What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

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.

Easily Create Assets with Enterprise DAM Software

Creation

Management

Distribution

Enterprise Digital Asset Management Archives

Preservation

Creation

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.

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Management

Asset governance is a new subject for most businesses implementing their first DAM system. Informal permissions were inherent with decentralized assets living on hard drives under desks or on departmental file sharing apps.

With all of a business's assets in one place, it’s important to structure roles and permissions within the DAM system to control who can access what. A DAM system provides access levels to different types of users based on their needs – for example viewing rights, upload abilities, or approval.

Another challenge with managing potentially TBs of assets in one system is finding the right asset for the project at hand. With metadata applied to assets, users can search for and filter for what they are looking for within the DAM system. They can also browse categories and curated collections of assets.

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Distribution

With the DAM system being the central source of truth for digital assets, it’s the perfect tool for distributing assets across systems, marketing channels, and teams.

Teams can use out-of-the integrations or an API to deliver assets between systems. For example, making assets available within a CMS, an e-commerce system, or social media publishing tool.

A DAM system also helps distribute assets to teams with share links. Users can grab a link to an individual asset or a branded Portal with many assets and share it. This is frequently used for sharing brand guidelines, marketing campaign materials, and event photography.

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Preservation

Digital assets have a lifetime, so when they’re no longer in use you should archive and preserve them.

DAM systems help transition assets from being active to archive with tools like asset expiration dates, data on where assets are embedded, versioning, and permissions.

The scalability of cloud-based solutions can also make your DAM system a cost-effective archive solution.

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Why is a DAM system 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

Today's world is driven by content. Without a DAM system to scale your marketing team's efforts, your teams will struggle to keep up with the demands of creating, managing, and publishing digital assets.

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 ever increasing amount of high quality digital assets and visual content 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."

- Patrick Nordstrom, Cambria USA

Benefits of digital asset management

Digital asset management gives your teams self-service access to the assets they need and the tools to deliver them in the right format. Which means your audience will, in turn, receive the information they need faster. Businesses like yours are realizing the following benefits of DAM.

What is DAM

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?

ROI #1: Money spent searching for assets

people

hours per week

$/per hour

20,800

spent per year searching for assets

ROI #2: Money spent on content distribution

hours per month

$/per hour

$/per month

6,000

spent per year distributing content

See what DAM users are saying about Widen

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-premises: 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 and serve it up to different people easily and securely.

Next step: See a demo

What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

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

Manage digital assets across the entire content lifecycle

Creation

Management

Distribution

Preservation

Why is a DAM system important to your marketing efforts?

The uses of DAM are driven by two key things:

Benefits of digital asset management

Calculate your DAM ROI

See what DAM users are saying about Widen

Types of digital asset management

Give your brand story a home

Start your trial now!