Types of Digital Assets

Digital Asset Management

What captures customers’ attention? Ask any marketer and they’ll tell you content like images, videos, or audio aid in breaking through the noise to entice customers to engage with a brand online.

Marketing channels have become incredibly saturated with noise. In order to stand out among the competition, marketers have relied on content and digital assets to get their brand noticed and help keep customers’ attention. In today’s world, digital assets have emerged as crucial items for marketing teams to create in order to forge a strong online presence to establish brand awareness and drive growth for their business.

But as more content and digital assets are produced every day by marketing teams, the management and organization of these items presents a new challenge. How do marketing teams store these important resources for their business?

Answer: Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions.

What Are Digital Assets?

At its core, a digital asset is any piece of content that can be stored, shared, and utilized through digital channels. Images, videos, documents, text, and even audio are all examples of digital assets. Companies across a wide range of industries use these assets as the building blocks of their digital strategies, which provide a ton of value to their customers as they engage with brands through digital experiences.

This includes product images that showcase a manufacturer’s product line, troubleshooting videos that provide helpful information to customers, and documents that inform customers of how to properly care for their products.

These assets hold tremendous value, adding to not only to the visual appeal of a brand’s digital experiences, but its ability to convey important information to customers effectively.

What Are the Types of Digital Assets?

If you’re a marketing manufacturer, you may be wondering, “What is considered a digital asset?” in reference to your business.

Images

Product Images: These images showcase the product from different angles, highlighting its design, features, and controls.
Troubleshooting Images: Visual representations of common issues or malfunctions that users might encounter, along with corresponding solutions.
Before-and-After Images: These images can show a comparison of items before and after using the brand’s product to show its effectiveness.
Maintenance and Cleaning Visuals: Images illustrating maintenance tasks the customer may perform at some point of their product’s life.
Usage Scenarios: Images showing people using the product in various settings or scenarios.

Videos

Instructional Videos: These videos provide step-by-step visual instructions on how to install, operate, and maintain the product.
Product Demonstrations: Product demonstrations are powerful tools to showcase the features and benefits of the product and its special functions.
Installation Guides: Video tutorials showing the proper installation process of the product.
Troubleshooting and Repair Videos: Videos that address common problems users might encounter with their products and provide step-by-step guidance on how to fix the issues.
Comparison Videos: Videos comparing different models or brands of the product, discussing their pros and cons, features, and performance.
Maintenance and Care Tips: Videos explaining how to clean and maintain the product.
Customer Testimonials and Reviews: Videos featuring real users sharing their experiences with the product and overall satisfaction.

Documents

User Guide: This document provides step-by-step instructions on how to install, operate, and maintain the product such as a washing machine. It covers everything from initial setup to choosing the right wash cycles, using different features, and troubleshooting common issues.
Installation Guide: This document explains how to properly install the washing machine, including information about electrical connections, water supply, and any special installation requirements.
Warranty Information: Manufacturers often provide warranty information that outline the terms and conditions of the warranty coverage for the product.
Safety Guidelines: These documents provide important safety warnings and guidelines for using the product. This might include warnings about electrical hazards, water-related risks, and general safety tips.
Maintenance and Care Guide: Maintenance guide provides information on how to clean, maintain, and care for the product to ensure customers get as much longevity as possible.
Troubleshooting Guide: A troubleshooting guide offers solutions to common problems that customers may come across while using their product. These guides provide more information and help resolve issues for customers without the need for customers to seek professional help.

What Is Not a Digital Asset?

Any type of material or value that is available in a digital format is referred to as a "digital asset" in a generic sense. This definition implies that physical items are not considered to be digital assets. Because they cannot be used on digital channels like social media, landing pages, or a website, things like a physical product catalog or photograph would not be regarded as a digital asset by manufacturers.

Is a website a digital asset? No. A website can comprise many different digital assets, but a website itself is not considered to be a digital asset.

That being said, marketers can build a website using a platform called a Product Experience Management (PXM) solution. PXMs often have a DAM functionality included and enable marketers to quickly pull in images, videos, or even text to build their website. One of the biggest pros to building a website on a PXM platform is that it negates the need to hire agencies or use development resources. This ensures the creation of the website does not take an absorbent amount of time and can be done completely by marketing teams. Another benefit to building a website on a PXM platform is that anytime a digital asset is updated within the DAM, it instantly updates any place using it, so marketing teams don’t have to waste time hunting down specific digital assets and updating them manually on the website.

Interested in building your website with a PXM? Check out how easy it is to build your website in minutes using Lumavate’s PXM.

Digital Asset Trading Platforms

Sometimes when discussing digital assets, the concept of a digital asset trading platform arises.

A digital asset trading platform is an online marketplace that facilitates the buying, selling, and exchange of various types of digital assets, such as cryptocurrencies, tokens, and other digital representations of value.

