13 Key Digital Asset Management Best Practices for 2024

Whether you’re working with documents, presentations, videos, or images, a digital asset management (DAM) system can provide your team with an all-in-one solution for organizing and distributing digital assets. To get the best return on investment (ROI) from your DAM system, it’s important to understand how it can work for your organization.

When implementing a digital asset management system, optimize your ROI by ensuring the software is widely understood by your teammates and collaborators — aka salespeople, marketers, franchisees, distributors, partners, or anybody who accesses or uses the brand assets you store in your DAM.

If your DAM solution isn’t set up correctly, it’s difficult to use, or your teams and stakeholders don’t understand how to use it, you won’t get as much value from the software. In-depth planning and onboarding for the transition — as well as regular maintenance and training — are critical so your team can successfully use the DAM.

At Brandfolder by Smartsheet, we’ve helped a variety of teams — from nonprofits moving from cloud storage tools to enterprise companies that have decades of assets scattered across dozens of libraries — work through this transition successfully.

Below, we’ll cover 13 digital asset management best practices you need to know to make the migration and implementation of a DAM system smooth and easy for your teams.

Want to see the Brandfolder platform and learn more about how it can be tailored to support your teams and business processes? Get in touch with our customer experience team for a free consultation and demo.

1. Define Your Goals

Why are you interested in a DAM system, and what do you hope to get out of it? Clearly defined goals are essential to choosing the right DAM software. Your goals should include any problems you’re hoping to solve with DAM implementation.

To determine your goals, ask yourself:

• What pains are you currently experiencing, and how do you want DAM software to solve those pains?
• What business processes will your DAM platform improve/support?
• How can a DAM system improve workflow for your teams?
• Who will be using the DAM?

Understanding exactly why you need digital asset management software and what you’re looking for in a DAM tool can help you find the right solution for your organization. When defining your goals and objectives, involve team members across all departments so you can get insight into how a DAM solution can meet your organization’s needs.

It’s important to note that not all DAM tools are created equal. Although there are plenty of DAM providers, every DAM is different — and different solutions are recommended for different users. Do your research on DAM providers and choose the best DAM software based on your organizational needs and goals.

2. Audit Your Assets

After you identify what you needfrom a DAM system, it’s time for an internal audit of current assets. To choose the right digital asset management tool, consider the types of assets your organization uses and how they’re stored and organized.

This is the most important step in guaranteeing that your DAM’s organization is clear and user-friendly and that your DAM’s search and discovery will work best for your users — before you migrate your assets to one DAM solution.

To audit your assets, you want to look at:

• Types of assets: What are the main types of assets your team has and uses? For example, do you work with more spreadsheets and documents or rich media assets like video and audio?
• Number of assets: How many assets has your team accumulated? Do you have any outdated or duplicate assets? Answering these questions can help you determine which assets are still useful and which ones you can consider getting rid of.
• Asset taxonomy: How are you storing and organizing your current assets? Do you have assets stored in one storage drive or are you working out of several asset libraries? Think about the usability and searchability of your DAM, as well as the ability to discover new assets when browsing content. When determining the best organization for assets, you’ll also want to map the appropriate metadata, tags, custom fields, and digital rights management (DRM) information you want to attribute to different types of assets.
• Folder names: Check the folder and file names to ensure they’re up to date and that the content within is accurate. When reviewing, look to see if there is anything you can delete, and take note of where your current/important assets live and which folders contain old content. This helps you determine how to break up ingestion and plan which content to move when.

The goal of auditing your existing assets is to better understand what you’re working with and what kind of DAM system features would work best for organizing and storing your digital assets.

What This Looks Like in Brandfolder

We can help you organize digital assets in the most logical way, plan metadata with Metasheets, assign digital rights management information to assets, draft clear naming conventions, and determine priority vs. archival content.

Once it’s time to migrate your assets, our team can help you connect all of your existing storage drives to push assets into Brandfolder seamlessly. We’ll move all of your priority content first and put together a schedule to get the rest of your content uploaded.

We can even configure Brandfolder to auto-organize your assets based on your outlined taxonomy. Our Brand Intelligence AI will also automatically assign metadata and tags, ID assets that need watermarks or photo releases associated with them, and detect duplicate files during ingestion. Our software does all of that heavy lifting to make sure your digital content is stored how you want it.

You can enjoy better organization once assets are moved to Brandfolder because we ditch the folder/subfolder structure and let users organize assets in Brandfolders, Collections, and Portals (for different brands, use cases, and end-users), and quickly search across their entire library for the content they need.

3. Establish DAM Governance

A DAM governance policy outlines rules and expectations for using your DAM. Essentially, this will be your rule book that defines things like user permissions, asset guidelines, metadata information, and uploading capabilities.

