You’ve got an upcoming launch, and the deadline to get your marketing finalized is looming large. The venue’s booked, and the copy’s ready to go—but where’s that perfect image you so carefully saved… somewhere?
It should be easy to find, but instead, the whole team is scrambling to locate that one critical image—not exactly the most effective use of their time.
Managing your digital media doesn’t have to be this hard.
With the right digital asset management software in place, you can quickly and easily find what you need when you need it.
So, how exactly does this improve team efficiency?
Let’s start by clarifying why improving team efficiency is so important for design, communications, and marketing teams.
Why Team Efficiency Matters in Digital Asset Management
When a core part of your business depends on using digital assets, but your team doesn’t know exactly which image or video to use or where to find it, they waste valuable resources on figuring that out.
| A McKinsey study showed that employees spend 19% of their working hours searching for and gathering information. |
That’s almost an entire day every week. Or, to put it another way, if you have five people on a team, only four of them are doing productive work at any given time.
All this time and attention could be better spent on more important things—like using those files to create income-generating campaigns.
There’s also another equally (if not more) important risk that comes into play here. When digital assets are poorly organized, your team may accidentally use an inappropriate or outdated version.
At best, this creates confusion and dilutes the impact of the final product. At worst, it may affect the reputation of your business or that of a client.
On the other hand, when your digital resources are well organized and readily accessible, team efficiency flows naturally from there. Collaboration is easy, which boosts team productivity. And when resources are used optimally, your projects are more likely to be delivered on time, on budget, and to spec.
Key Challenges in Ensuring Team Efficiency
As businesses generate more and more digital media, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage it all. Old-fashioned electronic filing systems simply aren’t up to the task, leading to challenges that dramatically reduce team efficiency.
Miscommunication and Fragmented Workflows
Who owns that file again? When filing systems are disorganized, or even worse, different departments each use their own systems to manage assets, confusion reigns.
Nobody knows where the most current versions are, who’s responsible for making any changes, and at what stage of approval a particular design might be. Changes made to a digital asset stored in one place most likely won’t be reflected across other copies. Files go missing because they weren’t labeled or filed correctly and then need to be recreated from scratch. Licensing agreements aren’t tracked and may expire or be paid for long beyond their usefulness.
All these factors can lead to fragmented workflows, potential duplication of assets and tasks, reduced productivity, and—you guessed it—wasted time and money.
Inefficient Collaboration and Security Risks
Without a DAM, research shows that 71% of files are shared via email, while the rest are shared via USB or public drives. This results in delays while team members wait for files to be shared or access to be granted to the files they need. It also leaves your business open to potentially losing control of intellectual property or confidential client files.
Then when files do arrive at their destination, giving input or feedback requires coordinating schedules for a meeting or sending a series of emails or instant messages back and forth. This is messy and time-consuming, and important information can easily be missed. Not exactly a model of team efficiency.
So what’s the (not so) secret ingredient here? The key to improving team efficiency across a business is digital asset management software.
What is Digital Asset Management?
Digital assets are the currency of marketing, communications, and design teams. They include:
- Product photos
- Infographics
- Videos
- Gifs
- Audio files
- Logos
- Brand images
- Presentations
- Instruction manuals
- And much more
Digital assets are usually tailored to a particular brand and often exist in multiple versions for use on different channels.
With the global digital asset management (DAM) market expected to grow to USD 23.20 billion by 2031, having a system to manage these assets at scale becomes even more critical.
Enter digital asset management software. It catalogs files and makes it easy to search for and retrieve assets on demand, improving team efficiency, collaboration, and project management.
How DAM Improves Team Efficiency
Let’s explore some of the many ways your team could benefit from a DAM system.
1. Effective Storage and Retrieval
Digital asset management software allows you to create a centralized file storage system that acts as a single source of truth. All media files are cataloged using descriptive tags. Then, the integrated search functionality allows you to quickly filter these tags to find exactly the right image for your purposes, along with all its relevant data.
Need an image of a particular angle of a product? Check. A client’s demanding the latest version of their logo? Check. Want to know if an image’s license is still current? Check. Need to know how many times a video has been used? Check.
This saves time spent searching and allows the team to focus on revenue-generating activities.
2. Better Team Communication
With everything in one place, DAM software allows teams to track exactly what’s happening with every digital asset. Status updates are logged directly against each file, so everyone knows if it’s an early draft, halfway through the approval process, or the final version—or version two or three.
This helps to keep track of progress on project work and streamlines communication between team members—without sending an email or holding a meeting to let everyone know what’s going on. It also enhances transparency and accountability as everyone can see what’s been done and what hasn’t.
3. Enhanced Collaboration
Granular access control gives everyone on the team direct access to the media they need, even if they’re working remotely. No one needs to request permission or wait for someone else to send them a file. Specific digital assets can also easily be shared with external providers—for example, printers, resellers, or publicity houses—without giving them access to everything.
This makes collaboration simple, saves time and effort, and reduces frustration and project delays, improving team efficiency on every level. It also protects intellectual property rights and sensitive client information, protecting your business’s reputation.
