Content strategy is your brand’s blueprint for driving sales, engagement, leads, traffic, and other marketing efforts. It involves planning, creating, executing, promoting, and managing content that is used and will be used for your company’s marketing initiatives. At the base, content includes images, video, audio, blogs, articles, and other media, which are all considered your organization’s digital assets.
The pandemic has made it important for businesses to have the right media assets to drive growth. Customers’ changing purchasing habits requires organizations to use immersive and compelling online content to foster and improve customer experience.
Consumers today expect more in the content included in product descriptions to help them make informed decisions. But according to the CMS Wire, it doesn’t end there. Consumers look to content for engagement, too. Customer engagement plays a major role in increasing brand reputation. When content is used to enhance customer experience and drive business growth, it’s important to adopt a digital asset management approach.
Digital Asset Management Explained
In general, digital asset management (DAM) is the business process for storing, organizing, and retrieving digital assets, which include media, Word and HTML documents, Excel spreadsheets, brand assets, PDF and text files, and presentations. It also involves managing the rights and permissions for these digital assets.
A closer look at DAM would tell you that it requires the development of an archive and an infrastructure to contain, preserve, store, and manage digital assets. In basic terms, it is a set of database records that you and your staff can access when you need a specific file. It is managed by a person or a team who manages the digital rights of each digital asset and provides different levels of access permission to users.
To make it easier for you to apply digital asset management in your business, you can develop your own DAM software or buy a proprietary one. Whatever option you use, though, you’ll need a reliable software patent law firm to work with, so you can protect your asset. You will also need to develop and maintain a strong DAM strategy. Here’s how.
Define Your Objectives for Adopting DAM
You need to enumerate your goals and reasons for implementing a DAM strategy for your business from the outset. It should be aligned with your business goals, which means you need to revisit your business plan. Review your general business goals and simplify them into micro objectives, which can help you determine why you’ll need a DAM strategy.
You should also pull your team together and find out if there are business processes that can be improved or problems solved once DAM is adopted.
Not all implementations of DAM end up successfully. However, if you’re using it to achieve specific goals and solve problems, you and your team will work towards making a successful DAM strategy
Conduct an Asset Inventory and Audit It
You should conduct an asset inventory to identify your digital assets used in specific areas in your business. It will also help determine who are the people in charge of each asset. This can help you protect your assets from threats and risks.
In companies that don’t implement DAM, employees are not always aware that content, documents, and files they are using are digital assets that need to be protected. An asset inventory can help you inform your staff of the importance of digital assets. It will also become a tool in motivating employees to protect your company’s digital assets.
With an inventory, you can also audit your digital assets. This means you’ll have a record of what assets you have, where they are stored and used, and who is accessing them.
Define How Assets Should Be Used
When implementing DAM in your company, it’s best to allow departments to adopt them one at a time. This will allow your business to use a DAM strategy in small steps rather than a one-time, big-time roll-out. Small steps can help you and your staff adjust to a DAM strategy’s requirements.
Before adopting DAM, however, your employees should know how to use, access, and store digital assets. This must be defined in a DAM policy.
A DAM policy should include the limitations that would permit and forbid employees’ rights and access to specific assets. It should also define the proper and accepted use of assets.
In addition to a policy, all assets should be named following a naming convention. This would provide uniformity, labeling, and classification to all your assets.
Before Anything Else
Don’t forget to coordinate with your team.
Before you can apply all the tips above, you need to get your team involved. Aside from asking them how DAM can improve their tasks, make them accountable for their use of company digital assets. In fact, this will improve asset governance and compliance. In other words, this will both protect digital assets and enhance workflow in your business.
Digital asset management will help you to control your digital resources better. Take advantage of its benefits to improve your business capabilities today.
