Three big reasons to have a Digital Asset Manager (DAM) strategy
Everyone who lives in our current digital age knows how important it is to find the right file, photo or graphic asset, at the exact moment that you need it. Organizations of any size are no different and working closely with a Digital Asset Manager (DAM) can have multiple benefits: the creation, organization and sharing of digital assets like images, company documents, videos and presentations.
For example, let’s say there is an agency with multiple clients or brands. For them to be able to store digital assets (logos, design guidelines, banners etc.) and then share all these assets with different departments is a big win for branding consistency. Depending on your type of business, there are also big benefits in creating a strategy around how you use digital assets and how you plan to grow your assets library: the result will be an increase in speed, availability, localization, centralization and brand consistency.
In this article, we’ll not only give you the steps to develop a strategy, we’ll show you the benefits of doing so!
Set your strategy
First you need to compare your digital assets today with where you would like to get to. Are you growing in the number of digital assets? Are these assets accessed by different teams? Do you have your assets in multiple tools? Do you use them in multiple places, not only digital? After you find out the answers to these questions, you can implement the following plan:
- Understand how to categorize / tag your assets. Plan your DAM hierarchy so it makes sense for your business and how people access your assets. It is also important to decide on consistent naming conventions
- Set a migration schedule to migrate all your content to your DAM
- Share this plan with your development team so they can validate your ideas
- Execute the implementation plan and prepare for training your users
When you have a solid strategy in place, the benefits will arrive almost immediately.
DAM as content repository
Using your DAM as your digital assets repository is by far the most common use of a DAM. However, having a tool that allows you to scale rapidly and easily add functionality around asset management gives you even bigger benefits. One DAM tool, Cloudinary, offers you just that if you use its basic functionality. You can organize, tag, search and share folders and assets across your organization
Centralization
If you are a business that publishes content or you are serious about a branding strategy and deploying the same assets from a single location to all of your digital properties, then you will need to connect your DAM assets with your website or other proprietary channels.
This will enable you to have the same version of your logos not only in your catalogs and printed publications, also on your website, emails, and wherever you need to put your brand.
Cloudinary: best-in-class developer tools
One example of the advantages of a DAM is Cloudinary, a company that uses AI and automation to make it a breeze for brands to deliver speedy, high resolution experiences.
Keeping in mind its developer-first approach, Cloudinary offers powerful tools that allow the developer to configure how the images or videos are being consumed.
You can decide in real-time whether to serve a customer’s browser a high resolution version of your product images or a smaller one depending on the device and speed of connection.
This feature combined with mult-content delivery networks (CDNs), injects an extra performance boost by serving the image from the location closest to where it is accessed. Customer experience is greatly improved using a DAM to serve your images to the web.
This not only is efficient, but it also saves development costs, allowing Cloudinary to handle all the content delivery.
If this sounds like something that you would like to implement, but don’t know where to start, we can help. At Harnon, our development and services teams are always excited to work with you to come with a solution for our customers. Contact us to learn more.