Is storing, organizing and managing your content assets getting out of hand? For busy enterprise teams, the volume of asset production is only growing. Keeping all your ducks in a row can be challenging without a system for centralizing everything. That’s where a digital asset management platform saves the day.
If you’re looking for your first platform or ready to trade in your current one, you’ll want to read these tips to ensure the best decision.
What Is a Digital Asset Management Platform?
A digital asset management platform is an application that enables you to store, organize, find, and share your digital content. With this solution, everyone that needs it has access to the repository. In addition, users can easily search the repository using keywords.
Such a platform can be a standalone tool or a feature within a content marketing platform. The types of assets you can catalog include images, graphic design files, presentations, audio files, documents, templates, videos, and just about anything else you create.
What Are the Benefits of a Digital Asset Management Platform?
There are numerous benefits to using a digital asset management platform. Any time you have a single repository and a collection of elements, it makes work more efficient and often eliminates wasted time.
With such a solution, you can realize these benefits:
- No more wasted time hunting for assets: Did you know that 57 percent of office professionals rated this as one of the top three problems they face? Your staff doesn’t have time to spare, so make access easy for all. With digital asset management technology, you can also quickly and securely share large files.
- Improved content production throughput: You have a throughput goal for content that tends to increase continuously. Anything you can do to streamline content workflows boosts efficiency. With everything in one spot, it can help clear up bottlenecks in the review process.
- Updating and repurposing content is easier: A content’s lifecycle doesn’t have to end at publish, promote, and analyze. A digital asset management system provides a way to find old content that can have a new life with updates or reused in another format.
- There’s no guessing about which version is accurate: Sales, product managers, customer service, and others use the assets you create. So, where do you put them? And how do you ensure that they’re using the latest one? Digital asset management provides you with this framework, so there are no concerns about what they’re using and what clients see.
- It improves content collaboration: If collaboration happens haphazardly through emails or chats, it’s hard to keep edits and changes straight. With a digital asset management tool, this can occur within the document with tracked changes and controlled user access.
- Assets are safe and secure: Using a digital asset management platform is a secure way to store and work on content. Users can also access with a login that includes two-factor authentication. It’s much safer than using hard drives, personal folders, or Google Drive.
- Reduce your technology costs with tool consolidation: A digital asset management platform consolidates a lot of functionality that you may require multiple systems for now. If you can remove those and use one platform, you’ll be able to cut expenses in this area.
Now that you know all the advantages of using this technology, what kind of evaluation criteria should you use to find the best fit?
Choosing a Digital Asset Management Platform: Defining Your Criteria
Many platforms are available, and most have similar features and functions. Before you begin your evaluation, determine what you want to achieve by deploying this software. That will shape the questions you ask and your ultimate decision.
Here are other questions and considerations during your assessment:
- How many assets do you have, and what are the file types? This would determine how much storage you need.
- Are you replacing a system or systems? If so, how will you migrate assets?
- Do you have a strategy for metadata? You’ll need to plan for this, as it will be essential for deployment.
- How will the use of the platform factor into current workflows? Will you need to create new ones?
- Who will own the platform? Most of the time, this would be a marketing ops person.
Once you begin to demo platforms, you’ll want to critique things like:
- User interface: Is it intuitive? Easy to use? How much training would be required?
- User experience: Does the software make it easier for your team? If not, you’re likely to struggle with adoption.
- Features: Does it have everything you need related to how you’ll organize and manage content, such as search, filtering, hierarchies, notifications, etc.? You should also ask about product roadmaps for the future.
- How does file sharing work? And what security measures are in place to ensure unauthorized access doesn’t occur?
Next, you’ll need to weigh the costs. What type of cost model do they use? Per user or license? Is storage priced by tiers?
Finally, you also want to do your due diligence on the company. Read the reviews and case studies on their website. Then have discussions about what customer support looks like and what you can expect.
After a careful review of what you need, what’s available, and what fits your budget, you’ll be able to make the right decision for your team.
DivvyHQ and Canto: A Dream Team for Digital Asset Management
Divvy offers many of the features of digital asset management platforms. For example, you can store and search for assets and files. It, of course, provides much more as a fully integrated content marketing platform. It can handle a lot of what you need, but you may prefer having a system that’s solely for digital asset management. That’s why we have an integration with Canto, one of the best platforms on the market.
Explore how these technologies can work together to help you reach your content goals. Start a free trial today!