategy is a productivity killer. If your employees need to spend hours every week spending on assets, they’re going to make do with what they can find rather than what’s best for your brand. Keeping a central content repository in a Digital Asset Management solution gives your employees a stable foundation to find effective materials to communicate better with your customers.

Want to find out how Digital Asset Management can help increase the ROI of your marketing? Contact us now or calculate it directly from our DAM ROI Calculator.