Everyone is a content producer today - from the largest publishing house and entertainment studio, down to the smallest ecommerce store, corporate website or personal blog.
If content is the lifeblood of your website or application, images and videos form the heart that makes it tick and creates an emotional connection with the audience. But, using images and videos to make the content visually engaging and meet your conversion goals, you face a new challenge: managing your digital assets. Because the images and videos are created by different teams for different channels - such as website, social media, ecommerce store, blogs, partners and digital agencies to name a few - chaos can ensue.
The pressure to create engaging content is amplified by the challenge of delivering a consistent and coherent experience that meets the performance requirements. With limited resources, this can slow down the time to market or shoot up the cost.
Bringing order to this chaos is where digital asset management (DAM) can save the day.
Why Should You Give a DAM?
DAM gives method to this digital media madness, enabling effective management, streamlined operations and optimized delivery of high-quality content to each and every user, irrespective of their device preference, bandwidth or location.
A DAM isn’t just for storage and consolidation of assets. It’s the foundation for orchestrating unique customer experiences across various channels, at scale.
What to Look for in a DAM?
Managing an ever-growing media library requires having a central hub from which teams can categorize and organize files, collaborate, control access, and monitor usage and performance. Ensuring your DAM solution meets these needs will enable you to streamline operations and improve productivity. The key to achieving these goals is automation. You’ll want a DAM that automates upload, storage, metadata management and manipulation of images and videos, as well as the delivery workflows.
Other features to look for include an interactive user interface, with dashboards that help you gain greater insights into performance and usage, and how to potentially improve use of digital assets to reach your marketing goals.
As you evaluate DAM offerings, you’ll want to look for features that enable you to:
Manage and organize assets:
- Easily upload assets from any browser or application
- Organize images and videos in folders and subfolders
- Create flexible, but deep taxonomies for different projects or campaigns
- Automatically add relevant tags and categories associated with the content, making the library easy to browse
- Add, edit and store metadata
- Sync with local folders
- Create collections for easy sharing, for example “all images with dogs”
- Edit images and videos in bulk
- Remove duplication assets
- Apply predefined rules, for user-generated content, so it’s consistent with the design and layout
Collaborate and streamline the workflow:
- Edit, review and approve from a single source of truth
- Enable alerts and notifications
- Set up predefined workflows for all uploads images and videos
- Maintain different versions to ensure that the most up-to-date file versions are available for download and it’s easy to restore older versions when required
Search and browse the media library:
- Browse your media library using faceted search with attributes and properties, including file type, size, color, keywords and tags, metadata and more
- Sort results to match your criteria and change the preview style from grid or list
Share and Distribute Assets:
- Privately share assets with other teams at your organization, or with external agencies
- Publish and deliver assets to end-users via a global delivery network
- Schedule publishing for the right time to meet your launch timeline
- Directly embed media into your website by pasting an automatically-generated code into your content management system (CMS)
- Use descriptive URLs to describe the specific content for search engines or to support different languages
- Control read/write access to suit the needs of different users - developers, creative, marketing and others - based on their roles
Now that we’ve covered the basics of adding assets and managing the media library, let’s focus on the main goal of using images and videos, which is to improve engagement and user experience. So it would be logical for the DAM solution (no pun intended) to have features that enable the goal, such as the ability to:
Manipulate, optimize and adapt assets to suit user requirements:
- Automatically adapt media to fit any graphic design, viewport, device and browser
- Dynamically manipulate images and videos using simple parameters for height, width, crop, format and quality, as well as apply enhancements, artistic filters and effects
- Dynamically personalize content for multi-channel experiences
- Optimize performance for varying device characteristics and network connectivity by:
- Selecting the most efficient format
- Adjusting quality compression and
- Resizing and cropping images to serve the most optimal version
Get Performance and Usage Analytics
Once your images are made public, you’ll want to see how they’re performing with key audiences. Doing so will enable you to:
- Gain important insights into your media assets with in-depth analytics on performance, bandwidth usage and error monitoring
- Create and share detailed reports, highlighting key metrics
If done right, DAM helps unify disparate organizations and channels, streamlines and automates vitals processes, and drives conversions that matter to you.
Organizations today know that engaging content is critical for meeting a number of goals, including speeding time to market, improving user experience, strengthening brand identity and increasing engagement. Adopting a DAM strategy, and finding the right tools, is an ideal way to ensure efficient management, streamlined operation and optimized delivery of your digital assets.
