What Are the Digital Asset Management Best Practices
There are several best practices for digital asset management; use controls and alerts to avoid copyright and infringement, leverage your digital asset management built-in analytics, standardize naming and meta-tagging, use the roles and permissions
For successful digital asset management, you need to implement the best practices. However, most people do not know the best practices, hence not getting the expected results from their systems. This article will take you through the best practices for digital asset management.
There are several best practices for digital asset management; use controls and alerts to avoid copyright and infringement, leverage your digital asset management built-in analytics, standardize naming and meta-tagging, use the roles and permissions to add a security layer, and keep the digital content in the DAM clean and current.
Read on to learn more about the best practices you should implement to ensure your digital asset management is successful. On top of that, learn about the roles of digital asset managers, the skills they should possess, and their responsibilities.
What Are the Digital Asset Management Best Practices
Digital asset management is a software system that stores and manages digital content. With a great DAM solution, you can get access to all your digital assets with a click of a finger. Examples of digital assets you can access easily are images, videos, documents, audio files, presentation decks, and much more. Additionally, the system asl ensures brand consistency and also increases campaign productivity. It also helps set important dates like the expiration of asset licenses, automate workflows, and check how your creative digital assets are performing. Below are the best digital asset management that you can take advantage of to get the most out of your system;
Leverage your digital asset management built-in analytics
With digital asset management with built-in capabilities, you can access various data to help you produce your digital assets. With DAM, forget about finding your assets whenever you need them; you can also see when an individual asset was last used, who used it, and for what reason. And most interestingly, when you want to create assets, DAM analytics tools come in handy by helping you figure out what support the marketing and sales teams use most. You can also take advantage of it and audit your current assets and find out if there are any gaps, and find solutions.
Standardize naming and meta-tagging
Most organizations overlook this practice; they don't know that everyone can easily find the files they are looking for when you develop a consistent, clear protocol for categorizing your digital assets plus metadata. This will, in return, increase efficiency and productivity for your business. Clear consistency involves saving your files in a particular manner and using specific files, a name that will be easily spotted and recognized, for instance, a campaign name.
Use roles and permissions to add a security layer
Most organizations have different and several employees who frequently use digital assets. Not everyone may have good intentions with them hence the need to use your digital asset management's role and permissions to make it safer for your purchases by having only authorized users access the assets. The best thing about implementing strict access control is gaining more secure and protected digital assets. With the same power, you will also be able to prevent users from accessing assets that are being created, plus limit campaign access to campaign-specific assets. Tesames can guide you through the process.
Avoid copyright infringement by using controls and alerts
Digital asset management's control and alerts can help you restrict access to specific campaigns. For instance, you can use rights-managed stock photos in a marketing campaign to reduce the chances of copyrighted photographs being used without your knowledge. It also goes a long way in informing team members when a license is about to expire so they can take action and review it.
Keep the digital content in your DAM clean and current
Your DAM will lose value if not properly maintained, and one of the ways to maintain it is by keeping it clean and organized. Some systems have features that help to keep your library asset organized; as time passes, you get new content and update the old one. Still, there are those DAMs that lack the features, but that shouldn't be a reason to worry you as you can go through the system once in a while, let's say in 3-4 months, to check the files that are not needed anymore and delete them. This will help keep the system clean and current.
What Do Digital Asset Managers Do?
As your business grows, your digital assets increase, and managing them becomes challenging. It would be best to consider adding a digital asset manager to simplify things for yourself. Do you know what they do? Let me break down everything for you.
What Are the Roles of a Digital Asset Manager?
Digital asset managers are responsible for creating, managing, and protecting your digital assets. They perform the tasks with the help of a digital asset management system. They oversee the following;
- Systematic naming, storage, plus maintenance of the digital assets.
- Monitoring and management of the access and usage of assets.
- Promotion plus optimization of the use of digital assets.
They are involved in governance, guidance, research, enforcement, and tool development. Additionally, they collect the business's assets in one place, organize them and make them easily accessible to various teams.
What Skills Should a Digital Asset Manager Possess?
The skills of a digital asset manager are divided into three; technical, analytical, and personal. Let's see what each entails in detail.
Technical skills
The fact that they must be able to work with metadata, search facets, taxonomy, digital rights, and web publishing process; they must also possess the following skills;
- Acquittance with the CMS, project management tools, ticketing systems, product information management, plus enterprise resource planning.
- Knowledgeable about marketing stacks, integrators, vendors, plus resellers.
- Familiar with markup plus programming languages, like HTML, CSS, Linux, plus macOS-based operating systems.
Analytical skills
They must be able to;
- Prioritize tasks plus assets
- Collect and manage digital assets to ensure the assets are fully functional and readily accessible.
- Apply reasonable metadata tags to assets by a consistent methodology.
- Implement an efficient plus effective system
Personal skills
The personal skills that a digital asset manager should possess are;
- A good relationship with customers and colleagues. Remember, most of the customers are not tech savvy hence the need to be a leader and teammate simultaneously.
- Explain the usage conditions and access procedures of the organization's assets.
- Diligently enforce compliance with the related guidelines.
What Are the Responsibilities of a Digital Asset Manager
Digital asset management systems ease the work of managers by helping them automate workflows, improving the organization's daily tasks and productivity. Check the table below for the critical responsibilities of a digital asset manager;
| Duties of a digital asset manager | About |
| Consistent branding | They ensure that the essential versions of digital marketing assets are easily found and that only authorized personnel can access and change the permissions. |
| High productivity | Create an excellent mechanism for simple search plus the application of assets. They also publish up-to-date, explicit usage and licensing data. |
| Uniform content usage | Create content uniformity by having timestamps, restricting channel assets, automating expiry dates, and enforcing company-wide compliance with content creation. |
| A centralized repository of assets | They maintain a well-organized library, cataloged and followed by all the usage details. |
| Informative timely reports | often analyze and report metrics containing demographics of access, lifecycle, and usage of digital assets. |
| Compliance with licenses plus copyrights | Ensures that every content has the correct licensing plus copyright information and automates the deletion of content once its license expires. |
| Tagging of metadata | Save digital assets with the correct information like creation date, file name, and type plus category in the form of metadata. |
| Accurate, descriptive, and consistent terminology | Ensures that the file naming is descriptive and accurate and shows how each asset relates to the other file in the system. |
Conclusion
The success of digital asset management depends highly on the practices you put into place. At least, now you have an idea of what those practices are. Protect your digital assets by hiring a digital asset manager, they have a lot to bring to the table and help take your business to the next level when it comes to managing your digital assets. Contact us for professional digital asset services.
