Growing organizations work with increasing volumes of digital content, typically involving multiple forms of media. According to Content Marketing Institute, by the time they reach the enterprise level, their content library includes videos, articles, data visualizations, data sheets, interactive assets, and audio material. Smaller organizations have followed this lead, resulting in a more complex content landscape than ever.
Companies must manage digital assets differently to handle all of that content. A purpose-built digital asset management system allows even the biggest organizations to maximize the return on marketing investment.
What Is a Digital Asset Management System?
First things first: What is digital asset management?
In its most basic form, DAM is defined as a process for storing, organizing, and accessing branded digital materials. Your organization may already have a default way of performing these tasks.
Those default workflows function relatively smoothly — but not seamlessly. Team members get used to routine inefficiencies and roadblocks, from lost assets in storage to hours-long searches for a needed image.
Those struggles bring us to the next step in defining DAM: systems and software that simplify asset use. A mature DAM system can streamline the entire content operations process, from creation to delivery, allowing your content ops team to scale without worry.
1. Improved Content Reusability
Disorganized content is more challenging to organize and find, especially when assets are image-based. Traditional search keywords don’t accommodate the subjective way people name images, so creative teams rely on guesswork.
Picture a healthcare copywriter creating an email campaign. They need a graphic depicting the provider’s state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment, so they search using the terms “diagnostics,” “equipment,” and even the names of several machines. When nothing comes up, they have to create a new graphic or go without one.
Meanwhile, the image hides in the digital asset library under “patient and radiologist.”
With a mature DAM system, valuable assets like these don’t get lost. Intelligent automation algorithms tag assets with customized labels and descriptive text, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) that learns from your workflows. By integrating industry terminology and in-house verbiage, AI-powered DAM systems increase content discoverability and improve marketing ROI.
2. Faster Campaign Launches
Time spent hunting down assets can slow the marketing team down. When you’re creating buzz for a new product, service, or market, each day matters.
Those time savings add up quickly. DAM is applicable across the content workflow, which means teams can use it throughout the asset development process. A mature DAM system empowers teams to create and edit templates, test campaign versions, and render personalized options.
The result? Increased content velocity with no loss of quality.
DAM also speeds campaign launches by simplifying collaboration. It puts the whole content development lifecycle on a single platform, creating a space where stakeholders can easily weigh in and request changes. Instead of waiting hours or days for asset revisions or approvals, collaborators can log into the platform and make notes within the asset’s file.
Faster content development means easier completion of the final deliverable, translating to quicker time-to-market.
3. Improved Brand Consistency
Cross-channel brand consistency is essential for recognition and trust, yet it becomes more challenging to maintain as a company grows. A larger creative team is more difficult to monitor and provide with branded assets. Off-brand assets are a typical result.
A digital asset management strategy helps protect your brand, even during rapid growth or market expansion. A robust DAM solution allows an organization to store and sort assets based on custom characteristics, such as product type or brand name. Asset library administrators can then determine who has access to which assets.
Off-brand content becomes much less likely when all users have access to branded materials, even during rebranding or market entry periods. You can create libraries within your DAM system and allow access based on branding guidelines. You can even create a brand review protocol and distribute it through the DAM system for improved usability.
4. Simplified Creator Workflows
Siloed asset storage is another significant problem, especially for growing organizations. As your teams expand and diversify, content creation involves more people and departments. Maintaining a shared asset library becomes challenging, particularly when your creative teams work with agencies or freelancers.
According to a 2023 Fiverr Pro survey, 54% of marketing leaders have an increasing number of freelancers on their teams. Freelancers and agencies can help you scale cost-effectively, but maintaining consistent branding takes more work. Uploading and sending assets takes time and adds to the load on your in-house teams, particularly when outside contributors don’t know what to ask for.
A mature DAM system provides the missing link. Marketing and sales teams can create libraries with branded assets and selectively share those libraries with third-party contributors.
The same solution works when your tech stack makes communication difficult across teams. Cross-department branding is critical to growing organizations, yet users working in different departments may see different assets. Depending on communication levels, they may not even know shared assets exist.
A mature DAM system serves as the glue between those disparate teams. It unlocks ecosystem adaptability by integrating with other platforms, from content management systems to product information management. Instead of wasting time on extended email chains looking for siloed assets, users can find what they need with just a few clicks.
5. More Engaging Customer Experiences
Today’s customers demand engaging experiences. They want content that feels consistently personalized and branded, regardless of where they interact with your brand.
According to McKinsey & Company research, 71% of consumers expect personalization, and 76% get frustrated when content feels impersonal. Adopting automation is the only way to deliver a consistently personalized experience in a diversified market.
A 2024 report showed that brands with mature digital experiences drive 123% more revenue. A mature digital experience is personalized and engaging while maintaining the quality of the image itself.
It’s easy for brands to neglect image quality and in pursuit of relevance. But with a robust DAM platform, you don’t have to make that choice.
