Five Best Practices for Digital Asset Management

Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms are crucial for centralizing, organizing, and distributing an organization’s assets across various internal and external teams. A well-implemented DAM ensures brand consistency, reduces marketing operation costs by streamlining workflows, and minimizes asset duplication and content sprawl.

While a wide variety of digital asset management platforms are available to you, the processes, and strategies to best utilize them are typically the same. To maximize the benefits of your DAM, consider these best practices.

1. Set Clear Goals and Objectives

Establishing clear goals and objectives is essential whether you’re setting up a DAM for the first time or refining an existing system. Identify the primary users of your DAM and gather their input to create a prioritized list of objectives. Document these objectives as milestones for implementation.

For a new DAM, your goals might include establishing brand standardization, minimizing legal risks, and creating a single source of truth for your assets. If you’re refining your existing digital asset management platform, you might focus on specific goals like streamlining workflows through automation or integrating your DAM with other marketing technology tools.

Common goals for a DAM system:

• Create a single source of truth where team members and external partners can find what they need

• Monitor content effectiveness by understanding where and why teammates publish content and measure how well it engages targeted audiences.

• Streamline workflows for sharing proofs, collecting feedback, and getting approvals from each reviewer.

2. Identify and Audit Your Assets

Conducting a thorough audit of your assets is fundamental to establishing and maintaining a reliable source of truth. An audit provides insight into the types of assets you have, their storage locations, and who has access to them. Consider your current goals and evaluate how the state of your assets impacts these objectives.

An audit will help you determine which assets should and shouldn’t be stored in your DAM. Avoid clutter by storing only final, high-resolution versions of assets and letting the DAM generate lower-resolution versions as needed. Regular audits help eliminate duplication and outdated files and ensure that assets meet standards for metadata, naming conventions, and taxonomy.

Key tasks to perform in an asset audit:

• Take inventory of all digital assets, including their types, folder structure, and stakeholders.

• Review adherence to metadata and naming convention standards.

• Identify unused, outdated, or duplicate assets that can be purged or archived.

3. Create Comprehensive Governance Documentation

A governance document is your roadmap for maintaining consistent processes, rules, and systems within your DAM. Without proper governance, your DAM can become disorganized, making it challenging and time-consuming to manage permissions and access.

When developing your governance document, remember that it should be a living document that evolves with changes in goals, policies, and workflows. Ideally, a DAM Administrator or Librarian should oversee its creation, updates, and adherence. To ensure consistency and compliance, include clear guidelines for roles and permissions, file naming conventions, metadata requirements, and rights management.

Examples of what to include in your governance document:

• Determine user roles and permission for uploading, downloading, editing, and sharing assets.

• Set rules around file naming conventions, tagging, and required metadata.

• Establish workflow procedures for uploading, approving, and categorizing assets.

4. Educate and Communicate

In-depth training and communication are vital for realizing a substantial ROI from your DAM. While vendor-provided DAM administration training is important, continuous internal training and communication are crucial for user engagement and effective utilization.

Customizing your internal training for different user roles can ensure relevance and avoid overwhelming users with unnecessary information. Offering a blend of in-person sessions alongside documentation and videos can help users communicate issues and work through them collaboratively while providing resources for self-paced learning. Tailoring the training to various learning styles helps users adapt smoothly to changes.

Effective ways to train and engage your DAM users:

• Host live webinars with assistance from your vendor account representative.

• Provide recorded training videos and how-to articles accessible from your DAM homepage.

• Periodically send email newsletters highlighting new features, tips and tricks, and ways the DAM will make user’s jobs easier.

5. Establish a Maintenance Schedule

Ongoing maintenance is essential for keeping your DAM functional and efficient. Implement a schedule for weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual tasks. Regularly review and update goals and objectives, perform asset audits to remove expired or irrelevant items, and ensure current governance documentation.

Offer regular training sessions to onboard new users and keep existing users engaged by sharing updates, tips, and highlights. Additionally, monitor site analytics to understand user behavior, identify power users, and uncover areas for improvement to enhance your DAM’s ROI.

Recommended items to include in your maintenance schedule:

• Weekly — check uploads for incomplete metadata, delete conflicting or redundant files, and monitor DAM for system alerts or errors.

• Monthly — review and delete inactive users, review expired assets, and review analytics for optimization opportunities.

• Quarterly — engage users with training and soliciting feedback, review permissions, and governance policies, and delete expired and outdated assets.

Making the most of your digital asset management platform is an ongoing effort. While it may require an investment of time and resources, it pays dividends through increased productivity and efficiency. By following these best practices and adopting a culture of continuous improvement, you can optimize the effectiveness of your DAM and ensure it continues to meet your organization’s evolving needs.