Your governance policy should touch on guidelines like:

• What types of files are compatible with the DAM.
• How assets and files are named.
• Which users have access to certain files.
• Which devices have access to the DAM.
• Who will be managing and updating the DAM.

Establishing a governance policy early on in the implementation of your DAM solution will set your team up for success and protect your brand image.

Implementation Team Takeaway: “Consider a situation where an employee inadvertently shares proprietary and confidential documents with a competitor. This is precisely where governance and software use policies prove invaluable. When effectively implemented, these policies uphold your brand's image by ensuring ethical software usage. Using the scenario above, such policies also bolster legal compliance. Given that your DAM software is an immensely potent tool, safeguarding its precious content is of the utmost importance.” — Berto Garcia, project manager on the Brandfolder DAM implementation team for enterprise systems

4. Designate a Digital Asset Manager

Designating a digital asset manager helps keep the DAM system organized and streamlined. This person is responsible for managing, organizing, analyzing, and protecting all of your company’s digital assets.

When working with a large volume of digital assets, an asset manager will keepyour DAM library up to date and organized. They’ll also act as the go-between across different departments and ensure all users are granted appropriate access to the DAM.

Additional responsibilities include training users on how to use and navigate the DAM, tracking analytics on asset usage, updating metadata, and ensuring proper security to protect all assets.

5. Implement Security Standards

Protecting your digital assets is crucial. Implementing technical and administrative controls helps keep your assets and sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.

Examples of technical controls include encryption of sensitive data, firewalls that block unauthorized users from accessing files, and multi-factor authentication that ensures only authorized users access your media.

Administrative controls, on the other hand, may include formulating incident response plans for dealing with security risks, backing up data to guarantee assets can be recovered safely, and training team members in security awareness so they know how to handle suspicious activity.

In addition, digital rights management technology can manage access to copyrighted assets, allowing organizations to control the usage of their assets. It also helps companies maintain compliance with copyright laws and regulations.

6. Decide on Branding Standardizations

Consistent structures across your DAM keeps the system organized so users can quickly and easily find what they’re looking for. To manage assets efficiently, you should develop logical, coherent metadata standards and file naming conventions for all users to follow.

Following simple file naming best practices for digital asset management can make all the difference. Develop a consistent naming structure for different file types and train users on this process so they not only know how to name their files, but also understand how they can easily search for them.

For example, a file naming convention may include the brand name, the project title, and the type of asset separated by underscores. It should be consistent across all digital assets.

You’ll also want to follow DAM metadata best practices to ensure assets are organized appropriately and easy to navigate. Metadata is information that describes your digital assets, making them easier to find and use. This data could include the:

• File name
• File type
• File size
• Date the asset was created
• Expiration date
• Usage details
• Keywords
• Historical data
• Compliance requirements

Some DAM solutions, like Brandfolder, have built-in features that can create metadata and tagging for you to maintain consistency. Naming conventions and standardized metadata structures increase searchability across the DAM, ultimately improving team workflow.

Implementation Team Takeaway: “Users adapt to DAM software more effectively when a clear brand standard is established. While naming conventions are beneficial, the true value lies in the metadata and taxonomy attached to each asset. This significantly enhances content discoverability.” — Berto Garcia, project manager on the Brandfolder DAM implementation team for enterprise systems

7. Set Up User Access

Once you have your DAM system in place, you must determine who can access, edit, distribute, and download your content. User access management enables team members to access the content they need while adding a layer of content protection.

You can share content and dictate exactly how other internal users interact with your DAM system by assigning user permissions. Most DAMs offer external sharing options, too, so you can get assets to people outside your organization without a hassle.

User permissions are typically based on the user’s relation to the organization — internal or external. Here are a few main roles you may consider when determining user permissions for the DAM:

• Administrators: DAM administrators are responsible for managing the entire DAM, which means they have access to all the digital assets, control user permissions, and can add new users or remove existing ones.
• Internal users: Internal users are employed by your organization. Permissions for these users may vary depending on their role in your company but can include editing, viewing, and distributing access.
• External users: External users are partners who are not employed by your organization, such as clients, freelancers, and investors. As with internal users, permissions can vary depending on the external user's role. For example, clients may only have asset viewing access and the ability to download the files.

What This Looks Like in Brandfolder

Brandfolder lets you share assets with other team members via user permissions and create custom share links to send assets to external stakeholders. We provide free unlimited guest seats so you can share assets and collaborate with non-Brandfolder users without worrying about extra fees.

