In today’s marketplace, digital assets are more valuable than ever. From captivating images to snazzy infographics, digital assets are resources that make a company’s marketing and branding campaigns possible. And with more digital assets to sort and manage, it’s important to have a quick and efficient way to organize and locate the assets right when you need them.
But before we get to an organization system for our digital assets, we have to first determine what digital assets actually are.
What is a Digital Asset?
The dictionary defines an asset is a person, quality or thing that is useful and valuable. So it stands to reason that a digital asset is something of value to a company in it’s digital form.
In a practical sense, digital assets are things that hold value for a brand or company that are stored in digital form. Examples of common digital assets include:
Photos
Videos
Graphics
Logos
Branding guidelines
Fonts
Copywriting
Today, digital assets are most used in digital marketing efforts like social media marketing, YouTube marketing, website design, apps, email campaigns and more. If it uses the internet or any device powered by electricity, it is probably digital marketing.
How Should I Store and Organize my Digital Assets?
Because most companies marketing strategies depend upon their digital marketing efforts, digital assets are precious commodities. Your digital assets have to be easy to find, easy to share and easy to edit.
In the past, file storage options were generic storage options like cloud storage or a physical hard drive. But common cloud storage solutions like Google Drive or Dropbox are limited in features and performance. Plus, we’ve all seen a Google Drive account filled with poorly named files in a jumbled up mess.
Thankfully, it no longer has to be that way. A DAM offers brands and companies a better solution, helping them to end the content chaos.
What is a DAM?
A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is a tool that helps brands organize and fully leverage their digital assets. Other generic storage solutions simply act as a place to store files, while offering some basic organization or collaboration functionality, while a DAM provides users with many useful features that will vastly improve your digital marketing efforts.
A great DAM also allows users to carefully track important metrics relating to digital marketing campaigns. This includes things like evaluating the performance of different assets at key points in the marketing cycle or buyers journey. That way, your marketing team can fully understand what’s working and what isn’t.
Some of other amazing the things a DAM can do for a brand creatives and marketing pros include:
Keeping track and analyzing the findings of A/B testing of digital assets or different versions of advertisements
Clearly organizing and marking different versions of a digital asset created for different platforms, seasons or purposes.
Allowing creative pros to make changes to digital assets while working with collaborators in real time.
Automatically taking care of metadata changes when something new is added to the DAM.
Managing metadata by making automated changes when a new asset is uploaded
Automatically tracking digital asset licenses and their validity which makes sure everything is legal without expensive legal fees.
Your DAM Should Offer Robust Smart Search & Discovery Features
While the functions and features discussed above offer massive value to DAM users, what’s perhaps the most vital thing a DAM must offer is smart search and discovery functions. This allows users to effortlessly find the digital assets they need--without searching for a needle in a haystack. Some of the smart search & discovery features Brandfolder offers include:
Easy in-document searches
Pinned searches that are used frequently
Auto-tagging of digital assets
Smart filtering techniques
AI Image recognition
Automatic metadata extraction
Suggested searches
And more
To learn more about the ways that Brandfolder can help your brand optimize digital assets and fully leverage their power through its powerful DAM platform, contact us today: (720) 744-0300 | hello@brandfolder.com