7 Factors that Should Influence Your Choice of a Digital Asset Management
Today, customer loyalty is largely driven by the speed and accuracy of information delivered, while business performance is directly impacted by customer experience (CX). However, as Augie Ray, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner, says, “CX is not a game of chance”. You must be “prepared to play the right game.”
The game begins by providing key information your customers need, in their moment of need. For instance, if a customer is stuck on a highway with a punctured tire, all he or she needs is a short video on ‘how to replace a flat tire’. For a consumer, it may seem like a simple demand, but often brands fail to deliver such customized digital content when their customers need it the most.
Furthermore, more customers mean more data for brands, which in turn means more touchpoints and more digital assets. Carving out personalized customer experiences from a vast repository of digital assets –photos, videos, music, graphics, podcasts, animations, fonts and other multimedia content – requires a robust Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution.
Digital Asset Management, or DAM as it’s popularly called, is a solution for storing and managing unstructured digital assets into a centralized, systematic, and searchable repository. It helps in eliminating data silos and improving productivity by empowering you to deliver personalized, content-driven customer experiences.
Selecting the best-fit DAM solution can be an extensive process, but it need not be complicated. Once you have earmarked your core needs and identified pain points, you can easily shortlist vendors catering to your demands. Before you put your money in a DAM solution, have a look at the following critical factors that will help you get the most out of your DAM investment.
Top 7 criteria for selecting a Digital Asset Management solution:
1. Organizational alignment
Selecting a best-fit DAM solution for your business is an uphill task if you don’t have complete buy-in from stakeholders across your organization. Like any other technology investment, the success of a DAM implementation depends heavily on the people who will use it. As a wide range of teams and workflows are impacted by DAM implementation, it demands organizational alignment.
2. Ease of use
Once implemented, users need to spend a considerable amount of time learning how to use the new solution and make it work to their advantage. Your DAM solution must give the users the control they need to evolve their business processes without excessive dependence on IT. Opting for a digital asset management solution with intuitive user experience (UX), collaborative workflow templates, and uncomplicated navigation, ensures ease-of-use across users, irrespective of technical expertise.
3. Integration with legacy applications
According to a recent IDC study, about a dozen other applications are integrated with a DAM solution in a typical organization. This is because digital asset management (DAM) plays a crucial role in synchronizing several business processes in a cost-effective way, which in turn adds value to the brand. The DAM solution you select must have state-of-the-art, pre-built integration and extensibility capabilities. This allows interoperations with existing systems and results in a seamless asset management experience.
4. Workflow management
Most business owners today prefer a DAM solution that manages workflows while providing complete visibility into business processes. This allows them to enjoy the control they need to evolve their business processes for a competitive advantage. Go for a DAM solution that offers low-code integration with existing workflows and automated asset tracking from ideation to review to distribution and archiving.
5. Cloud-based environment
When deciding on a DAM solution to meet your business goals, go for a cloud-based environment. This will help you leverage standard cloud computing benefits of flexibility and scalability to enhance productivity, accelerate time-to-market and save costs. A cloud-based digital asset management solution also empowers you with innovative plug-ins for collaboration with external partners backed by a robust global infrastructure for distribution and backup support.
6. Metadata management
A DAM solution differs from a general file storage option as it can provide a comprehensive view of an organization’s digital assets through robust metadata management. Consider investing in a DAM solution that supports all media formats, it’s highly scalable and can seamlessly cater to an increasing number of assets and users. The digital asset management solution must ensure that information can be assimilated, maintained, retrieved, connected, and shared for business needs across your organization. No matter where your assets are stored, your DAM solution must have advanced searching and indexing capabilities to help you find them quickly.
7. Security checks
Accessing and sharing digital assets through cloud-based DAM solutions raise considerable security apprehensions. Invest in a digital asset management that offers stringent security features like multi-factor authentication, variable user permissions, whitelisting file sharing destinations, periodic automation script audit, user access controls, logging, and monitoring. These features help safeguard your assets and mitigate security risks significantly.
| Also Read: DAM Implementation Best Practices |
Delivering amazing digital experiences that are relevant, personalized, and engaging demands a magic concoction of content and data. With the proliferation of devices, channels, and tools, offering a connected and seamless customer experience is the biggest challenge that today’s business owners face. Often, due to gaps in content management and data points, customer interaction with the brand is significantly reduced. Investing in an efficient digital asset management solution can help mitigate these challenges by filling the gaps to engage customers, improve conversions, and inspire brand loyalty and advocacy.
