The benefits of digital asset management (DAM)

For your brand to thrive, you need visual content - and lots of it. We’re talking product photography, videos, advertising creative, marketing campaign collateral and more. 

Too often brands rely on OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive to store their thousands of assets. These are great file sharing and collaboration tools. But here’s the kicker: they aren’t designed for finding, sharing and using visual digital assets.

That’s where digital asset management (DAM) comes in. Here's the key DAM technology benefits you could benefit from.

What are the main digital asset management benefits? 

From briefing to collecting content to then using it in your campaigns, a DAM system will improve every step of the creative workflows. Here’s how:

Now let’s break down each of the key 14 benefits a good digital asset management system provides.

1. Build a search engine for all your digital assets

A DAM system is like building a searchable asset library for your brand’s creative. Rather than searching for digital assets across folders and shared drives, DAM software is the single source of truth for your company. Upload your content, tag it in a way that will help your colleagues find it when they search for it, and you’re good to go. Having a single place for all your marketing materials also helps with brand consistency.

2. Gather all your content together your content together

Uploading digital assets is one way to get content into your DAM solution. But a good digital asset management system, like Dash, can do a lot of the drudgery for you. This is particularly useful for ecommerce brands collecting content from creators, influencers, photographers and customers.

Take Dash’s ‘guest upload’ feature. With this, you can send links to creators for them to upload digital assets directly into your Dash ready for your approval. 

Here’s an example of a guest upload link we use when working with ecommerce experts for our blog. This is what our contributors see when we send it to them:

They can then upload digital files straight into our Dash. We’ll then be notified that there’s new creative for us to approve. And it’s all done in a single system with no downloading email attachments or dealing with expired WeTransfer links.

We also see ecommerce brands use this feature to gather together user-generated content (UGC). It can be a real time-saver!

3. Reduce repetitive tasks

Imagine all those Slack messages from colleagues asking for the new logo or that specific product shot from years ago that everyone else had forgotten about. Those time-consuming requests are reduced substantially when you have a digital asset management platform. Rather than chasing you, your team can log-on to your digital asset management platform and simply search for the visual they need.

4. Save time and money

When your digital assets are tagged and easy to find, you’re going to save time. That means less hair-pulling frustration trying to track down that one creative file you knew you put somewhere. And it’s good for your business, because the more time you have to actually do productive work that furthers your company’s goals, the better off your company will be.

We talked to Kim from DTC haircare brand RevAir who heads up their brand marketing team. In her words:

“I truly believe Dash has saved us at least ten times its cost.”

It'll save valuable time your team can use to grow your brand.

💡 Find out how Kim's using Dash (our DAM system) to save her team 20 hours a month.

5. Share files and collaborate with your team

Sharing files easily with your team should be a key benefit of any digital asset management solution you go with. Make sure you pick one that makes sharing content simple. 

Dash’s sharing features suit any job you might be trying to do. Here’s how:

Use share links

These will likely be the most familiar. Select one or a group of assets you want to share, then select the timeframe you want to share them for. This creates a link you can use to send assets to your partners. They’ll get instant access and be able to download them - without logging into Dash.

Group assets into collections

Use this to gather together digital content on your Dash across different folders. Keep them in a ‘collection’ and share this with your team members, who can also add content into the collection themselves. This feature is particularly useful when you're working on a creative project, like planning a shoot and needing to pull together a lookbook for your photographer.

6. Use your DAM system to work with your retail partners

While most digital asset management software offers variations of the share features listed above, not all provide ‘portals’ like Dash. If you’re sending digital assets to retail partners and external partners, then you’ll want to hear about these.

Portals are a way to share assets in a view that’s easy to sort and search. They can be publicly-accessible or password protected - the choice is yours. DTC brands will use portals to make it easy for retail partners to access product assets. All the partner has to do is visit the link, search for the digital asset they want, and hit download. Take Haws, a watering can manufacturer. They use portals to manage their network of 100+ retailers.

7. Customise your DAM to suit you

Make sure you pick a DAM system that can be adjusted to meet the needs of your brand. Here’s some features to look out for.  

Set your own custom fields

With a digital asset management feature like ‘custom fields’, you can set up a list of tags that match how your colleagues want to search for content. Think product name, SKUs, campaign, season, and more.