Our custom share links give you a lot of control over outside sharing. Beyond the basics like assigning the link a name and setting the link to expire, you can do advanced things like:

• Require an email address to access assets
• Watermark assets
• Disable the downloading functionality
• Add or remove assets
• Set notifications to receive alerts when people view or download assets

8. Use the Media Library as Your Source of Truth

If you have never used DAM, you’re likely managing digital assets across multiple devices and storage systems. Once you’ve implemented a DAM solution, all of your organization’s digital assets should live in a single media library attached to the DAM.

The media library in the DAM should be the only place where teams and stakeholders access, store, and manage digital files. Since the media library will be your organization’s single source of truth for managing digital assets, everything must be organized and current.

One of the biggest benefits of having a DAM system is the ability to keep an organized asset library where users can access pre-approved brand assets without bugging creatives — this improves brand consistency and saves designers’ time. But if assets are old or you have duplicate assets lying around, users won’t be able to navigate your library as easily and will have to ask a creative for clarification — and you risk unapproved content accidentally being sent out into the world.

Some DAMs have features to assist with keeping your asset library organized as time passes, you acquire new content, and you update old collateral. However, if your DAM lacks those features, you should make it a point to go through your DAM every three or four months (about once a quarter) to remove old content and make sure everything is still clean and current.

Implementation Team Takeaway: “As your company expands, new employees will familiarize themselves with the intricacies of your DAM software, especially once they recognize it as the definitive ‘single source of truth’ for all digital content. It's a mutually beneficial situation. They can locate content much more rapidly, and you'll experience smoother collaboration with your team.” — Berto Garcia, project manager on the Brandfolder DAM implementation team for enterprise systems

What This Looks Like in Brandfolder

Brandfolder has three key features to make digital asset management easier. Our solution helps you manage the content lifecycle and keep your asset library up to date, including reviews/approvals for new assets, duplicate asset detection, and asset expirations.

• Reviews and approvals settings: Brandfolder lets you put a review/approval flow in place for all new or updated assets. This feature guarantees that all new content is given the green light before it’s available for others to access. You can use permissions to determine which users can add assets to your library and which users have access to review and approve those new assets.
• Duplicate asset detection: This tool analyzes assets upon upload to tell you if the file you’re trying to import already lives in your Brandfolder. When dupes are detected, Brandfolder will prompt you to either cancel the upload or merge the file with the existing asset. This prevents duplicate assets from causing confusion and allows teams to group similar assets (like different versions of the brand logo) together in asset containers.

• Asset expirations: This feature lets you specify when you want an asset to expire so it’s no longer available for your teams to use. Expired assets still live in your Brandfolder for reference, but downloading is disabled and a banner is placed across the asset so it’s clear to users that it’s old and no longer approved.

9. Create and Automate DAM Workflows

Automated workflows save time spent on repetitive tasks and free up your team’s time for more important work. Most digital asset management software has automation rules that let you train your DAM to accomplish certain tasks for you, like organizing new assets once they’re approved or adding tags to files.

Implementation Team Takeaway: “Whether the customer uses the application programming interface (API) and their own developer resources to automate certain workflows or they use asset automation to organize and update based on certain triggers, I have absolutely seen automated workflows benefit brands. With some initial effort to build out these workflows, teams save time by avoiding manually organizing and working through preferred processes. Additionally, these rules ensure a consistent organization of assets that lends to a positive end-user experience.” — Jenny Orren, project manager on the Brandfolder DAM implementation team for enterprise systems

What This Looks Like in Brandfolder

Our DAM provides a dedicated Automation tab for users to create automation rules in each of their Brandfolders.

Note: Teams managing brand collateral for one brand will only have one Brandfolder, but teams that manage assets for multiple brands will have several Brandfolders and the ability to create custom rules for each brand.

Our platform can automatically organize files and assign metadata based on your asset taxonomy, but you can also create extra rules to trigger additional actions from our platform. For example, you can train our software to add additional labels to assets based on information from custom fields, or you can have Brandfolder automatically move assets around when labels are added/removed.

There’s no single best way to map out automation rules. Build these rules around your team’s preferred workflows to ensure you’re making the most out of the automation feature.

10. Collaborate Internally

With a DAM solution in place, gone are the days of endless email threads and multiple communication platforms. Most DAM systems include built-in collaboration tools so all communication can happen within the DAM.

Digital asset management software generally improves team collaboration because it gets everybody working out of the same storage drive and guarantees that everyone is using the same versions of assets. However, some DAMs are built with additional collaboration tools to support new digital projects and keep teams on the same page throughout the entire content lifecycle.

What This Looks Like in Brandfolder

Brandfolder offers an array of collaborative features. Our asset overview is very team-friendly because it allows users to comment back and forth with each other on the asset level, review the comment history at any time, push assets back and forth between their native editing apps for changes, and check the asset’s version history to see how it’s evolved over time.

