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How to Manage Digital Assets Across Channels at Scale

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May 30, 2022

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The more products you sell on a larger scale, the more challenging it is to manage your content across channels.

In fact: Almost half of content marketers, around 43%, find themselves dedicating about four hours daily to handling administrative and operational tasks associated with content management.  

Now that you’ve outgrown basic file hosting services, you need a solution that can manage your digital assets efficiently and publish them on the channels of your choice, ideally with the snap of a finger.

Great news, that’s exactly what we’ll show you today.

What is a Digital Asset?

A digital asset is a piece of online content used for business purposes.

  • Common examples include:

    • Documents (e.g., product release notes and industry-specific case studies)

    • Audio files (e.g., podcast recordings)

    • Videos (e.g., YouTube ads)

    • Logos and graphics (e.g., Banners to complement marketing campaigns)

    • Slides (e.g., presentation slides for annual conferences)

    • Images (e.g. product photos for ecommerce websites)

Marketers usually store these digital assets in a digital asset management (DAM) platform.

What Is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

Digital asset management (DAM) is a process where brands store, organize, and manage their corporate assets on a central platform. That way, stakeholders can access them any place, any time, and anywhere. 

The DAM market is on fire, with an impressive annual growth rate of 17.0% projected from 2024 to 2032. This surge is driven by skyrocketing adoption rates across various sectors, especially in media and entertainment, which dominates the market.  

And with more and more companies recognizing the value of managing their digital assets effectively, DAM systems are becoming crucial tools for businesses that want to stay ahead.  

Depending on the tool’s features, it might even distribute your assets to the channels of your choice directly within the platform. 

Enterprise DAM suites deliver omnichannel experiences in real-time with a few quick clicks. 

Digizuite DAM frontend example

How to Manage Digital Assets?

When you’re a solopreneur

Solopreneurs are companies of one with minimal asset management needs.

Take an independent designer, for instance.

She might store all her projects in a simple solution like Dropbox or Google Drive and share the unique links with her clients. If she wants to streamline her workflow, she could integrate it with one or two third-party apps.

Everything is straightforward and requires little work.

When you’re an agency or SMB

Unlike solo entrepreneurs, agencies and SMBs work with dozens to hundreds of customers at a time.

With this group, the ideal storage service sits between no-frills tools and enterprise-level DAM suites. In other words, a project management tool with multiple integrations will work brilliantly.

Let’s illustrate this with a fictional example.

An end-to-end fashion agency might struggle with branding, managing the internal asset creation process, sharing deliverables with clients, and marketing them, to name a few. 

In this case, it will need an integrated tech stack that helps with creating prototypes, collecting feedback, and exporting assets.

When you’re an enterprise

Enterprises are a whole different ball game.

Not only do these massive corporations struggle to coordinate their content marketing efforts, but they’re also constantly plagued by departmental silos, lack of technology integration, localization issues, and inconsistent messaging in global markets.

  • It’s no wonder then that enterprises around the world prioritize:

    • Productivity improvement when managing digital assets. The less time brands spend on manual and repetitive tasks (e.g., searching files), the sooner they reach time-to-market, engage with customers, and boost sales.

    • Ensuring brand compliance with legal protections in place. Better yet, marketers should get notified when products are no longer in stock (i.e. sold out), have been called back (i.e. technical issues) or are nearing their expiration date, so as to avoid copyright infringement.

    • Cross-functional collaboration. Companies that align every department in the absence of silos and collaborate effectively see a 76% success rate in their projects.

    • Maintaining global brand consistency across hundreds of products in different regions, industries, and multiple sales and distribution channels. A consistent brand experience increases revenue by 10-20%.

    • Omnichannel content distribution to unify all communication with customers. Marketers who used three or more channels in a campaign earned a 494% higher order rate than those using only one channel.

A robust DAM system solves all these issues. It updates your digital assets and shares them across multiple channels simultaneously without requiring you to leave the platform.

Illustration showing multiple channels

Digital asset management tools don’t just help enterprises manage digital assets efficiently. At its core, these platforms transform your entire content operations, freeing up more time for value-adding activities.

DAM in the age of AI 

As AI is increasingly becoming the norm, AI and machine learning will transform how businesses manage digital assets through DAM systems.  

AI-driven DAM platforms will boost efficiency by automating tasks like metadata tagging, keyword extraction, and expiration date alerts.  

For example, marketers will get timely notifications to update expiring assets, which helps ensure smooth content management.  

Additionally, DAM systems will automatically optimize asset formats for various platforms and streamline background removal from images. As a result, enterprises can ensure more personalized and timely content delivery, keeping brands relevant and engaging in a competitive market. 

Why Do You Need a DAM?

The global DAM market size is projected to grow from $4.2 billion in 2022 to $8 billion by 2027—this hints at a growing need for structure amid content chaos.

If you’re still skeptical, here are the three big reasons DAM platforms matter.

Publish all digital assets to all channels directly on one platform

Don’t you just hate it when you have to click through dozens of tabs to publish the same piece of content?

You’re not alone.

When SEMrush surveyed 1,500 content marketers across industries, it discovered publishing content at scale remains one of the top challenges.

This is where DAM platforms come in. 

Say, you want to publish your photos from Adobe Creative Cloud to your sales and distribution channels.

To do this, all you have to do is to:

  1. Connect your Adobe account with Digizuite

  2. Edit your photos directly without leaving Adobe Photoshop

  3. Update changes on Adobe Photoshop (note: all modified assets are automatically updated in Digizuite)

  4. Distribute photos to the channels of your choice (e.g., website, Facebook, e-commerce site, partner channels) directly on Digizuite

Adobe connector to Digizuite DAM

And it’s not only Adobe Creative Cloud.

Digizuite also integrates with other major MarTech tools like Optimizely and Sitecore.

Increase visibility no matter what content it is

Content marketing gains new traffic, leads, and sales.

Failure to locate the right asset at the right time hurts first impression, loses credibility, and causes potential loss of sales. 

A DAM platform prevents findability issues.

It helps you locate high-value content (e.g., case studies, 3D and CAD object files, 360-degree images) seamlessly.

To access the specific digital asset you’re looking for, do a quick search and select the relevant filters (e.g., “360-degree view product No X” for content type and “USA” for country).

Want to save time for future searches? Save your most often-used search criteria(s).

Automate manual workflows and promote cross-functional collaboration

According to Monday.com, 38% of 1,000 workers feel that they could save up to five hours each week if they had tools to automate their repetitive tasks.

DAM solutions solve this knotty issue by enabling your internal and external teams to work faster in workflows.

Whether it’s approving digital assets, publishing them to your marketing channels simultaneously, sending them to specific stakeholders, or archiving a piece of content on a desired date, you can easily customize your own workflows to fit your organizational needs.

Conclusion

DAM platforms are an overkill for solo entrepreneurs and small businesses.

But it’s a different story for larger companies.

The more products you sell, the more brands and channels you need to manage.

Add in different audiences (businesses and consumers) and it’s easy to see why managing digital assets can be a challenge for enterprises.

That’s why companies like Volvo Trucks, Nikon and CommScope use Digizuite, which supports them in their strategy to deliver a consistent brand experience across all channels and customer end-points.

Book a 30-minute call with us to manage your digital assets from a single source of truth today.

 

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