4. Simplified Approval Workflow
Digital asset management software makes review and approval processes simple. For example, let’s say your team is building a new website.
There are multiple steps involved, each of which needs input and approval:
- Defining the purpose and goals
- Collecting data
- Planning the website
- Creating design elements
- Writing content
- Developing the site functionality
- Testing by all stakeholders
- Fixes and changes
- Retesting
- Final approval
With digital asset management software, each person involved can simply access the work in progress at the appropriate time and log any comments or suggestions against files. Multiple stakeholders can review simultaneously in real-time or in a specific order without passing files or screenshots back and forth.
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A concise checklist to help you assess if your organization requires a DAM.
The review process moves seamlessly from the design team to management to the client. This leads to faster decision-making, which, in turn, keeps projects on track to finish on time.
In short, using the right DAM system simplifies and streamlines all your marketing tasks from beginning to end, improving team efficiency at every turn.
So the only question left is: Which digital asset management software is right for you?
Daminion: The Best DAM for Improving Team Efficiency
If speed, privacy, collaboration, and scalability are priorities for you, Daminion may be the digital asset management software you’re looking for.
With more than 20 years of experience helping both small and large companies around the world master their digital asset management, Daminion’s focus is on saving you time, improving team efficiency, and protecting your digital assets.
Just for starters:
| Benefits | Description |
|---|---|
| 1. Efficient Search and Retrieval | Daminion’s clever tagging tools enable efficient cataloging, search, and retrieval. They include pre-existing, AI-generated, and custom options, helping your team find exactly what they need when they need it. |
| 2. Seamless Collaboration | Multi-user collaboration is effortless, doing away with a host of time-consuming and back-and-forth emails in favor of suggestions and annotations directly on each media file. This significantly boosts team efficiency and productivity, making the most of your resources. |
| 3. Secure Access Control | Granular access permissions keep sensitive data secure and ensure authorized people have access to the assets they need—and unauthorized people don’t. And because Daminion can be used remotely, it doesn’t matter whether your team members are located in New York or Timbuktu. |
| 4. Customizable Workflow | Daminion’s highly customizable workflows and approval processes allow you to set up systems to suit your business’s needs. Each stakeholder is notified when it’s their turn to get involved, ensuring the team works efficiently together to meet project goals. |
| 5. Ease of Use | The Daminion platform is extremely intuitive to use, so team members can quickly get up to speed and start making use of all the tools it offers. |
| 6. Cross-Functional Time-Saving Tools | Daminion integrates with a host of design, marketing, and sales tools, including Photoshop, InDesign, and several CRM and CRS systems. With no more silos, cross-functional teams can work seamlessly together. |
| 7. PIM Integration | Daminion also integrates with your PIM system, ensuring that product images and related digital assets, like videos and brochures, are always automatically updated. This reduces the chances of human error and frees up your team’s time and attention for more creative tasks. |
| 8. Helpful Reporting Features | Comprehensive analytics and reporting features keep you up to speed on exactly where your team’s time and energy is being spent and help you identify any bottlenecks or gaps in the process. |
It’s a win across the board.
Getting Started with Daminion
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Store, tag, search, and share media assets like never before ➡️
Case Study: How Leroy Street Boosted Team Productivity with Daminion
Leroy Street is a New York City firm that focuses on architecture, construction management, community design-build work, and interior design. The teams involved in all these phases of creating a building work very closely together to fulfill the client’s needs.
Over the years of business, the company had collected a vast archive of project-based assets, but it was very badly organized. As a result, team members wasted hours trying to find digital assets they needed and eventually defaulted to doing internet searches instead.
They needed a sophisticated and robust system that was easy to set up and use, and Daminion’s digital asset management software fit the bill.
Once they signed up with Daminion, they were able to quickly export all their files from the previous system and set up a structure with their own taxonomy.
Instead of relying on search engines to find file alternatives, the team can now use Daminion to navigate through their assets and quickly locate the needed information.
This allows everyone from architects, construction managers, interior designers, and the marketing and communications department to easily find and access the resources they need. Now, they can work smoothly and efficiently together towards their joint goal of creating beautiful and functional buildings.
Take Your Teamwork to the Next Level with Daminion
Digital assets are essential to the successful functioning of design, marketing, and sales teams. However, as these collections of media grow exponentially, they become more and more unwieldy.
Without proper organization, it’s difficult for team members to find the files they need, multiple copies across different filing systems cause confusion and potential risk to the company, and a lot of time and energy—and, as an extension, money—is wasted.
The solution is digital asset management software, which provides a central database of all digital assets across the company. This facilitates fast search and retrieval, easy communication and collaboration, and streamlined workflows and approval processes, improving team efficiency at every turn.
This translates into optimal resource management, projects that run on time and to budget, satisfied clients, and a bottom line that makes you smile.
To boost your team’s efficiency and improve communication and collaboration across the board, book a demo with Daminion today. We’d love to show you how our system can take your teams—and your business—to the next level.
