What Is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

What are the benefits of digital asset management?

Increase content ROI

Content is more accessible, so people are more likely to use it and share it — amplifying reach and increasing impact.

Boost productivity

With the right tools enabling more efficient workflows, businesses can create and distribute more content — without spending more on hiring or agency partnerships.

Launch content faster

When people can access on-brand content directly, creative teams are no longer a bottleneck. Brands can launch campaigns faster and beat competitors to market.

Expand business to new markets

Teams can browse content created for other markets and easily adapt it and repurpose it for new audiences.

Better brand management

A central platform for brand management ensures an on-brand customer experience across every digital touchpoint.

Less risk to your business

Built-in digital rights management (DRM) helps businesses avoid liability from misused content.

Closing more deals

Sales enablement features help sales reps win customers over by putting persuasive collateral at their fingertips.

What is a digital asset?

Digital assets are any content that can be stored digitally, so you can create, manage, publish, and share content with anyone inside or outside your organization. In today’s rapidly evolving digital climate, there’s no limit to what a digital asset can be. Files like videos, music, photos, documents, and other media that contain the rights to use them are considered assets.

Consider the types of files and assets that are routinely created and shared across your organization. The marketing team creates and collaborates on advertisements, social media content, videos, and emails. Operations and services teams produce process documentation, blueprints, and workflow diagrams. And if you’re working with a network of vendors or providers, you may be producing images and content that you want to make available to them on-demand.

Virtually every department engages with digital assets that fuel the growth and success of your organization. With a digital asset management (DAM) platform, team members across every sector of your business can search, collaborate, and share assets with maximum efficiency.

Why is digital asset management important?

51% of marketers waste time and money recreating unused or missing assets.

Effective digital asset management requires companies to organize and govern every digital file in their media ecosystem. The more your business and content needs grow, the larger your digital asset library will become. Everyone can relate to spending too much time looking for a single file. This is the case for most companies operating without a DAM solution.

The most common digital asset management challenges and how to solve them

If you’re not managing your digital assets, it will hit your bottom line, hard. Take a look at some of the most common DAM challenges and how businesses are solving them with a simple solution.

Asset accessibility

Without a DAM, digital assets are rarely managed properly. Chances are, the wrong people are using the wrong assets at the wrong time. Regain control with a centralized solution that establishes workflows, manages access, and streamlines the approval process so the right files get into the right hands.

Time lost, money spent

If your team is spending precious time searching for mislabeled or disappearing assets, that’s time lost focusing on growing and scaling your business. Empower them with a centralized platform that makes the organization, monitoring, and maintenance of every asset in your ecosystem a breeze.

Disconnected workforce

Break down silos and enhance communications across your organization with a unified platform designed to boost collaboration and sharing. Digital asset management platforms enable teams to democratize assets, create agile workflows, and improve consistency across all channels.

Bring your team and assets together

Digital asset management software empowers teams and serves as a single source of truth for all brand assets. It improves information security while enabling teams to store, organize, share, search, and grow their digital library.
A DAM solution does more than uphold brand standards and expand storage capacity. It allows your team to focus on what matters.
(Hint: It is not spending an hour searching for a mislabeled document.)

Additional links

The Canto DAM in action

There’s more than one way to use Canto DAM

Streamline the asset lifecycle

As businesses grow, content and digital assets grow at an exponential rate. A digital asset management solution can streamline this process and serve as an incubator for all branded content, enabling teams to ideate, create, share, and manage assets from inception to publication.

Support sales & marketing teams

Send and receive mission critical content between your marketing and sales teams, and distribute high-converting assets like datasheets and customer stories with ease. Get the right materials into the hands of your sales teams with the freedom of self-service so they never lose a sale to unnecessary downtime.

Curate the digital customer experience

Content drives the digital customer experience. Meet the demand for developing personalized customer experiences, and keep your customer-facing assets up-to-date and relevant. A DAM platform enables teams to seamlessly refresh, create, and publish the content your customers want to see.

External distribution

Share branded assets with external parties such as freelancers and vendors. Uphold brand consistency by providing approved assets that your external partners can access via email, secure links, social media or powerful, branded portals.

Choosing a digital asset management platform

Choosing a digital asset management system can be overwhelming. What features matter most? What do you need to know to compare options? To make the process easier, we’ve put together an overview of key considerations, so you can shop confidently and pick the best digital asset management software for your team.

How does the pricing work?

At its core, DAM pricing is based on number of seats and storage requirements. But teams shopping for a DAM software also need to be on the lookout for hidden costs. Some digital asset management companies charge extra for basic functions, like sharing portals, smart-tagging, reporting, and integrations with other software.

Can you share collections with specific audiences?

Most teams’ DAM requirements go beyond simple digital asset management. They also need to deliver content collections to different audiences – internally and externally. That requires a DAM software with flexible sharing tools, like Canto Portals. Consider who needs access to your content – including sales teams, distributors, customers, and agencies – and ensure your new DAM solution will allow you to easily deliver curated collections to anyone.

How steep is the learning curve?

DAM software makes your organization’s content accessible. Look for a system that packages all of the powerful DAM features you need in an intuitive interface – so your team can hit the ground running. Also consider ease of use for external users. Do they need an account to add and retrieve content? Or can you share individual assets, upload links, and public or password-protected portals without much fuss?

Does it integrate with the other tools your team relies on?

Integrations speed up your workflows by connecting your content library with the software you use every day. Look for out-of-the-box integrations with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Workfront, and Microsoft Office. Need something more niche? Your DAM solution should offer a robust API, so your developers can connect it with any application you like.

Is it video compatible?

If video is part of your content strategy, the best media asset management software for your team will make it easy to work with video. Can you preview video files without exporting them? Can you trim videos to download just the clips you need? Is there a Premiere Pro integration? Not all DAM systems are video compatible, so make sure to try before you buy.

Can you configure it to make it your own?

Every organization is a unique ecosystem of people, processes and procedures. Your DAM system should adapt to your team and industry. Are there customizable fields to categorize assets and filter search results in a way that makes sense? Can you brand the interface and external portals with your logo, colors and imagery? Consider how easy these configurations are to implement. Is it a simple setting adjustment, or does it require custom code?

Is it secure?

Keep your digital assets safe by ensuring your DAM provider uses proper encryption and security protocols. Where will your assets be stored? Is the data center secure? A reputable DAM provider shouldn’t hesitate to discuss security and data protection.

Do they offer high-quality, ongoing customer service?

Choose a trusted vendor with an established track record of providing DAM services to major brands. DAM is a complex field, and it takes time to build up the expertise to serve clients well. Digital asset management is an ongoing process, not just a one-time installation. Look for a DAM vendor that will provide ongoing customer care from an experienced support team.

Learn more about DAM Solutions

What is digital asset management (DAM)?

In this article