Checklist & Examples to Develop Your Digital Asset Management (DAM) Strategy

The struggle to find creative assets is a pain point that many marketing teams share. Research shows that 40% of marketers report they don’t have a single source of truth and find it difficult to locate digital assets, meaning a substantial number of marketers can’t find the necessary materials to create up-to-date on brand and engaging marketing materials.

In other words, they’re in dire need of a Digital Asset Management system strategy to help them find creative assets. However, building a Digital Asset Management strategy isn’t as simple as onboarding a new digital solution; it’s about ensuring that your organization is in the right state of readiness to benefit from building an entirely new process for managing digital assets.

This article will provide a Digital Asset Management examples checklist that’s broken down into three sections;

• a checklist you can use to measure your organizational readiness,
• a Digital Asset Management solution checklist you can use to find the right platform,
• an adoption checklist to prepare for a successful digital transformation.

Digital Asset Management Examples and Signs of Readiness Checklist

Before adopting a Digital Asset Management solution, it’s useful to identify what challenges your organization is facing when managing content to know whether making the transition is right for you. Some of the key signs that your organization is ready include:

1. Your team is struggling to find digital assets

The most significant sign that your team is ready for a Digital Asset Management solution is if they are wasting lots of time finding and/or recreating creative assets. If a team can’t find assets quickly, then a Digital Asset Management solution will enable you to create a searchable library of rich media assets so they can find the content they need faster.

Watch this video to learn how to search the right information with a DAM solution

2. You can’t guarantee the security of your digital assets

Organizations that can’t locate digital assets or rely on cloud-based shared drives often struggle to protect the security of those assets due to a lack of comprehensive security controls. Switching to a DAM system is a great way to protect the security of your assets because you can use features like user access permissions and authentication, to control who has access to what marketing materials.

Learn more about content & data security here

3. Your organization has outgrown AD-hoc solutions like shared drives

If you’re at the stage where you’re organization is too large to use disparate ad-hoc solutions like shared drives to manage digital assets, or it’s likely to become too large in the next 12-24 months or so, a Digital Asset Management solution can help you to centralize the storage of your assets so that employees can search for them in one place.

Learn more about our most recent benchmarks with 11 billion objects

Choosing the Right Digital Asset Management Solution Checklist

After identifying whether your organization is ready to modernize its asset management process, it’s time to start a preliminary search for a Digital Asset Management solution. Identifying a high-performance tool is critical for ensuring that you optimize your asset management strategy. Below are some Digital Asset Management examples of features you should look out for:

• A simple user experience
• Bulk import digital assets
• User permissions and Access Control Lists to control user access
• Document sharing
• Automatically tag metadata (optional/advanced)

Being able to import digital assets in bulk is essential for organizations with thousands of assets because otherwise, the process of importing your content will take too long. Other features like document sharing will make it easier for creative teams to collaborate on documents without going back and forth via email.

It’s important to note that if you’re dealing with a high volume of assets, it’s also worth considering an advanced solution like Nuxeo Platform that can automatically tag rich media assets with AI and ML. Automatically tagging rich media assets means your employees don’t need to tag assets manually, freeing up time and reducing the chance of documents being tagged with the metadata.

Digital Asset Management Examples Adoption Checklist: Things to Double-Check Before You Adopt

After assessing your organizational readiness, the importance of DAM system and identifying a potential solution, there are some key things you need to check to ensure that you’re in the position to undergo a successful digital transformation. Before adopting a new solution, you need to make sure that:

☑ You have the necessary budget to purchase a new solution
☑ You have a clearly defined goal you want to achieve by onboarding a new solution
☑ You’ve determined who will create metadata for assets and how often
☑ You have achieved buy-in from all relevant decision-makers
☑ You know who will use the platform on a day-to-day basis
☑ You have a strategy to increase user adoption (with 1-to-1 coaching opportunities or online training materials)

The most important things to check before implementing a Digital Asset Management strategy are that you have the funds available to purchase a new solution and buy-in from all relevant decision-makers. If you don’t have the necessary budget or approval, then you’re unlikely to see your transformation attempt through to its conclusion, resulting in a waste of time and money.

Start Small, and Think Long Term

Building a Digital Asset Management process is a long-term effort, so don’t try to create a complete strategy overnight. Start small by assessing your organizational readiness, identify a solution with the features needed to streamline your asset management process, and then draft an adoption strategy to onboard the solution successfully.

While there are many tools and Digital Asset Management examples suitable for entry-level users, selecting a comprehensive Digital Asset Management system like the Nuxeo Platform can make it much easier to build your DAM strategy by providing advanced features like automated tagging and document collaboration, which ensure your users have all the tools to process digital assets quickly and painlessly.

Want Nuxeo to help you kickstart your Digital Asset Management strategy?
Contact a member of our team today or read our Guide to Strategic DAM Replacement or Consolidation.