A DAM platform lets users plug relevant, visually rich images into customer-facing material. Research shows these richer images help customers engage more deeply and cultivate a stronger emotional connection with the brand. That connection drives the desire to engage further.
According to a Gallup poll, fully engaged customers have a 23% higher value than the typical buyer. With a DAM solution that makes it easy for users to interact with high-quality assets, you can push more customers into that high-value sector.
6. Faster Page Loads Worldwide
Managing digital assets is more than choosing and rendering the right image. It also means categorizing and storing your images so they load quickly, no matter where the user is. If your images live on a server halfway around the world from your shoppers, those images you’ve worked hard to develop might not load quickly enough.
Google rates your website based on how quickly your largest text or image loads. Anything over four seconds is considered “slow.” If your images take too long to travel the world, you could lose out on search results.
Page load speed matters to people, too. In one 2020 study, slow websites raised people’s blood pressure. A stressed and frustrated user isn’t in the right space for loyalty.
The best way to fix that issue is with a best-in-class DAM solution with a high-speed content delivery network (CDN), a worldwide web of servers that help assets load faster. If you have digital audiences in multiple countries, or you plan to, a globalized CDN is one of the most significant benefits of digital asset management. It can power digital experiences across various countries, improving page load speeds worldwide.
7. Actionable Performance Insights
Performance analytics and insights are essential for today’s budget-constrained marketing leaders. They need to do more with less, so they use data to evaluate content ROI. However, without a unified DAM system, that data is limited in its usability.
Marketing teams have traditionally relied on in-app analytics tools or third-party platforms that pull and synthesize large volumes of data. That data may be days old or older, mainly once analysts have manually pieced it together.
Unfortunately, piecemeal data can never give a genuinely high-level picture, no matter how skilled the analyst is. It can’t consider campaign effectiveness in the moment, with full integration of other content and customer experience data.
Integrated analysis is one of digital asset management’s biggest benefits. A gold-standard DAM system connects with operational data in real time and delivers actionable insights on spending, performance, and reach.
With just a few clicks, you can see where your money goes and where it drives conversions. You can compare real and predicted spend and assess return on investments. The result? More informed and effective business decisions.
8. Fewer Compliance Headaches
From AI policies to industry regulation, teams deal with more compliance processes than ever. Keeping on top of those rules can take hours of staff time — hours you’d rather spend on revenue-generating activities.
An advanced DAM platform can take those compliance processes off your plate. Tools are available for all reviews, from digital rights management to the complex federal regulations for medical, financial, and legal content.
For Citizens Bank, these time-saving tools reduced the load on legal review personnel by 67% and shortened the review cycle to four to six business days. Before integrating a DAM platform, the process took 14 to 16 business days and involved up to 50 separate tasks.
But the bank’s success story goes beyond the numbers. With automated workflows at their fingertips, the Citizens content team has fewer frustrations and can focus more on engaging its customer base.
9. Optimized Content With AI Support
AI has transformed the world of content creation. It’s come so far, so fast, that 73% of marketers have begun using generative AI tools like ChatGPT to work faster.
But faster isn’t the only piece of the puzzle. When marketers and content creators use generative AI in isolation, without brand guidelines or company-specific tool training, their content is typically subpar.
A digital asset management system solves those problems by linking AI to brand guidelines. DAM-connected AI coaches link to ad trains from your content so their output aligns with your company’s voice. AI is an inspiration and content coach, helping your team achieve more.
AI-powered DAM solutions can help you repurpose content for new channels, create localized and personalized variations, and edit content for engagement. You get all the benefits of generative AI while your human voices stay behind the wheel.
Supercharge Your Content Team With Digital Asset Management
With so much to offer, it’s no wonder DAM platforms are becoming a go-to solution for leading enterprise companies. DAM streamlines the entire content lifecycle and makes assets work harder, improving brand consistency and strengthening identity.
DAM can transform how your team works with digital assets. See it in action today, then find out where your team can take it.
Digital Asset Management System FAQs
Are digital asset management platforms difficult to use?
Top DAM platforms are accessible to the average marketing user. For example, Aprimo clients can access content libraries directly from Chrome and Microsoft Edge with easy browser extensions. Users can integrate those assets easily with familiar tools, including marketing automation clients and customer management systems.
Can digital asset management platforms help with search engine optimization (SEO)?
A DAM platform makes SEO management more accessible than ever. Connect your branded assets with public links that sync and update whenever the asset changes, whether small or part of a large-scale rebranding. Public links are configurable to boost SEO and discoverability. Plus, with real-time performance data, you can keep better track of which campaigns help you rank.
Are DAM platforms worth it for small businesses?
Absolutely. Digital asset management streamlines content workflow for any size business, whether you have thousands of assets or dozens. It takes the manual work of organizing, storing, and retrieving assets out of clunky, outdated systems so you can do more in less time. It also returns advanced analytics to help you spend smart and grow faster.
What types of assets can digital asset management systems support?
The best DAM platforms handle any asset types you might use in your content, including images, videos, audio files, and text.
