DAM! Digital asset management, from definition to solution
Digital asset management (or DAM), another typical digital marketing anglicism. But what if we told you that this article was about managing your digital assets?
With the ever-increasing dematerialisation of media, which accumulate year after year on your servers, it is becoming essential to organise and store them correctly from the moment they are created, downloaded or purchased, so that they can be exploited easily and optimally.
In this article, appvizer sheds some light on digital asset management, and introduces you to a few trends in digital data management.
Digital asset management: definition and translation
What is digital asset management?
Digital asset management, or DAM to those in the know, translates as " digital resource management":
- still images (illustrations, photos, etc.),
- moving images (animations, videos, etc.)
- sound recordings (music, speeches, etc.)
- and other multimedia documents.
Digital asset management is therefore defined as a software solution whose functionalities cover :
- feeding
- annotation
- classification
- storage
- backup,
- searching,
- sharing,
- distribution,
- backup,
- optimisation,
of these digital resources.
In a way, it is an advanced online media library, particularly popular for marketing and communication activities.
What are the advantages of digital asset management?
The ROI (return on investment) resulting from the adoption of a DAM does not lie in the storage of files alone. It also comes from :
- effective use of media
- sharing and exploiting them both internally and externally,
- or their integration with other corporate solutions.
Digital asset management is therefore proving to be a powerful tool, from which professionals can draw a number of benefits. These include
- secure centralisation of documents on a single platform ;
- rapid search and sharing of digital files (search by similarity, etc.);
- reuse of resources, which eliminates redesign costs;
- support for inbound marketing strategy, which requires optimisation of resources for better targeting;
- managing copyright and restrictions on use;
- compliance with increasingly strict regulations;
- distribution of unified communication media;
- integrated image editing (one image, thumbnails, variants);
- image history and versioning ; etc.
With all these benefits, DAM provides a response to many of the challenges facing organisations today.
The issues surrounding DAM
Enhancing the company's brand image
Enhancing a company's brand image has become a major challenge for businesses. And with good reason: if it is well constructed, it constitutes a positive differentiating factor in a context where the market is becoming more competitive by the day.
Thanks to digital asset management, organisations have a tool that enables them to unify their communication and marketing strategy. In short, DAM brings coherence to the deployment of a stronger, more impactful visual identity and brand image.
More efficient digital asset management
Digital asset management is undoubtedly an asset in terms of productivity and achieving a better ROI from marketing and communication campaigns.
This tool ensures that digital assets are processed more efficiently, by automating and facilitating activities that were previously time-consuming. For example, many solutions have modules that enable content to be created in line with corporate requirements, in just a few clicks. Production workflows ensure effective quality control of media. Finally, DAMs can be interconnected with other tools, ensuring that processes run more smoothly.
Improving collaboration
DAM solutions, which used to be simple storage bases for digital resources, have gradually become genuine collaborative platforms. This is particularly true for international deployments. Using a digital asset management solution means working together easily around a common brand, while integrating the specific features of each country (copyright management, for example). Ultimately, digital asset management supports companies' local marketing strategy.
DAM versus PIM: towards a common platform?
In the series of marketing acronyms, we also have PIM (product information management) or GIP (gestion de l'information produit).
The latter is defined as a management technology that centralises and harmonises all the marketing and technical information for product catalogues.
These are two complementary practices in projects to digitise product offerings, but their file organisation processes are very different:
- DAM manages media files and enables creative workflows to be set up between marketing, graphics and sales teams;
- whereas product information management, although aimed at the same teams, involves numerous categories and sub-categories that are incompatible with media storage.
Professionals agree that the two tools must be able to communicate with each other, but remain distinct.
Examples of digital asset management solutions
How do you choose your DAM software?
These tools require a great deal of thought beforehand, as well as the unification of teams around the project and support from the service provider.
So there are a number of steps to follow before choosing the right solution.
- Define clear and precise objectives: for example, do you want to streamline the sharing process or automate the sending of photos to your site?
- Define an implementation schedule and a team dedicated to monitoring the project.
- Identify requirements in terms of ancillary services (project management module, photo editing, etc.).
- Comparison of solutions and making contact.
💡 Some advice:
- Tip No. 1: It is advisable for the DAM project manager to come from the department from which the digital asset management requirement emanates (marketing manager or IS manager, for example). In any case, specialists from each of these departments should be involved in the project to express their specific needs and constraints, such as the interoperability of the DAM tool with third-party applications.
- Tip 2: Setting up a DAM tool, in the same way as creating a website, requires legal expertise (in-house or external) to ensure compliance with legal notices, as well as copyright and usage rights.
- Tip 3: A person dedicated to content management, such as a documentalist or content manager, can be very useful in defining the content repository.s repository and an optimised filing plan.
Examples of DAM
Phraseanet is a good example of open source digital asset management.
In SaaS mode, we find :
- Bynder, an intuitive and intelligent software package with many advantages:
- its user-friendly interface,
- online photo library
- management of duplicates and obsolete file versions,
- Bynder analytics tool that calculates ROI per file,
- integrated visual identity management and graphic design tools.
- Wedia supports major groups in the deployment of an omnichannel, personalised customer experience, using a powerful DAM:
- optimised content management, even for very large volumes
- advanced video services (360° video, for example) and high-quality steaming,
- compliance with regulatory constraints (copyright, image rights, RGPD, etc.),
- support for brand compliance and consistency of customer experience,
- optimising content publishing and distribution as part of a glocal marketing approach (adapting to local markets, for example).
Manage your visual identity in total security
Some will say that using Google Drive or Dropbox is just fine for storing and sharing digital data.
That's possible, but here's what these storage solutions don't offer: visualisation. The DAM is, in fact, a much more visual platform, optimising creativity. It also makes collaboration, interactivity and searching much easier and more intuitive.
Whether you're in e-commerce, marketing, communications or many other sectors, you have to manage an immeasurable quantity of images and multimedia data.
To avoid wasting time and money (we keep coming back to this), a good strategy for managing your digital resources and the use of the right tool are the keys to organising your visual identity and working together seamlessly.
The digital transformation has only just begun, for the benefit of your productivity!
Article translated from French