What is Digital Asset Management?

Regardless of your size or sector, your organisation likely creates and manages many digital assets daily. These assets can be anything you store digitally, from videos and images to PDF documents and audio files. They provide more descriptive context and value compared to standard files.

As time stretches on, the number of assets you create inevitably increases. And so, too, do the complexities and challenges of managing these resources. Beyond the hassle of searching through disparate systems, you also face the challenge of updating out-of-date assets and establishing user access controls.

This is where Digital Asset Management (DAM) can make a real difference. With the right solution in place, you can leave these challenges behind you and spend your precious time on more important activities.

When done well, Digital Asset Management allows you to manage your assets effectively, increasing their security and accessibility.

It hinges on using a Digital Asset Management system that stores, organises, and secures your assets in one centralised web-based application. Your teams can then easily upload, access, and share the resources they need.

This is only skimming the surface. Let’s break down what these systems can do for you in more detail.

Digital Asset Management definition

Let's start by defining what Digital Asset Management is:

Digital Asset Management is the process of organising, storing and retrieving digital files like images, videos and documents. DAM systems help businesses manage their digital content in a central location, making it easy to access, share and use, ensuring better efficiency and control over their assets.

What does a Digital Asset Management system do?

Improve digital asset organisation

When saving assets on a local drive, you naturally rely on file names. These are useful for organising and finding your own personal assets.

But, for larger organisations with a growing number of resources, the task of enforcing these naming conventions becomes more difficult. The more assets you have, the more creative you’ll have to be.

A DAM system uses structured metadata to categorise your assets. This means you can tag and search for a resource based on its content rather than its name.

Share digital assets in bulk

Long gone are the days of enormous, easily-lost email chains. A DAM enables you to securely share multiple assets at once, both internally and externally, with just a single URL link.

You can easily export assets to your other content platforms (such as YouTube and Flickr) too.

Share digital assets securely

Naturally, security will be one of your top priorities when sharing your resources.

A DAM should allow you to stipulate the level of access you’d like to give your recipients. This includes refining the metadata fields each individual can see. From there, you can generate and send a unique URL link for every recipient, ensuring only the intended audience can view your assets. With access controls, you can designate assets as view only, blocking your audience from being able to download to their own devices.

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Maintain brand imagery

With many employees suffering ‘change fatigue’, it’s important to choose a DAM that’s easy to adopt. The more familiar it is to use, the less daunting it will feel.

The right DAM system will allow you to customise its interface based on your organisation’s brand image, colours, and logo. It’ll also help you maintain and optimise your campaign imagery, offering watermark features and image and video resizing functionality. This will ensure your employees get the asset size they need for the channel they need, all without the worry of overstretched logos and cut-off artwork.

Automate workflows and approvals

A DAM will direct specific user uploads or download requests through an automatic Digital Asset Management workflow to your platform admins. At that point, your admins can either approve or deny the request. This is particularly important if you need to check licenses or ensure data subject consent before using the materials.

The benefits of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system

So, why use a digital asset management system? Now that you know what a DAM system is and what it does, let’s explore how it can benefit your organisation day to day.

Let’s explore four of the most significant advantages of adopting a centralised, web-based Digital Asset Management system:

Enhance productivity

With the ability to search for assets using a range of descriptive metadata criteria, your users can find the resources they need easily and quickly. This can boost the efficiency of your internal processes. For instance, if you need to send assets to a client within a set timeframe, the power to find the right materials quickly can make all the difference.

Plus, it’s will save you time in asset management with workflows and automations that free your time up (more on that later) by handling some of the basic Digital Asset Management admin.

Maintain up-to-date content

When marketing a product or promoting a new campaign, your teams must have access to the most up-to-date assets. Otherwise, your marketing and communication efforts may prove inconsistent, or you may promote content that lacks relevancy.

With a DAM system, you can keep track of your outdated assets and enable authorised employees to edit and replace them. This reduces the likelihood of someone accidentally downloading and promoting an old resource.

Access from multiple locations

Because the DAM is a web-based system, your users can access your assets no matter where they are. Certain systems even allow your employees to log in using the same credentials they use for your corporate network, which can streamline platform adoption.

To guarantee secure access, a DAM will also offer access management policies to ensure you only give each user the right level of access.

Help with compliance and licensing

A DAM system with automated workflows will notify you when a license needs updating. This saves you the hassle of monitoring license expiration dates. And, if you choose not to renew, it’ll move resources with expired licenses from ‘accessible’ to ‘non-accessible’ without you needing to lift a finger.

This ensures you only use the assets you have the right to own and use.

