What is digital asset management?

Digital asset management (DAM) is the management, organization, and distribution of digital assets from a central content hub

What is digital asset management abstract graphic

Benefits of digital asset management

Digital asset management gives your teams self-service access to the assets they need.

Deliver assets in the right format at the right time

Give your audiences the information they need faster

Reuse and repurpose your strongest content

Manage digital assets across the entire content lifecycle

With the right digital asset management system, you can extend the reach of your digital assets — also referred to as visual content — from creation through preservation. Then watch the agility and productivity of your marketing and creative teams grow.

Digital asset management brings clarity and efficiency to the content creation process across the business.

With existing assets centralized, it’s easy for departments to see what’s available and guidelines on how to use them properly. Creative teams can create templates and provide brand approved assets to help other teams customize brochures, slide decks, and other frequently created content.

Instead of sifting through shared drives, teams can set up an integration between the Adobe Creative Cloud and a DAM system to make assets available from within the application they are working in. The DAM always provides the most recent version of the asset, saving your team time updating assets.

Why is a DAM solution important to your marketing efforts?

Business growth requires an investment in digital assets. New products, geographic markets, sales channels, formats, and marketing strategies are increasing the demand for digital assets. This proliferation of assets strains the teams and tools creating and publishing the assets.

Without a company-wide digital asset strategy, departments struggle to scale and maintain brand consistency. A digital asset management system provides a central source of truth for the business. It acts as the hub to reference old assets, share current assets, and inspire new assets.

Gain organizational efficiencies

Improve cross-functional collaboration
Automate manual tasks
Simplify asset searching for everyone

Grow your business

All teams deliver a consistent brand
Publish where your audience is
Infrastructure and organization that scales

The uses of DAM are driven by two key things:

A global need to access a large variety of marketing and creative content that supports the brand
An increasing amount of high-quality digital assets being created and shared

“[Widen] is the digital asset hub of the organization that feeds our internal and external applications and drives demand for our products.”

DJ Lein
American Woodmark/
Timberlake Cabinetry

Digital asset management benefits by Industry

Agencies
Increase productivity of marketing, advertising, creative and design

Food and Beverage
Encourage global brand consistency

Healthcare
Secure brand assets and support compliance

Higher Education
Centralize digital assets and get all departments on track

Manufacturing
Global distribution of brand assets

Media and Entertainment
House media assets and manage image rights

Non-Profit
Maximize marketing resources on a limited budget

Print and Publishing
Streamline production operations

Retail
Bring together assets from everywhere for multi-channel promotions

Sports
Connect with press and revenue opportunities

Travel and Tourism
Give the public and press approved brand assets

Digital asset management benefits by user role

Creative and Design
Streamline creative workflows, increase productivity information

Technology (IT)
Support organizational digital transformation and security compliance

Marketing Communications
Centralize control over marketing operations

Multimedia and Web
Easily publish to digital channels and get more out of new technologies

Public Relations
Get the word out

Sales
Empower sales channels and localize branding

Calculate your DAM ROI

The ROI of DAM is all about marketing success. What’s it really costing your team NOT to have a DAM solution? Find out by entering your values in the ROI calculator now.

Money spent searching for assets
Calculate your DAM ROI now

people

hours per week

$/per hour

20,800

spent per year searching for assets

Money spent on content distribution

hours per month

$/per hour

$/per month

6,000

spent per year distributing content

Types of digital asset management

Software as a Service (SaaS): SaaS DAM systems are hosted in the cloud and accessed via the internet. This means no hardware or servers to maintain. SaaS DAM systems provide budget-friendly options and rapid deployment of upgrades.

Hybrid: Some vendors offer a hybrid of cloud and on-premise deployments. This offers more flexibility on where your assets are stored.

On-premise: On-premise DAM systems are deployed on your hardware. Your IT department provides the storage space and machines to run the DAM software, as well as manage updates and data backups. With the system on-premises, you control the security needs and gain faster speeds when working with larger files, like video.

Open source: Open source DAM systems provide can be hosted by a third party or on-premise.

Give your brand story a home

A digital asset management solution centralizes and organizes the visual assets that make up your content. But it's more than just a media library. It’s a way to share data about your content and make better use of the stories and images that get buried on CDs, servers, and drives.

Extend
Power your brand assets to reach other systems, processes, and people.

Connect
Share your brand story clearly and consistently.

Protect
Protect your brand with secure access, storage, and distribution of your assets.

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