What is digital asset management?
It’s more than just managing your digital files, digital asset management (DAM) involves hardware or software that not only stores, but catalogues, annotates, retrieves, and distributes digital assets like videos, photos, animations, documents, and more.
Widen Enterprises CEO Matthew Gonnering tells us that digital asset management can actually improve a company’s productivity. Gonnering said, “No doubt, the nature of Digital Asset Management is dynamic. Rather than a static system that gets set up once and runs, DAM is constantly evolving along with newer and better ideas that spring up all along the digital asset life cycle.”
Further, Gonnering explains, “There are always new media types being originated and created, new strategies made for their storage and management, new devices and solutions evolved to consume digital assets, and new preferred vehicles developed to market utilizing those assets for consumption.”
Three ways to stay ahead, stay productive
How do brands stay ahead of the changes and keep their chosen DAM solution current, efficient and able to scale for what the future brings? Gonnering offers the following three key points as guidelines:
- Use a SaaS DAM model. A SaaS-based DAM solution will serve you well into the future for a number of reasons. It holds up to lightening-fast technical advances, and can even be adjusted according to these advances before you realize you need them. It can ensure, for example, you are delivered the fastest, richest user experience that’s responsive to the variety of ways your assets will be used. It can even scale itself automatically to the file load you are currently working with. The install model can’t come close to delivering those types of advantages, and will continue to lag further behind in terms of adjusting to what comes next.
- Integration is essential. If you’re smart and use DAM as the central storage and management platform for all of your assets, you need to make sure your solution integrates easily with all of the other applications you utilize to manage subtasks. This leaves you free to take advantage of the ever-evolving best-in-class subtask management tools that are available, while maintaining assurance that DAM, as your primary solution, can and will continue to speak to and interact seamlessly with all of them.
- Customer service is king. Although reliable self-education with easily-accessible, timely and reliable content for using your DAM system is essential to the consistent efficacy of its use, nothing comes close to exemplary customer service when the circumstances require you to work with a person in real time. Look for a DAM solution with a support portal that makes it extremely easy for you to get answers, or to start a chat with a customer service representative. Only organizations built on a legacy of fantastic — and consistent — customer service are trustworthy enough to take the immeasurable value of your digital assets into their hands.
