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Why You Should Take Advantage of Digital Asset Management

Every business that deals with a vast number of video plus image assets will, in one way or another, struggle with asset management. The struggle will mess up their productivity and growth as the assets' volume keeps growing without a proper way to handle them. So you may wonder, what is the solution to this? Digital asset management is the only way out! It will help you organize the assets in one destination, making it easy for everyone to access them. You won't have to deal with lost files, duplicates, or anyone creating a copy for themselves. The above are just a few advantages of investing in digital asset management; you will learn more as you read. 

What Is Digital Asset Management

Digital asset management helps businesses or people to manage their digital assets. It lets you locate the correct file, track its usage within the industry, and keep files organized. Digital asset management systems can be used by any company, whether big or small, as long as they need to store digital data for marketing purposes or vast amounts of data like video footage or music. 

What Are the Advantages of Digital Asset Management

As you've read above, digital asset management offers a bunch of advantages, and below are more in detail; 

Acts as a centralized file storage system

Finding the correct file on time is among the top challenges that employees of huge businesses face. Imagine how hard it is for a graphic designer to see the right version image, as there are several variations of the same picture; now imagine how hard it would be for an average person to find the file. That would be frustrating, but digital asset management saves the day, ensuring fast and easy access to the files for everyone, irrespective of location. Also, using tags, keywords, or descriptions makes it easy to locate the files, not forgetting meta tagging plus categorization, which ensures that users find files by search queries plus filters. It also lets you preview the assets before selecting them to ensure you choose the right one. And most interestingly, it achieves or deletes redundant assets, making the system clutter-free. 

Facilitates easier management of assets

Have you ever thought about how a project manager handles multiple teams working on different projects and how they manage to monitor asset-related operations? My guess is as good as yours; digital asset management helps them. The units can create project folders for each project, making the files organized and easy to find. They can also go a step further and classify the files based on purpose, format, size, etc., making it easier to find them. Digital asset management also has excellent features that make it easy to edit, create, approve, categorize, reject, move, delete, download, publish, unpublish, etc. 

Streamlines cross-team collaboration

Coordination within teams and getting everything going well is tricky unless you use digital asset management. A creative asset has to pass through multiple people like writers, designers, marketers, brand experts, and many more to ensure the final draft is excellent. Digital asset management makes it easy to collaborate between the team by replacing email exchanges and messaging tools with one platform where users can collaborate via real-time comments. Sometimes, you will find that an asset has multiple variants, but digital asset management will let you preserve, retrieve and restore all versions in the library. This makes it easy to find a file, even if it was deleted or misplaced. 

What Are the Stages of a Digital Asset Lifecycle

Managing a digital asset may be challenging unless you are an expert. The creation of digital assets is not about to die anytime soon, especially with the rise of omnichannel marketing plus the digitization of commerce. However, the good news is that a digital asset gets easy to master if you know its life cycle. There are five stages in the digital asset lifecycle; creation, management, retrieval, distribution, and archival. Let's have an in-depth look at them.

Create 

The creation process starts with having an idea and planning. To create the best, you should research your audience, study the competitors, and brainstorm on the content you will need to make to take your business to achieve your business goals. You can brainstorm with an expert or involve your team in developing more fantastic ideas. Once you have the concept, design, collaborate, review, execute, and approve. Then finalize and get the asset ready for use. 

Manage

After creating the digital asset, you need to tag it, organize and upload it to a central location with all the requirements to ensure it stays up-to-date and readily available to its users. Ensure it's well managed and stored appropriately for easier retrieval and use. 

Retrieve

Once the asset has been saved, searching for it in a file containing a thousand files is hard, but you can make it discoverable. You can do this by labeling it using unique slang that the team knows. The retrieval phase handles user groups, like marketers, sales teams, etc. This means each section can have its unique keyword to search for and get their files quickly. 

Distribute

When you create a digital asset, you have a purpose for it, and it will only serve its purpose when shared or distributed to meet the business goals. This means you must share it with the internal team and the external partners, and it must be in excellent condition for them to quickly identify it. You can also use it for your social media channels; the main catch is to have it quickly and securely accessible. 

Archive

If you want to extend the life of your digital asset, it would be wise to have it preserved in an archive. In cases where it is mainly used, it will remain in active storage, but when it has met its purpose and is not used as it's supposed to be, you can have it moved to archive as static content. This makes your storage space clean and, at the same time, ensures you can get your retired files anytime. 

Conclusion

Every organization needs a modern digital asset management solution to manage, optimize, and deliver images and videos in excellent condition to the appropriate audience. The need for digital assets will keep on growing exponentially in the future. The good news is that every business, no matter its size, can invest in digital assets. We offer comprehensive digital asset services; contact us for help.