Defining digital asset management
Here are some common questions about digital asset management—and how Brightspot is built to help for marketers, designers, producers and others who rely on a modern digital asset management solution.
What is digital asset management?
Every second, new digital assets are being created, modified and saved. Companies need to access these assets—images, videos and files of all kinds—to create content and communicate with their internal and external audiences. The sheer volume is staggering, and even the most organized teams struggle to maintain an effective digital filing system that scales to meet the priorities of the organization. Digital asset management is both the process and the system to manage this ecosystem of digital assets.
A good digital asset management (DAM) system brings order, consistency and efficiency to the chaos. It also enables digital asset managers to find the content they need plus manage use and access to the digital assets in their libraries, ensuring brand messaging is consistent and appropriate licenses and rights-management issues are observed.
Defining digital asset management
What is a digital asset management system?
A digital asset management system is a solution that helps organizations and publishers manage and access all of their digital assets through tools like search, workflows and editing features—all in one place. Modern digital asset management solutions like Brightspot's embedded DAM help content teams move their business forward and easily scale to help achieve digital transformation projects. Companies lose inordinate amounts of time jumping between disparate third-party and local systems to find the asset they need. Brightspot moves the creative process faster, providing the right access to the right digital assets based on permissions, metadata, tags, and unified search functionality.
Why is digital asset management important?
To deliver on a strong brand experience, and create and promote a positive image, a digital asset management (DAM) solution is important to organizations and publishers for the following four core reasons.
- Digital asset management brings order to the creative process: At the center of delivering on the experience customers want is first increasing efficiency between digital and editorial teams throughout the entire content lifecycle. Without this, content creation and distribution becomes chaotic. A DAM with the right search capabilities, image and asset management and editing tools in one place saves time and money in the long run for organizations and publishers.
- Digital asset management allows easy access to assets that matter: Today, digital assets like photos and videos are key to driving engagement and making content pop. It’s no longer just the words on a page that will drive people to react and respond to your content—visually, businesses need to stand out. A DAM solution ensures you have the right assets at your fingertips to bring your stories to life beyond the text.
- Digital asset management ensures consistency: Brand consistency has never been more important than it is today. For digital and editorial teams, reinforcing brand narratives through meaningful content is key, and at the center of this is ensuring your organization delivers a consistent output/experience with these ideas reinforced. According to Oberlo, consistent presentation of a brand has been seen to increase revenue by 33%. For publishers, specifically, where advertising plays a huge role in revenue generation, delivering on a consistent content output—both aesthetically and emotionally—is what will keep advertisers confident in their partnerships. A DAM solution helps establish a consistent, seamless digital experience for the consumer by making it easy to access a bank of assets for every piece of content.
- Digital asset management supports stronger collaboration: Stronger collaboration via the right technology and tools is especially important for businesses in the era of remote working. For organizations and publishers, a DAM solution offers robust admin capabilities to set clear roles and permissions, as well as to establish workflows to better track reviews, edits and rejections.
Who benefits from digital asset management software?
These days, every business is a content business—and your digital assets are the clearest representation of your brand. Across the spectrum, from media organizations to e-commerce startups, businesses need a system that effectively and proactively allows them to manage their brand narrative in a digital ecosystem. There are three key roadblocks to supporting that digital ecosystem that a DAM aims to help organizations and publishers overcome.
- Publishers with chaotic creative processes: Organizations and publishers today work with a variety of content types for everything they produce—including text, photos, audio and video—and these shifts are only expanding that list. A DAM solution aims to bring order to the creative process by increasing functionality for the digital and editorial teams working with these assets to produce content.
- Businesses with inconsistent output: With the heightened number of channels to which content is being delivered, and disparate teams working on different projects behind the scenes, organizations and publishers can get lost in trying to achieve a seamless, consistent experience for every user. A DAM solution aims to act as a business’s central repository of assets, making it easier to ensure a uniform approach to content is being produced across channels.
- Teams with lack of collaboration: Unclear and undefined roles and permissions create bottlenecks in the content process. Digital asset management works to solve this by supporting organizations and publishers in strengthening information sharing and collaboration among digital and editorial teams at every stage of content creation—from planning and creation, to review, version control, approval and license management.
What does a digital asset manager do?
Distinct to a digital asset management system (DAM)—the organizing repository for your digital assets—a digital asset manager is the individual responsible for sourcing, creating, curating and producing these digital assets. Some job functions that might include the role of digital asset manager within an organization might be content producer, social media manager, marketing manager or designer.
How does Brightspot approach digital asset management?
Brightspot’s mission is to transform the way business content and digital experiences are created and delivered—and that means simplifying and enabling the most efficient way for organizations to access, store, share and manage their valuable digital assets. In fact, a good digital asset management solution is central to the marketing tech stack.
Brightspot's embedded DAM is powered by federated search, a custom front-end and artificial intelligence to provide the fastest and best user experience possible.
Key features & benefits:
Brightspot DAM: Key features and benefits
Powerful search
Brightspot's embedded DAM was built on top of a powerful search engine, making finding, editing and creating content intuitive and seamless. Brightspot displays all available content appropriate to the object selected, and the fields associated with that content object will adjust depending on the object
Customizable dashboards
Users can create dashboards at a global, role, or user level, bringing the most relevant information to help that user do their daily job front and center.
Multichannel distribution
Package content together, share to thousands of licensed sites and edit/update that content directly within Brightspot's embedded DAM. Your editorial team can collaborate seamlessly with access to your assets in Brightspot regardless of the site they manage.
Integrations
Brightspot was designed integration-ready. It is built to integrate, extend and enhance all your relevant, important enterprise information and systems. Brightspot offers out-of-the box integrations to ensure all components of your marketing tech stack work effectively together.
Reporting and analytics
Review performance metrics within Brightspot with built-in analytics. Brightspot gives you the ability to view your analytics across personalized dashboards, assets and search performance, where they can be used for queries.