Four real-world use cases of a DAM

All this sound good in the abstract, but it’s easier to see the benefits once applied to real-world sectors. With that in mind, here are four use cases of a DAM:

1. NGOs

Many non-profit organisations use third-party images in their marketing campaigns and website content. Some of these images feature vulnerable people who, in time, may no longer feel comfortable sharing their faces or identities online.

This makes consent and licensing a complex challenge. And it’s only exacerbated by the fact that many charities use multiple systems to store their assets. This is often the case for NGOs that work internationally or across disparate offices.

Fortunately, this is easily rectified with a DAM.

Using the right system, NGOs can receive notifications whenever an individual revokes consent, allowing them to promptly take down images, videos, or other resources. What’s more, with the use of automated workflows, they can cut off access to expired resources once licenses end.

2. Museums

Museum collections aren’t limited to what’s on display to the public. Consider New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which displays only a tiny percentage of its art collections. Only 24 of its 1,221 pieces by Picasso, for example, are on display.

But while they’re hidden from sight, these pieces must be catalogued through high-quality, easily searchable imagery.

A DAM allows museums to easily tag their assets based on visual metadata descriptors and search for them. This is essential when updating website content, creating informative, promotional materials or guides, or preserving an artist’s legacy. Plus, some DAMs will integrate with existing Collections Management Systems, making life even simpler.

3. Product marketing

A DAM makes it easier for product marketing teams to search for assets, such as product videos and images, using relevant phrasing or SKU codes. This can boost productivity when generating social media campaigns, updating product pages, or sending materials to distributors.

Better still, they can update these resources easily with a DAM’s version control settings, ensuring that no asset is out of date.

4. Design agencies

While all Digital Asset Management systems will differ, a good platform should offer a package that allows for unlimited users, including individuals outside of your organisation.

This is beneficial for design agencies - or other creative businesses - where you need to give a client secure access to a portfolio of work. It’s even better if you have a long list of clients and require a platform that can scale with this growing list of users.

Is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system right for you?

With most organisations handling an increasing number of large digital assets, it’s worth asking: why use a digital asset management system? The answer lies in its ability to centralise, organise, and simplify your workflows—making it an essential tool for any business, no matter its size or sector.

Of course, moving to a new system can feel daunting. So, to make sure a DAM is right for you, answer the following questions:

Do you need continual access to your assets?

Perhaps you have a distributed team and need your assets to remain available across different time zones. Or, maybe, your organisation frequently navigates tight deadlines that require late-night finishes. No matter your situation, a DAM can provide secure, 24/7 access to your assets.
Do you have archives of assets that are difficult to navigate?

File names can be arbitrary and often only make sense to the person who created them. This is where metadata-based tagging and searching really help. For example, imagine you work in a museum. Instead of naming a scanned image of a Monet painting ‘Water Lilies 1/250’, you might tag it with words such as ‘water lilies’, ‘impressionism’, and ‘pond’. This increases the chances of finding an asset quickly and ensures your employees don’t have to rely on remembering file names.
Do you deal with third-party assets?

Achieving compliance is hard when you deal with third-party assets - particularly those reliant on licenses or individual consent. A DAM will prove valuable if you frequently struggle to keep on top of license expiration dates or requests to take down content. These platforms can automatically notify you when it’s time to renew a license and when a third party revokes consent.
Is it difficult to find the most up-to-date resource?

Picture this - a campaign is due to go live within the week, but your marketing teams can’t find the latest version of your promotional materials. This can be stressful for everyone involved. A DAM’s robust version control functionality will allow your teams to update out-of-date assets quickly and ensure everyone inside or outside of the business can only access relevant resources.
Do you need to share assets with multiple parties?

A DAM could be the best option if you frequently send large files or portfolios outside of your business - and find it difficult to do so over email. You can share your assets quickly and securely with a few permission checks and one simple URL.

Picking the best Digital Asset Management system

If your organisation creates, manages and shares assets regularly, you know the challenges of resource management all too well.

Digital Asset Management systems allow you to easily update and search for resources, boosting productivity and consistency. Whether you're looking for digital asset management examples to compare features or evaluating specific solutions, the options can feel overwhelming. But, with so many solutions on the market, it can be tough to choose the right system for you.

To help you along, let us introduce you to ResourceSpace: our answer to the complexities of the Digital Asset Management search. The tool is secure, completely open-source, and provides a range of easy-to-use features, including rights management and licensing workflows and version control functionality.

Better still, you can download the platform for free.

Our free tier offers 10GB of storage without an expiration date or user limits. Try it out for yourself and see how it can bolster your asset management processes.

Try ResourceSpace for free

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