Below are examples of digital asset trading platforms:

Bitcoin
Cryptocurrency
Blockchain

While these are considered to be digital assets, they are very different from the digital assets we’ll be talking about.

DAM Benefits

DAM systems offer several benefits for manufacturers that can help streamline their operations, improve collaboration, and enhance overall efficiency. Here are a few key benefits:

Centralized Storage and Organization: Digital assets can be stored, edited, and managed by marketers using DAM systems, and makes it simpler to find and access assets.
Increase Productivity: DAM systems enable marketers to quickly find certain assets using search terms or tags. When marketers aren’t bogged down with time spent trying to find specific assets, they can accomplish more items on their to-do list and spend less time tracking down digital assets.
Increased Collaboration: Manufacturers frequently collaborate with several groups like agencies or channel partners. DAM systems offer the ability to share assets, improve collaboration between teams,and provide real-time access for all parties involved.
Brand Consistency: By offering a centralized location for approved videos, images, documents, and more, DAM systems help maintain brand consistency. This guarantees that team members follow the brand's guidelines and only use approved assets.
Time Savings: By having a system that simplifies digital asset management, marketing teams can drastically reduce the amount of time needed to search for content they need to make engaging digital experiences for their customers.
Content Distribution: DAM systems enable teams to quickly deliver marketing materials to multiple channels, including team members, agencies, or channel partners.
Scalability: DAM systems are made to scale to accommodate growing amounts of content and digital asset marketing teams create daily or even weekly. Even when the amount of digital assets grows, DAM systems have functionality in place that allow team members to quickly find the digital asset they’re searching for.
Enhanced Security: DAM systems include security features like user authentication and permissions management, to make sure that only authorized individuals can access critical assets.
Reduced Duplication and Redundancy: The chance of creating duplicate assets and storing them in various places is decreased by a well-organized DAM system, resulting in a more effective use of storage space.

Digital Asset Company

Many businesses, particularly manufacturers, are beginning to understand they need a DAM tool in their tech stacks due to the multiple advantages of a DAM solution we just described. There are several different DAM software providers to consider if you're just beginning your search for a DAM application to buy.

Lumavate
Bynder
Brandfolder
Adobe
Canto

You may have noticed that Google Drive and Dropbox are not on that list. Google Drive and Dropbox are popular cloud storage and file-sharing platforms, but they are not considered the best options for digital asset management for several reasons:

Customization and Branding: Products made by manufacturers and digital assets are complicated. They need a high level of customization in their DAM systems as a result. Dropbox and Google Drive don't provide as many customization choices.
Scalability and Performance: The software used by manufacturers to manage these assets must be able to expand along with the company as it produces more digital assets. Larger asset libraries may be handled more easily by dedicated DAM solutions, which also offer quicker search and filtering capabilities.
Security and Access Control: Although security measures are in place in Google Drive and Dropbox, DAM systems frequently offer more detailed control over who may view or alter particular items. DAM systems provide a superior user-based rights setting mechanism than Dropbox or Google Drive.

There are better solutions to digital asset management. In the next section, we’ll discuss what the best DAM solution in the market is.

Why Use Lumavate

Lumavate is the best DAM solution on the market for several reasons. The first reason why Lumavate is the best option for manufacturers to manage their digital assets is because we have additional functionality within our platform that gives marketers the ability to do so much more than manage their content and digital assets.

More Than a DAM Solution

Lumavate is a PXM platform with Product Information (PIM), DAM, Digital Experience Platform (DXP), and text messaging capabilities. Why should a marketer care about all of these solutions? It’s because it puts all of the necessary tech solutions marketers at manufacturing companies should have in order to create a holistic and consistent product experience strategy.

Marketers can get started with Lumavate by spending upfront time loading their product data into our PIM and uploading all of their digital assets into our DAM solution. By spending the time upfront completing this process, marketing teams can speed up time creating digital experiences in the future and not waste time tracking down specific product data or a particular product image. Everything is stored on our platform.

Once everything is stored in our platform, that’s where the real magic of creating digital product experiences can begin. Let’s say you were creating a product onboarding digital experience. All you would need to do is pull in the specific product images and video instructions you need to include in the digital onboarding experience and you can create a personalized experience within minutes.

Having a PIM, DAM, and DXP under one platform drastically reduces the number of technical solutions your team needs to invest in, which means you can champion saving time and effort for your business. Plus, a PXM makes your life as a marketer easier and more efficient so you can do more without having to worry about finding specific product information or digital assets. And in case that wasn’t enough, you never have to worry about finding an unapproved brand asset being circulated to your customers ever again; you can rest easy knowing team members have easy access to only the approved digital assets saved within your DAM solution.

Schedule a Demo

Set up a 30-minute call with one of our product experts and we’ll show you just how easy it is to get started using Lumavate’s PXM. We’re 75 percent more efficient than other solutions and can get you onboarded in just a day.