Nowadays, pharma marketing teams are creating more and more content to keep up with demand from their target audience and achieve business objectives. However, as the volume of content continues to grow, all of the content assets get lost in the sea of content, making it difficult for team members to find what they need. This is where a digital asset management solution can offer a lot of value to businesses by making it easy to organize, share and track your brand’s digital assets. In this article, we will provide you with everything you need to know about digital asset management and the value it can offer to your business.
What is a DAM System?
You probably already know what DAM stands for, so let’s dive deeper to understand what it does. A DAM system serves as a central repository where you can store and manage your content. It offers both internal and external stakeholders controlled access to all their digital assets, including photographs, images, creative files, video, audio, presentation decks, documents, and much, much more. Most importantly, DAM systems provide a way to increase campaign productivity and ensure brand consistency.
Whether you are looking for a DAM solution or a way to optimize your current one, you need to make sure that it is able to organize your digital assets in a way that increases their value to your company. Its features help you do things like automate workflows, set expiration dates for asset licensing, and set varying levels of user access for files, folders, projects, and entire campaigns.
Who Uses Digital Asset Management?
The vast majority of businesses in today’s world are turning to digital solutions to manage their content assets. What are examples of digital assets? It can be various content formats such as logos, PDFs, images, eDetailers, and much more, all of which be a hassle to organize within any organization, big or small. Fortunately, there are asset data management solutions to keep these digital assets organized. Companies that are forward-thinking and strive for organization and collaboration use DAM software.
What are the Digital Asset Management Challenges?
There are many challenges that come with digital asset management. One of them is keeping track of all the files on a computer or network. Another challenge is keeping track of all the different versions of a file. A third challenge is making sure that everyone who needs access to a file has it. Below we list some of the DAM content challenges:
- Governance and standards – Digital asset management (DAM) governance is frequently lacking in organizations, which can result in inconsistent or nonexistent standards for keeping, organizing, and tagging assets. Users may have trouble locating the assets they require as a result, and redundant assets and versioning problems may be an issue.
- Lack of visibility and control – A major issue is a lack of visibility and authority over the digital assets in your company. It may result in copyright violations, data loss, duplicate material, and other problems. Utilizing a DAM system gives you full visibility into your digital assets and the power to manage who has access to them and when.
- Integration issues – Your DAM system must connect with various business line apps within your organization in order to give the impression that you have a single platform for accessing, management, and updating your digital assets. Employee productivity will suffer if they have to handle their digital assets through multiple systems. It will take some time to search through various repositories for the desired digital object.
Even with all of these challenges, DAM use benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. With this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the features of digital asset management systems.
Why is Digital Asset Management Important?
Digital asset management is important because it enables staff to utilize a single source of truth to sort, store, share, and secure the digital assets they need to conduct important business operations like marketing, business development, and branding. In other words, digital asset management is how organizations keep and utilize the digital assets they need to grow their brand, empower their sales teams, and convey a clear and purposeful message to their audience.
What are the Benefits of Digital Asset Management?
A successful digital asset management system offers much more than a simple place of storage for digital files. It offers enhanced visibility and provides a single source of truth for creatives, marketers, brand managers, and other stakeholders to utilize in pursuit of your business goals. Let’s take a look at some of the main benefits of digital asset management:
- Improve brand consistency – While there are many ways of improving brand consistency, all of them require your marketing team to spend a lot of time and effort. The good news is that there are a lot of tools available that can make this process easier.
- Enhanced collaboration – A DAM system enables users to share assets with internal and external partners without additional software. This improves collaboration and reduces time-to-market for important campaigns. If you’re looking to improve internal and external collaboration, be sure to look for a DAM system that offers support for multiple asset formats.
- Maintain compliance – The pharma landscape is highly regulated, and every time your marketing team creates a new content asset, they need to be sure that it will pass MLR approval. A DAM system will help you here by controlling content usage, tracking compliance with regulatory obligations, involving legal, risk, and compliance managers in the content validation process, and a lot more.
In addition to this, it is worth pointing out that your entire DAM system can be further enhanced by integrating with a content development platform. This will allow you to speed up content creation and make sure it is compliant with all MLR processes. It will also involve all of the stakeholders in the digital asset management workflow and allow them to work as a unit.
Main Features of DAM Systems
While various DAM solution providers offer certain unique features on how to manage assets, there are some core features every DAM system should have:
- Support for asset lifecycle and user roles – DAM systems have a unified interface tuned to user duties across workflows that works well with various kinds of content from all users. As a result, you can personalize interfaces, automate file routing, and align features with user roles. Business and IT managers can monitor activity and streamline processes with the help of reporting functions
- Support for multiple formats and devices – Given a wide variety of content sources that are continuously expanding, DAM systems provide extensive support for numerous formats, devices, destinations, and user types. Large, unstructured data, such as multimedia files, scanned papers, digitized images, and electronic forms, are some examples.
- Third-party integrations – Social networks, cloud-based apps, and content management systems are examples of third-party tools. Additionally, processes centralization established due to DAM systems’ open design and API support enable you to manage a variety of file types, media, new and legacy apps, and repositories.
In addition to this, it is worth pointing out that your entire DAM system can be further enhanced by integrating with a content development platform. This will allow you to speed up content creation and make sure it is compliant with all MLR processes. It will also involve all of the stakeholders in the digital asset management workflow and allow them to work as a unit.
How Does Asset Management Work?
Every DAM solution works slightly differently. However, they all work on a similar basic principle. The digital asset management software stores all of the digital assets in a centralized library. Additionally, every file has associated metadata such as the file type, size, resolution, and description. Users can search the library to easily find files. It is like a special computer file system made specifically for the shared use of digital assets.
A digital asset management workflow defines how you manage digital assets and get content projects completed. Although it focuses largely on the DAM and requires a DAM platform to implement, it has little to do with the software. In other words, the DAM workflow outlines how you request an asset for the system or how you create a brief in the system, etc. But it has nothing to do with how the system processes that information.
Make Sure You are Getting the Most Value Out of Your DAM System
A DAM system can offer a lot of value to your business. It can streamline asset distribution, increase productivity, reduce compliance-related risks, and offer many other benefits. However, you can only achieve these benefits if you are producing enough content to fill up all your distribution pipelines. This is why it is highly recommended that you integrate a content development platform with your DAM system so you get the highest ROI. It will take a lot of the workload off your teams and enable them to meet the demands of your target audiences.