Save custom download sizes

Your company will need to download digital assets in dimensions specific to your brand, like your homepage banner or product page photograph. If you have a set of custom dimensions you use regularly, save these in your digital asset management tool and save time.

8. Get inspiration when briefing content

If your digital content is all in one place, you’re able to look back through your DAM solution and gather inspiration when creating a brief. If you pair this with powerful search and tagging features, you can easily filter through past campaigns, creative assets, and high-performing content. This can spark new ideas for your content strategy and help you nail your next campaign brief.

Don’t just take it from us. Lucy, who manages the social media of fashion brand Emmy London, uses Dash for inspiration. She says:

“I can plan a whole month's worth of content so quickly with Dash because I have so much inspiration right in front of me.”

9. Keep in control of your brand

How do you keep brand consistency as your company grows? It’s a challenge every ambitious ecommerce business will need to face.

DAM software can help you with this. Firstly, when people know your DAM is the place to go for brand-approved media assets, there’s much less risk of rogue agents unearthing outdated assets and going live with those.

Some DAMs provide features to give you greater control over your brand (like Dash). Let’s go through them, shall we?

Control asset versions

When your creative team updates an existing asset, for instance, they can upload this as a new version under an existing asset. This version control stops duplicates, and notifies anyone who’s downloaded that image in the past that there’s a new version available. This is helpful when you’re rolling out a rebranding project or wanting to control your brand consistency.

Set expiry dates

Using models or stock photography in your assets? These may come with license restrictions like expiry dates. With Dash, add the expiry date associated with each image or video so you don’t accidentally use content you no longer have rights to.

10. Launch campaigns quicker

Digital asset management systems help get your creative content ready for marketing campaigns.

Most digital asset management solutions have image editing tools to help with repurposing content for different channels. For example, using Dash you can crop, resize and reformat images easily. It’s one less thing to add to your creative team’s workload, and they’ll thank you for it. In the words of David, who leads design for pet food brand Forthglade:

“We get fewer requests now for branded graphics and logos because they’re all on Dash. People in other teams can do basic editing in Dash, like resizing graphics, so they don’t have to come through us.”

That means you don't have to wait for your creative team for simple requests. You can make the edits yourself and launch your campaign quicker. 🚀

11. Integrate with your favourite tools

Make sure you pick a digital asset management system that offers seamless integration with the tools you use every day. Here’s a few that Dash connects with:

• Shopify - import product assets from Dash straight into your listings on Shopify
• Canva - use your Dash assets directly in your Canva masterpieces
• Adobe Creative Suite - drop images in Dash directly into your Adobe designs without having to break your design flow

There’s a tonne more, too. Browse our integrations page to find out more.

12. Manage user permissions

If your digital asset management tool is used by multiple teams and external partners, you’ll want to set permissions and manage user access. This means you’ll get control of who can see which assets. Say your advertising agency wants your latest product shots and brand photography, but that’s all they’ll need access to, you can easily set levels of permissions like this in Dash.

13. Get usage analytics and insight

When you’ve spent all that time and effort creating content, you want to know it’s being used. A good digital asset management system will give you analytics and insights into how your creative is performing. 

Take Dash: once you click into a digital file, you can look at asset usage like when it’s been downloaded and by who.

And if you’ve added contributors to your user list, you can see individual usage stats. This can be helpful when you’re working with retailers and want to see which product assets are being downloaded. Here’s what Amy’s been downloading:

14. Keep your digital assets safe and secure

A cloud-based DAM solution means you can download assets from wherever you are in the world. So it's important to make sure the DAM you pick offers secure access and takes data security seriously.

Dash is ISO 27001 certified, which is the international standard for information security. This means Dash offers secure storage, stays up-to-date with security patches, and backs up your data. 

Which DAM tool should I pick?

So what's the best DAM software to pick? To start, draw up a shortlist. And for that we’ve got you covered! Download our free, fully editable DAM comparison worksheet to help whittle down your list of contenders.

Make sure the digital asset management tool you end up going with is suited for your business and won’t break the bank. If you’re a growing business, you won’t want an enterprise DAM where you end up paying over the nose for features you don’t need.

For ecommerce brands, consider Dash. Dash is a DAM solution that has an award-winning interface and speedy onboarding. There's a reason it's the number one choice for DTC brands at the top of their game like Beavertown, Passenger Clothing and BrewDog.