Creating an asset library
Has your marketing team ever struggled to find that one piece of content that doesn’t seem to be in any of the usual files or folders? Has a project ever been delayed in your organization because the one employee who had the content you needed couldn’t be reached and was out of the office? These kinds of issues occur all too often in the business and marketing world.
They stem from a bigger issue – most companies are not doing a good enough job managing their digital assets. Without connectivity, collaboration, and organization, these content slip-ups will continue to occur. Although it may seem small, every hour spent searching for a missing image is an hour that could’ve been spent on far more strategic and high-value activities growing your business. At a large organization, these hours quickly add up to losses in revenue and overall productivity.
What is a digital asset? Basically, digital assets consist of content that can be stored digitally. This means files like videos, music, photos, documents and any other kind of digital media that contain the rights to use them are digital assets. This could also include logo variations, custom fonts, as well as marketing graphics. This could even include custom PowerPoint slides.
There really is no limit to the variability of digital assets and how businesses need them to function. Marketing teams produce reams of digital assets and need to continually refer back to them as they build your digital presence. Operations and services teams will also produce documentation and diagrams. A B2B sales team will be producing PowerPoints to help sell your product, each one of which will be filled with other digital assets. The list really is endless.
Your entire workforce works with various forms of digital assets, showing just how important they are to the success of your company. That’s why many organizations take digital asset management seriously and use something called an asset library.
A digital asset library can help you organize your content and make it more accessible to your team. This can also increase your team’s efficiency in creating content. This way, you and your employees have more time to focus on taking your business to the next level of growth and success.
What is an asset library?
So what is an asset library, exactly? Fundamentally, an asset library is a single place to store all your digital assets. There are several different kinds of asset libraries, but the most basic function of a library is to store and organize your content. This way, anyone on your team can quickly access and find what they need to get the job done.
Ideally, teams should use a cloud-based asset library that is simple and intuitive. Teams from various departments can log into the platform, and then use the search bar or filters to instantly find the image, document, or video they need to create content that will be effective. With the right asset library, digital asset management is easy and efficient. A marketing asset library can be a great way to support your marketing efforts. You would normally have to scour through files and folders looking for a stock image that’s already been used in your company. Now, you could instantly have that image pulled up through the asset library in seconds.
How do you organize an asset library?
A content library or asset library is only as helpful and effective as its organization. When setting up your own content library, you may be wondering, how do you organize an asset library? We recommend thinking about the digital organization the same way you think of the physical organization. It’s all about clear labeling. For example, think about the last time you put something into a bin or box. You most likely put some kind of label on it that was fairly specific so that you knew, later on, exactly what was put in the box without having to open and search for something. In the digital space, your boxes are your folders. That is why it’s very helpful to name them in a way that tells you exactly what kind of content is in each folder.
The next step in your organizational journey is a little more technical. The search for content in a library can be made much more efficient if the library is implementing metadata management. You should use a tagging system that allows each image or piece of content to be attached to certain keywords describing their content. This allows you to quickly search for a single word and have your content appear in the search. Furthermore, you’ll want to ensure that your content is stored on a cloud system. Cloud storage means that you won’t have to rely on scaling physical storage devices.
This means that as you create more content over time and your library grows you won’t have to worry about finding space for new hard drives. Plus, cloud storage gives the remote access capabilities we have already mentioned. Cloud storage systems are designed to provide access to remote resources quickly. This makes them a perfect fit for your asset library.
The basics of asset library management
Asset library management consists of the organization and structure of your content library. Managing your library is important. You’ll want to ensure that you remove old content that is no longer relevant so that no one else in the organization uses it by mistake. Keeping everything up-to-date is one of the key asset library management activities. Ultimately, asset library management is best performed with a digital asset management (DAM) tool. Digital asset management usually refers to a single piece of software that does all of the previously discussed asset library management activities automatically.
One great example of DAM software is Canto. Canto lets you build a powerful digital asset library that is fully searchable. Our system uses the power of AI-driven tagging to automatically organize your content. Our system also has facial recognition to help you find the perfect asset in seconds. Furthermore, our system enables greater collaboration on content creation than ever before.
By keeping all your content in one place, the entire workflow is streamlined. This makes it easy to move content from professional to professional until it is delivered to your audience. The ultimate goal of digital asset management is to simplify how you store and manage your digital content. Canto’s content library makes it easy to tag files with the keywords and data that can make searching for it later so fast and simple. Plus, Canto also features an advanced search feature as well as a comprehensive set of filters. This way, you can quickly drill down to exactly what you need.
One of the great benefits of going with a cloud-based solution like Canto is that the security of your assets is enhanced. Our system runs on AWS (Amazon Web Services) a cloud service that houses all data in highly secured data centers. Furthermore, our platform is SOC 2 compliant, making it an even more secure option for storing data.
Asset library examples
There are so many great examples of how an asset library such as the one provided by Canto can be used effectively. The versatility of a good digital asset management strategy is really quite endless. For example, you could use an asset library for storing 3D assets in a 3D asset library or a Blender asset library (Blender is a program for 3D animation). You can use an asset library as an Enscape asset library (another 3D software focused on computer-aided design but used more in construction and architecture).
We have had clients that used a digital asset library to promote collaboration between departments. This has made it easier to share content. We have also seen Canto used for better storage and organization of documents surrounding important business processes like sales. Another asset library example is a Salesforce library that would help you organize all the files and manage user permissions of all the content in your Salesforce platform. In the end, it’s easy to see why so many organizations have found digital asset management such a valuable element of their business strategy.
