A robust digital asset management system empowers the administrator to be in control of various aspects of managing your digital library.
Let’s examine how your digital asset management system supports a solid content management strategy within your organization.
What do we mean by content management?
Content management encompasses all the stages of handling assets – from acquisition to development, curation, edit, approval, publishing, and ultimately to archiving or deletion. Your organization will handle many types of assets, both digital and non-digital.
These will include stock photos, images of your product line, documents, slides, DVD and CDs, logos, amongst others. As you might have noticed at this point, the content management discipline overlaps to some extent with that of digital asset management.
This makes your digital asset management system a powerful tool to help you manage your digital content.
Companies are becoming increasingly aware that taking a strategic perspective to content management and focusing on it as an engagement tool that generates brand amplification is the current paradigm.
The most important part of an effective content strategy is linking it to a digital framework, implementing the right system to manage your digital assets. Gone are the days when content was one-directional (brochures, white papers, advertisements, or articles) content is digital, evolving, and engaging.
What fuels this digital content engine is content in all its manifestations and incarnations across various channels, devices, and points of interaction.
The content management struggle is real
It is not hard to see why marketers grapple and struggle with content management. You create all this fantastic content, and yet you are not putting it in front of the right person at the right time on the right platform on the right device in the correct format. What is the point?
Delivering content in a personalized, context-dependent way requires a strategic approach and a sophisticated asset management platform to manage that content.
In content management and strategy survey conducted by the content marketing Institute 72% of respondents say that managing their content strategy is challenging. And only 12% say that they are hugely or very successful in managing content.
In that same survey, 51% of the respondents noted that they lack the technology to distribute content across their enterprise and a further 35% indicated that the technology they have is not used to its full potential. Ironically 93% of respondents to that survey recognized that content is an essential business asset.
To prepare your company for a rapidly changing future adopting a strategy that incorporates digital asset management systems seems to be a no-brainer.
We are moving into a world where it’s nearly impossible for people to discover your content unless your team is very deliberate in how it makes that content available.
Lay the groundwork now by investing in the right talent and systems to ensure that your content will perform well into the future.
How does a digital asset management system help me with my content management strategy?
Use metadata to increase search and search engine optimization
Metadata is crucial! Very much like a catalogue describes the content of a library and where to find each book, the metadata in your catalogue describes the content of each asset and where to find it.
A good, structured and easy to navigate taxonomy make the search process faster and more efficient. A well-described and tagged asset boosts the visibility of your assets online.
Google and other search engines will understand the content of your images. This increases the SEO value of the page, blog or social media post, adding value to your marketing efforts.
When the SEO score of a page goes up, so does the credibility of that page and it will increase your chances of ranking high in the search results.
Establishing a metadata structure that is crystal-clear to everybody who uses the system and to potential future users of the system needs to be a collaborative effort. Discuss your metadata needs with actual users of the system.
We are always surprised at how the real needs of users differ from the DAM admin’s expectations of what those needs should be. For more information on how Daminion works with metadata, keeping it synced to the files, refer to our help section here.
Centralize and organize all digital content
When setting up your DAM system, whether you are handling it internally, using a third-party consultant or a vendor, a step-by-step approach to centralizing and organizing your asset library will improve your content management efforts. Some of the steps you might follow:
- Centralize, centralize, centralize! Pooling your digital assets in a centralized location with a backup strategy in place is crucial.
- Next, you will define guidelines on what to keep, what to save to an archive and what to outright delete. Be as clear as possible when defining these guidelines for future use.
- After ingesting the files into your system, it’s time to curate your collection. This will include tasks like duplication elimination and identifying master images and versions.
- Now that you’ve taken care of the clutter and organized your library it is time for metadata! There are various approaches to metadata application: you can apply metadata before ingesting it into the system, during the upload process or after the fact in your DAM system. Each method has benefits and disadvantages, and the procedure would differ from organization to organization.
For a step-by-step walk-through on how to import your assets into Daminion server, please refer to our help section here.
User governance by establishing roles and permissions
The roles and permissions that you create in your digital asset management system will ensure that the right files are available to the right group of users and used in an intended manner.
Usually, one of the first concerns raised when one establishes a centralized repository that contains information that is compartmentalized or sensitive is controlling access to different areas of the system.
What are roles and permissions?
Think of roles as the doorman at a nightclub: directing patrons to the correct areas of the nightclub, keeping the regular patrons out of the VIP section, etc.
Each user role has specific permissions assigned to it. These permissions will determine how users access the system and what functionality is available to them.
Much in the same way that certain patrons in our nightclub example would have access to different bars. Roles are usually broad categories that contain sets of permissions. Typically speaking you would have different user roles in your organization: administrators, editors, and users.
With Daminion server you can customize these roles in addition to creating your own custom sets of user roles giving you full control. Daminion ships with four built-in user roles: admin, editor, guest, and viewer.
These built-in roles can be duplicated and subsequently customized to suit your specific level of access control, or you can build them from scratch.
For a detailed breakdown of how to establish custom user roles in Daminion, please refer to our help section here.
Control asset life-cycle
Depending on the age of your asset library you should establish a policy to keep your assets fresh and relevant. Establish a plan and reinforce it on a set basis (annual, quarterly or monthly depending on the frequency of asset acquisition) and keep your DAM system from overflowing with ageing records.
A sample of your asset life-cycle policy might read something like this:
- all assets have a life cycle of 5 years
- after five years in the system, curate assets to remove non-selected outtakes from the system to a separate catalogue
- assets older than ten years are removed from the system and transferred to physical backup to be archived.
Implementing a life-cycle policy in Daminion server is as straightforward as creating a separate catalogue, querying the system for old records and moving them to a different catalogue out of the mainstream user experience.
Keeping multiple versions of an asset
Different platforms – websites, print media, blogs, social media, email communications, and in-house publications – all call for different versions and sizes of an asset.
These differences might be as small as cropping it to a different size or exporting it to a different file format. There will also be cases where you treat your assets with different effects, text overlays, captions or creative filters.
To protect the integrity of the original or master asset each of these iterations needs to be tracked and easy to find. Control over different versions of an asset is essential when you have teams working on the same set of assets.
Restoring destroyed or overwritten assets from backup create an additional workload that version control eliminates, freeing up time and resources.
For an in-depth look at implementing version control, please refer to our help section here.
Case Study
Austrian advertising agency POLAK and FRIENDS
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