Digital Asset Management (DAM): What is it? And why do you need it?
Digital Asset Management is one of the fastest-growing industries and what’s driving this change is the growing digitisation of content, collaboration, delivery, access control, security and more.
How often does it happen that you search for content, and it takes hours to find it? Do you have any centralised location where you know you can find any content?
Another important reason is brand identity! If you want to share content on social media, update the website or share it with someone.
How do you ensure your brand identity is consistent across all these channels/platforms?
This is where Digital Asset Management becomes integral, it’s a need for organisations today!
Gartner defines,
A digital asset is anything that is stored digitally and is uniquely identifiable that organizations can use to realise value. Examples of digital assets include documents, audio, videos, logos, slide presentations, spreadsheets and websites.
What is Digital Asset Management?
Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a business process management solution that provides a central repository where you can manage, organise, access control, share and analyse content. It is an effective way to empower teams where instead of everything being located on an individual computer, you get a central space where all your digital assets are ready to use by anyone who has access to it.
Apart from all of the above, DAM also helps with brand control where it ensures how you run your business and also how to handle your digital information. DAM helps you manage how you use, handle and distribute your content.
59% of those using solutions other than a DAM report challenges with ensuring up-to-date and approved assets are used.
Let’s see some of the challenges that DAM can help you resolve.
1. Accessibility- Every organisation has an abundance of data but they are rarely managed properly. Sometimes wrong assets are used at the wrong time, or it is unavailable when you need them. So, having a centralised solution can help organisations regain control and establish a set workflow where they can manage access, streamline the process of approval and right assets available whenever required.
2. Prevent lost and misplaced work- With so much content creation, there are high chances, a lot of assets will be lost or misplaced. DAM makes it easier to pinpoint the location of the digital asset while making the assets most available and used whenever teams want them. It prevents loss of assets and misplacement.
3. Remove silos- One of the most common challenges is sharing of information and communication between two departments or teams boosting collaboration and sharing. DAM helps democratise assets, create a fluent workflow and improve consistency across all the channels.
4. Supports your digital transformation strategy- DAM helps you stay fast-paced as it allows you to easily organise and optimise your digital assets, which is an important ingredient to digital success. Content is something that’s required by both internal and external teams as it’s a way to communicate and share information. One of the greatest benefits of DAM is that it helps maintain brand consistency.
5. Detailed analytics- DAM comes with analytics and insights on how different assets are used and who is accessing what content. It helps identify which asset is inciting more interest, what can be done to optimise these assets and how to make the content strategy stronger and more effective.
What does a DAM solution do?
There are some of the very important components that DAM solutions must include:
1. Managing and Organising- Once you upload your content, you can manage and organise them into different categories to find the content easily whenever needed. Here, you can also create a smart folder based on similar tags and categories to make it easier for others to see.
2. Access Control- Another important aspect of the DAM solution is that it helps control access, you decide which team gets access to what type of content and who can share it further with other teams. It helps maintain control and visibility of what content is available to whom while maintaining brand consistency.
3. Search and Share- Since it is a central repository, you can easily run a quick search across the library to find relevant content. You can also bookmark them to find them easily in the future. You can also share the content on social media, WhatsApp etc., to engage and communicate effectively.
4. Analyse Content- Visibility and analysis are necessary to make any activity more effective and efficient. Hence, relevant insights on content usage, sharing, access and several other aspects, help analyse the effectiveness of the content available in the DAM and optimise it accordingly.
Evaluating a Digital Asset Management Platform
Now, if you are planning to invest in a Digital Asset Management solution, there are certain aspects that you must consider and evaluate your platform accordingly. A DAM solution should be able to scale, accommodate the need of a diverse set of users, and be easy to implement.
1. Pricing- Before implementing any new solution or software, cost evaluation is necessary. Even though effective management of digital assets helps generate better ROI, still businesses have designated budgets and financial limitations to make investments. DAM is a growing space hence, there are many platforms available in different price ranges that can be customised as per the need of your organisation.
2. On-premise or cloud-based- Once the pricing aspect is settled, another criterion is whether your organisation requires a cloud-based solution or an on-premise solution. Making this clear will also remove a large number of options for DAM platforms. This aspect can be determined with the help of IT teams.
3. Ability to maintain brand identity- Since DAM is a central repository and can be accessed by both internal and external teams, it should be capable of maintaining brand identity. It should have the capability to assure that duplicate, outdated or wrong assets are not accessible or shared by the teams. Aspects that can bring brand consistency will include features like brand guidelines, right management, version controls, brand integrity and more.
4. Customisations- During the evaluation, make sure you understand your needs and what level of customisation can be offered by the DAM solution to fit your requirements. Just having ideas that are out of the box and not manageable can slow down the process of enabling teams and resolving their actual problems. If your organisation is small then, evaluating a large or enterprise-level solution would be irrelevant.
5. Integration- Apart from DAM features, another important thing can be whether it can be seamlessly integrated with your current tools and software such as Google Drive, project management tools and more. However, this might not be the most prioritised need for the organisation, but it can be useful to seamlessly move assets across systems.
Digital Asset Management with SalesPanda
SalesPanda is a well-integrated SaaS-based sales enablement and acceleration platform where we provide a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. It’s a central repository for internal and external teams (agents, advisors, employees, partners etc.) to maintain brand identity, consistency and control. Our solution ensures that it helps maintain brand consistency, communication, user-friendliness, control and security.
Here, we offer features like:
1. Advanced search- Based on relevant tags, you can put keywords to run a quick search across the library and narrow down your results. It helps quickly find content and allows you to ‘Bookmark’ that content for future reference.
2. Smart folders- Based on criteria like tags and content category you can create a smart folder where all the relevant content gets fetched automatically to use in the future.
3. Access control- You can provide access settings by defining user rights for the library, both internal and external users of the asset library.
4. Share to engage- After getting the access rights teams can further share it with the customers to keep the communication and engagement consistent.
5. Co-branding- Users can co-brand their content along with their details like Name, Mobile Number, Email etc. and share it with their customers to strengthen trust.
You can schedule a demo of our platform by writing to us at
marketing@salespanda.com