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Guide to Digital Asset Management in 2023

Guide to Digital Asset Management in 2023

Your digital assets are invaluable to your business success: product content drives traffic, engagement, and sales in an increasingly omnichannel world. Understanding how to manage your content correctly helps you position yourself to win your market. 

Read our guide to learn best practices for effective digital asset management in 2023.

What is Digital Asset Management?

Every business or organization has digital assets that make up its online presence, including:

  • Word documents 
  • Contracts 
  • Spreadsheets
  • Presentations 
  • Product photographs and renderings 
  • Video 
  • PDFs
  • Audio files 

Your digital assets are your business, from company documents to the rich product content on your PDPs. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the methods and strategies used to track, organize, store, and distribute those assets.

How Digital Asset Management Helps Your Business

DAM controls all facets of your digital assets. The right DAM strategy identifies your business’s unique needs, determines your assets, and identifies ownership and access. With 24/7 access to your assets, DAM solutions allow you to manage your content from anywhere and at any time. 

DAM provides many benefits to your business, including the following:

1. Preventing Content Loss

DAM tracking capabilities help you quickly locate all your assets from the creation stage through retirement. Every asset is accounted for, and your team won’t waste valuable time manually searching for them.

2. Enhanced Collaboration

DAM solutions promote effective collaboration among teams and departments, even as your organization operates within remote or hybrid work models. A central location for your assets ensures your content is easy to find and universally updated as team members make edits.

3. Greater Brand Consistency

Housing all assets within one system increases your brand consistency. Content auditing allows you to eliminate off-brand or outdated content. 

4. Stronger Security

DAM solutions eliminate the need for password lists and constant security monitoring. Asset management programs assign user roles that enable varied access levels, increasing asset security from a central source. 

5. Real-time Asset Distribution

Because all assets are stored in one location, asset distribution is universal and real-time. Team leads aren’t responsible for manual or individual asset delivery, saving time and ensuring all parties have access to the appropriate assets. 

DAM Strategy

Below are the 6 essential components of a successful DAM strategy to help you make the most of your asset management practices.

1. Auditing Assets

Your digital assets are crucial to your success, regardless of your industry or market. Your assets drive traffic, engagement, sales, and retention in an omnichannel world. Therefore, you must perform regular asset audits to ensure your content is relevant and helps you accomplish your goals. 

Product page audits are essential for ensuring a positive customer experience. Regular audits allow you to:

  • Identify discrepancies among product data, like titles, descriptions, specs, and product categorizations
  • Understand keyword usage across sections 
  • Identify and fix rich content issues 

Your digital content is either working for you or against you. Asset audits ensure that all content on your site brings you closer to your goals and draws consumers to purchase.

2. Create Content Taxonomy

Your audits should help you determine which content to keep and what needs to go. Once you’ve consolidated relevant content, implement a content taxonomy. 

Content taxonomy is a way to classify and organize your content. Your taxonomy should be logical, scalable, and easy to replicate. Best content taxonomy practices simplify search and discovery and organize your content into relevant categories. 

As you build out your DAM strategy, consider how your content taxonomy can save you time and resources, then create keywords and custom fields that keep your assets organized.

3. Integration

DAM is one piece of your digital commerce strategy. And while it’s a crucial component of your success, it won’t replace all the tools you use to run your business. Setting up integrations within your DAM strategy helps you streamline workflows by sharing assets among applications. 

You’ll still need communication apps, document creators, and other apps you require daily. Integrating your tools together through your DAM strategy can reduce the time wasted manually sharing files between applications.  

4. Varying Levels of User Access

Your team includes many members, each with different roles and access levels. As you choose a DAM strategy and software, you need a program that offers varied access to each user. Some assets can and should be available to all team members, while other content and data are more sensitive and require higher security levels. 

Traditionally, companies with digital assets have kept products secure via password protection. And while that’s an effective means of maintaining asset security, it’s also cumbersome and requires careful maintenance to ensure passwords remain private. 

DAM solutions deliver heightened asset security through a universal system: user roles. Unique roles are assigned asset permissions that dictate what those roles can view and edit.

5. Better Analytics

Businesses rely on consumer analytics to deliver personalized content and shopping experiences that drive shoppers toward purchase. As we enter 2023, the most effective DAM strategies will emphasize analytics and use that data to deliver exceptional customer experiences. 

You can understand how consumers interact with your digital content through user analytics based on purchase history and browsing behavior. Your teams can then create and structure content that best serves your audience and compels them to purchase.

6. Emphasis on AI Integration

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities are evolving daily, especially in how organizations create, manage, and distribute their digital assets. 

These applications allow you more accurately and efficiently organize your product content and data. For example, instead of manually tagging each asset, AI integration automatically groups your items into their respective categories based on keywords or content type. 

The automated nature of AI can save your team thousands of hours, especially if you’re working with a large content bank. Competitive brands will take advantage of all that AI and ML offer as they plan for 2023 and beyond. 

 

Digital Asset Management that Works

You can’t overvalue your digital assets. Neither can you overestimate the importance of a solid DAM strategy.

Content Status ensures you’re getting the return on content investment you deserve. Connect with our team today to learn how our tools and resources can provide the asset visibility and confidence you need to keep your business positioned for e-commerce growth.