A digital asset management system (DAM) is more than an archive. As its manager, you hold the source to unlimited potential—to increase your team’s productivity, to offer data to back up or challenge people’s pet theories, and to manage content out in the world. But, how often are you using your DAM to its fullest potential? How can you add value to your team and propel your career forward?
These five career-catapulting tips will help you level up your automation, simplify your tech stack, and collaborate effectively with your partners—all by maximizing what your DAM can do. Who knows… You may even get promoted *wink*.
1. Rules Are Revolutionary
How often do you get requests that boil down to, “I don’t know what I’m allowed to use!“ or “I can’t find what I need!” (Or, *shudder*, “Can I get that logo again?”) Whether it’s your internal marketing team or global partners and licensees—rules are an invaluable feature to streamline several processes.
Not all DAMs work the same, but you should be able to set rules to automate things like:
- How metadata is mined from ingestion—Set yours to automatically tag file properties, content, and embedded data at ingestion.
- Permission-based access—Automate permissions based on where content is uploaded in the platform, or how content is tagged.
- Workflows—Apply rules to automate content organization and tagging when assets are uploaded into the system, ensuring they go where intended every time.
Rules release you from having to recreate new criteria every time you invite a freelancer into a project or ingest a big batch of assets. It’ll create cleaner data, reduce work, and as we’ll explore, offer better insights.
2. DAM, Those Channels Look Sharp
A good DAM doesn’t just store assets—it should also help you publish approved content. That’s pushing creative out to campaigns, channels, social, and eComm sites. Whether you use a CMS integration or a content delivery network (Tenovos’ CDN is built-in), your marketing teams can push assets directly to their channels. This potentially saves everyone time from using third-party publishing tools, which simplifies the workflow. It also reduces the potential for human error and simplifies onboarding. Plus, you can change any asset after publication and push updates across all those channels instantly. Your teams also have the power to retract content at the click of a button, if necessary.
The best part of using your DAM as your channel delivery tool is that all of the vital metadata for each asset is in one place, meaning you never lose important SEO tags. Expanding your use of the DAM in this way increases productivity and maintains brand consistency.
3. Automate To Liberate
The creative world suffers from app sprawl. In most organizations, the review process is scattered—it’s email threads, ‘check-ins’ on Slack, approvals in Asana, and meetings in Zoom. The challenge with this workflow is that it robs a percentage of everyone’s day as they attempt to keep up with all those communication tools. Undoubtedly, helping everyone at your organization get a bit of their day back is sure to set you apart from the average DAM manager.
The solution is to automate the review process. If you automate reviews, it allows everyone to forget about things until it’s ready for them, which frees them up to do more focused work. Your DAM probably comes with a review template you’ll want to customize. Review and annotate content in the DAM and set workflow triggers to automatically alert marketing leaders and external partners to complete a review round—once they do, the cycle continues until all assets are approved.
It works just as well for long-term reviews. If an asset is set to expire or should be revisited after six months, set alerts for the DAM to automatically resurface content to the attention of your marketing teams for regular review and updating.
4. Make DAM Collaboration Irresistible
One of our clients does something unique for their retail partner. This liquor brand uploads pre-approved templates and available assets into their DAM. Their retail partners access these permissions-protected assets and can change the templates based on their recent promos. From there, retail partners can print and publish new content in bars and restaurants worldwide, all without additional approval cycles or fear of misusing creative.
In the same way, what if you created an irresistible DAM collaboration experience? Not just fun or engaging but a process they can’t resist. Lockdown your creative in a template they can only use with your DAM—if they want those shiny new assets, they have to use your tried and true process. Resistance is futile—and they might just thank you for making their lives easier. Plus, dynamic templates for print and digital will have everyone thanking you for making their lives easier.
5. Make Your DAM Your CMO’s Favorite Tool
The key to getting noticed by your CMO is proactively offering insights that prove the value of your DAM. Reach out to your C-level leaders and book a meeting to present on the DAM. Now, it might feel like jumping into the catapult and tightening the rope yourself, but fear not—this is a golden opportunity to show them the value of the DAM and your role in managing it.
To impress your CMO:
- Report on your ongoing work of integrating your DAM with your product information management systems to share data
- Explain how the DAM is speeding up approval cycles or contributing to the success of your newest campaigns
- Show how newly implemented DAM features have replaced redundancies in your stack, saving the organization money on software
Go beyond reporting how the DAM helps your creative perform and report on how it helps your creatives perform.
Onwards And Upwards
The value of the DAM—and what you do as its manager—cannot be understated. These tips will help you get the most out of your DAM, whether it be automating workflows, collaborating with external partners, or showing your executive leadership the ROI of one of their most important tools. Your DAM is your catapult—it’s time to propel your career forward.
Does your DAM do it all?
If your current data management system leaves something to be desired, learn more about Tenovos’ data-first digital asset management platform.
Eliminate complexity so your storytellers can focus on what they do best: reaching your customers and growing your brand.