In addition, Brandfolder’s Workspace feature acts as a built-in project management suite that lets you divvy up tasks amongst other teammates and work in parallel. Workspace makes it easy to check on task status and get all hands on deck with new projects, facilitating real-time collaboration and accelerating the creative process. Our platform also integrates with Smartsheet for more advanced project management capabilities.

11. Integrate Your DAM System

It’s crucial to ensure your DAM integrates seamlessly with software your organization uses. An ideal DAM system should be flexible enough to integrate with your existing tech stack so you don’t have to modify your processes or change software.

To find a compatible solution, put together a list of all the software you want your DAM to connect with. Most DAM brands build their software with out-of-the-box integrations, but many DAMs also have open APIs so you can create custom integrations.

In general, DAMs can support your team’s workflow by integrating with a variety of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, content management software, martech tools, sales enablement software, content creation software, daily workspace apps, project management software, and more.

Implementation Team Takeaway: “Integrations are key, whether it's ensuring your assets are the same across various platforms in your tech stack, using the proper elements in new asset creation, or just saving work time, integrations make a huge difference for our customers.” — Jenny Orren, project manager on the Brandfolder DAM implementation team for enterprise systems

What This Looks Like in Brandfolder

Brandfolder has over 50 integrations and an open-source API so it can be personalized for any business. Our professional services team can help you connect Brandfolder with other software and develop custom integrations to provide a bespoke implementation.

Request a free demo to learn more about our customization options and how our solution can better support your teams.

12. Collect, Monitor, and Analyze Data

Unlike cloud storage drives like Google Drive or Dropbox, DAM software can access reports and data regarding asset usage. These features help you monitor how stakeholders use brand collateral, who is interacting with your content, and which assets are performing best.

Reporting features vary from DAM to DAM, but these insights and analytics can help you understand how your content is being used so you can make informed decisions on future content creation.

What This Looks Like in Brandfolder

Our insights feature lets you monitor asset performance and engagement, check metrics over different time periods, and customize reports to dig into different data.

Some of the key metrics you can look at with our reporting tool include:

• Asset’s health score: This metric looks at how engagement with the asset increases or decreases month by month.
• Top-performing assets: This data reveals which assets are viewed, downloaded, and shared most frequently.
• Top users: You can track who interacts with assets the most.
• Where assets currently live on the web: This report looks at every place your asset’s unique CDN link is embedded and published online.

Our reporting feature is simple to navigate and allows teams to make data-driven decisions to refine their DAM strategy, maintain a consistent brand image, and improve team performance.

13. Establish Patterns of Continuous Maintenance

Finally, once you have your DAM system running smoothly, you’ll need to develop regular check-ins to review integrations and make sure your DAM is set up to support all of your team’s workflows.

As previously mentioned, an asset audit is one of the most valuable DAM best practices when you’re choosing a DAM solution or migrating to a new one. However, asset audits should also be performed regularly as your content strategy evolves.

You should also think about your DAM users during this reevaluation:

• Who’s accessing your DAM?
• How do they use it?
• What do they need for their projects?

You can use these details to see how you can tweak your DAM to work best for your users. You may want to add or remove integrations, look at add-on features, change settings or permissions, or make changes to metadata. During maintenance reviews, you should refer back to your governance policy to ensure all procedures are accurate and up-to-date.

What This Looks Like in Brandfolder

Our customer experience team provides ongoing support after onboarding. We’re always here to check in, answer questions, and provide assistance to make sure that Brandfolder is fully optimized for your brand’s needs. You can change your onboarding and support packages once you’re settled in our platform, but if help is needed, we have services to keep you covered for the long haul.

Getting Started With Brandfolder’s DAM Solution

Following digital asset management best practices can make your organization’s transition to a DAM solution seamless. With the right digital asset management software, you can maximize your ROI by streamlining DAM and improving your team’s workflow.

Brandfolder is one of the most popular digital asset management software available because it’s highly intuitive — making adoption much quicker — and it’s visually beautiful, so teams truly enjoy using it.

We’re consistently voted amongst the top DAMs on sites like G2 and Capterra, and reviewers praise our platform because it’s user-friendly, modern, and super customizable.

But most importantly, it’s worth noting that Brandfolder continues to earn these high marks because of our dedicated customer experience team. We do our due diligence to make sure our DAM is tailored to your exact needs and we walk you through the entire transition process to get you set up successfully.

One-size-fits-all software solutions can only work so hard for your business, and we believe the full value of a DAM is only unlocked when it’s truly customized for your teams and goals. We’re here to help you through this transition and help you get the most benefit from your digital asset management platform. Get started with Brandfolder today by requesting a free demo.