What Is a Digital Asset Management Company?

A digital asset management company is a business that creates and supports software to gather and organize digital assets all in one place. This software saves time on searching across the company for what you want and allows you to manage versions, tag, and associate products with related accessories, and far more.

As a manufacturer, maker of consumer packaged goods (CGP), or maker of medical devices, your marketing department can make great use of this software, by quickly creating exceptional digital experiences for your customers. It can also be useful in other areas, such as documentation, sales, and the quality department, allowing everyone to quickly find and use all available digital assets to provide documentation, marketing assets, sales information, product information, and more.

What Are Digital Assets?

Digital assets can be any type of file in any format, including images, documents, graphics, video files, audio files, and more. You might want to keep all of your marketing assets, such as graphics, logos, ad concepts, brand guidelines, brand voice manuals, and more all in your digital asset management system (DAM) for easy access across your marketing department and rapid creation of landing pages, websites, microsites, and other highly useful assets.

What Is a Digital Asset Management System?

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is a software solution that allows companies to centrally store, manage, and share digital files.

Digital asset management tools provide full control of all your digital assets so that no time is wasted on searching across the company for the right images, marketing materials, documents, and other important information. These tools also allow for tight version control, ensuring that everyone across the company and any external partners are all using the latest, correct version of every digital asset, from your logo to your product images.

It’s easy to get started with this software and, with Lumavate’s DAM, you’ll find it’s intuitive, easy to pick up, and that you can quickly set it up and upload your digital assets ready for use.

While the DAM is usually controlled by the marketing department, the software is often shared across multiple departments in the business as well as externally with partners such as agencies and channel partners. We talked above about how useful this software can be for many different departments, and when implementing such a solution, it’s a good idea to talk to each department and see what they might be able to use it for.

Once it’s set up and ready to go, you can control who has access to the software and what they can do with every asset. You’ll want most people to have read and use access only so that people can’t edit controlled assets either accidentally or on purpose. This is particularly important from a quality point of view, especially if your company works to ISO 9001 quality standards, where asset control and management is part of regular inspection each year by ISO.

What Is a Digital Asset Management Company?

Some well-known digital asset management companies are Adobe, Canto, Bynder, and Brandfolder. These companies have created their digital asset management platforms, providing software services to a variety of business sectors. Each one has different functionalities to help you safely store your digital assets and increase the speed of your content creation, and each one is aimed at different industries or sectors.

When choosing the best digital asset management software for your company, it’s best to demo several aimed at your sector and find the one that suits your company best. Pay attention to what each one does, what functions you need, how easy they are to learn and use, and how quick the setup is. Adobe, for example, takes a great deal of time for implementation and will need outside consultants to help you. That’s fine if you’re “MegaGiantCorp Inc.” with an unlimited budget, but not if you’re keeping an eye on the bottom line and want to make sure you’re getting value for money.

The four companies named above are big names in the DAM software space, but they are standalone DAMs that still require you to use a third-party solution, agencies, or developers to create digital experiences. If you’re looking for a full Digital Experience Platform (DXP) with quick setup and ease of use, you’ll either need to find a DAM that integrates with the DXP you want to use, or choose a complete solution DXP platform, such as Lumavate, which not only includes DAM functionality but a quality Content Management System (CMS), and a Product Information Management (PIM) solution, all integrated within a high-quality digital experience platform for smooth working and seamless, built-in integration to the DAM.

In addition to the DAM for images, audio files, video files, and more, Lumavate also includes a professional PIM to enable you to manage and control your product data, including pricing, SKUs, product descriptions, data sheets, related products, and more.

That way, no matter what job you want to do and what you want to create, it’s quick and simple to come up with top-quality digital experiences for internal or external customers. You can incorporate every possible digital asset you own into these experiences, and all without needing to know or use a single scrap of code.

What Does a Digital Asset Specialist Do?

Your Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution is usually managed by the marketing department, and you would need to appoint a Digital Asset Specialist to be responsible for the overall management of your software.

A central point of contact, with a deputy to assist and to cover for vacation, is vital to ensure the safety and secure control of your data. What you don’t want is multiple people being able to upload multiple versions of the same asset and edit anything they like, whenever they like, with no control over which version is the correct one or the latest version that must be used. That’s how quality starts to deteriorate and how you cause maximum confusion for everyone when trying to use your digital assets.

Instead, your digital asset specialist will be the one person accountable for the digital asset management software in your company, so that everything is managed and version controlled correctly.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t have other users and others responsible for uploading and managing particular digital assets related to their department, but it does mean that you have one person in ultimate control. They can then allocate different roles and access to your other employees, so the whole company can quickly find and use your digital assets to create quality digital experiences.