Nowadays, almost every business uses its digital content and assets to promote and sell products or services. Digital content includes images, videos, blog articles, and other multimedia forms. Meanwhile, digital assets are the building blocks of any effective business branding.
Maintaining and managing your collection can quickly become a nightmare with the growing digital assets your business creates. Outdated documents, corrupted files, lost images, and a complex network of folders make it difficult to organize them.
This article shares everything you need to know about digital asset management, who uses it, and its benefits.
What Is Digital Asset Management?
Digital asset management refers to storing and organizing your digital content. It also includes managing your digital media. These include photos, videos, animations, music, articles, podcasts, and other multimedia content most commercial organizations use.
You can store, manage, and distribute your company’s digital content and files using media asset management software. Some platforms offer several convenient features which can enhance productivity and efficiency across the digital content lifecycle.
Who Is It For?
Any business that creates and uses essential digital files and content needs digital asset management software. Both internal and external users can use a robust system.
The internal users refer to employees and teams within your companies, such as graphic creators and designers, marketing and sales representatives, and IT professionals. Meanwhile, external users refer to clients, third-party contractors, and company partners who need access to digital designs for collaboration.
Why Do You Need It?
Some companies invest in a digital asset management system to improve workflow and protect their assets. This section shares a few benefits of using one in your small business.
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Organize Your Digital Asset
Digital asset management helps organize all your digital content. Being the central digital and creative content location, it provides teams and users direct access to the latest and approved files. It often comes with an intuitive hierarchy storage system to manage assets. Also, it can minimize duplicated files while preventing data loss.
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Find Digital Assets Faster
With a well-organized digital asset, finding the right content is faster and easier. Searching through emails, drives, and numerous desktop folders for specific content can be overwhelming. With a digital asset management system, you can head to one centralized storage space to find any document or file you need.
Most software has advanced search features that allow users to type keywords or asset names to find what they’re looking for or search via filters. Some technology also saves searches so users can find an asset based on their search history. Ultimately, this saves effort and time, allowing team members to focus more on critical things and ensuring higher productivity.
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Improve Collaboration
Traditionally, creative teams use email for content and file sharing. However, email has become an impractical channel for sending and receiving large volumes of content. Robust digital asset management software has become the asset-sharing standard, improving team collaboration.
It provides fast-paced, media asset-rich companies with a central platform to collaborate in real-time. As centralized storage for all media content, digital asset management systems eliminate information silos and gaps. In addition, they help companies achieve a faster and more efficient work process with real-time updates and modifications on creative assets.
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Better Security
Lack of access control to digital files and assets can increase security risks. It can result in leaks and breaches of private data and core marketing strategies. With digital asset management software, you can ensure that digital assets are secure. With better protection, it also provides you with peace of mind.
Most software has advanced security protocols, allowing you to set user permissions and access levels. They give you better control over who can access what files and content. In short, digital asset management systems ensure that only authorized users can access the digital content they need.
Takeaway
As consumers rely more on the Internet to find what they need, small businesses must invest in developing a good digital presence to survive. As a result, companies continue to create more digital content to build their digital presence.
On the other hand, having an effective management system to store and maintain thousands of digital assets is critical. However, it would be best to identify your priorities when choosing the right software. Determine the suitable storage space for your needs to avoid switching from platform to platform.
Meanwhile, it’s also necessary to check its user-friendliness to enhance collaboration. Proper digital asset management practices and technology can make managing and maintaining your asset collection easier.