Digital Asset Management: What Is it And Why Do You Need It?

Marketing teams require a way to bring all their digital assets together in a central location. This prevents tricky situations such as whether a designer has the latest version of the company’s logo created and other people in the team don’t have access to the image.

Let’s dig deeper into digital asset management to learn more about what it is, how it works and why you need it.

What is Digital Asset Management?

Creating a repository of digital assets like images, videos, workflow diagrams, draft documents and other digital media in a central location makes it accessible to the entire marketing team. There’s no longer a separate group of individuals all using different systems and software that don’t work well together. Instead, the team can access the right files when they need them and they’re available to be viewed by anyone with authorization to do so.

Digital media can be stored, distributed to different people within the team, designed and updated, and is fully searchable too. The assets used in a marketing campaign can be kept together and the campaign performance reviewed. Previous campaigns and their digital assets can also be reviewed to see how the new marketing approach is (or is not) working well.

What is a Marketing Portal?

A Marketing Portal is designed to be accessible in the cloud only to the team who will use it. It enables disparate teams that might be situated in different places around the world to work collaboratively.

In this globalized world with distant employees, freelancers, and staff that work at the head office, the portal allows everyone to be on the same page at the same time.

Superior Collaboration

Collaboration is encouraged with effective digital asset management and portals. Using the MediaBeacon’s system, there are project dashboards to view all the assets within an individual project in one place. Videos can have annotations added to them, so that different people within the team understand why certain scenes or informative slides were included. Similarly, graphics can have annotations which allows graphic designers to add notes about their design inspirations or comment on different iterations of a new design for a marketing image to solicit meaningful feedback.

The review and approval process are built-in to layer in controls over what campaigns have fully authorized media elements and which don’t. There’s process management to help projects and people stay better organized and the whole package integrates happily with Adobe software suite too.

Customization and Interoperability via APIs

For marketing portals and digital asset management, a robust API is an essential in today’s mobile and desktop software world. In the case of MediaBeacon, their API allows useful connections programmatically to other commercial software.

Workflow can be shared either via an online server or through the web browser using JavaScript. This gives this type of asset management interoperability where it can make these essential connections between different apps and software tools.

For marketing teams that find that their campaigns are too scattered and uncoordinated, pulling together digital assets, effective business processes and workflows makes a great deal of sense. Isn’t it the right time to consider doing the same?

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.