What to Expect with Digital Asset Management (DAM) for Small Businesses

Digital asset management (DAM) has become an essential tool for competitive companies. Digital marketing is an effective way to raise brand awareness and get the most out of your marketing investmentt. For example, on average, email marketing generates $36 for every $1 spent, and Facebook and Google Ads have the highest return among all paid advertising choices. That’s some serious ROI!

Digital asset management helps companies organize and quickly access the images, graphics, and text that enhance digital marketing. However, small businesses often face barriers to marketing their brands successfully. People within small organizations typically wear multiple hats, limiting the time they can spend on producing, managing and finding digital assets for social media, email marketing and website development. Those limitations can impact campaign creativity and, unfortunately, campaign effectiveness.

A leading DAM solution for small businesses can help you overcome those challenges, get your brand in front of your audience and compete more successfully with larger businesses in your market.

What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

DAM software enables your small business to store and manage digital content in one place. It gives your creative team access to assets, including photographs, images, video, audio, graphic design files, presentations and documents. With organization and easy access, DAM improves campaign-creation workflows, marketing productivity and brand consistency.

A DAM solution also allows teams to share assets securely with people inside and outside of their organization. For example, creative directors, designers and marketers can upload digital assets to the DAM platform and collaborate on designs. If you work with a marketing agency, contractors or partners, you can also provide them with secure logins so that they can use your assets and upload new designs and documents for approval.

Additionally, DAM allows your legal team to manage permissions for licensed assets and add expiration dates so you can be confident your brand is compliant. Furthermore, your IT team can use the DAM solution to manage metadata for easier integrations with the other systems you use, such as your content management system (CMS), design software, social media, marcom and e-commerce platforms.

How does a digital asset management solution help small businesses manage assets?

It might sound easier to store images, creative files and documents in a cloud collaboration or file transfer program and inform your team where you’ve stored them. However, that option gives you limited opportunities to maintain control over your team’s content. Team members may upload hundreds of assets that don’t have a consistent naming convention, not only making them hard to find, but increasing the likelihood that they’ll only be used in one project.

In addition, all teams may not need (or should not have) access to all assets. DAM for small businesses gives you the ability to grant permission to specific files based on role or project participation, protecting your intellectual property (IP).

Benefits of DAM for Small Business

A solution that’s purpose-built to solve the problem of managing your digital assets will enhance marketing processes in several ways.

Saves Time on Search

It takes time for anyone on your team to open a cloud or FTP file and look for an asset from a previous campaign, an image for an email or a presentation for a sales meeting. And, if your business stores digital assets in multiple platforms and folders, it can take even longer. Our research shows that businesses without a DAM spend five times longer looking for the right assets.

The time you save will streamline workflows and help you get your content in front of customers and prospects faster.

Enhances Security and Tracks Permissions

DAM for small businesses must include the ability to keep digital assets secure. If you’ve invested time and resources into creating assets or purchasing licenses, you want to protect that investment from data loss and corruption. A DAM solution that stores and secures your assets in the cloud with encryption, access control and security scans will minimize lost assets.

Your DAM solution can also automate keeping track of licenses, permissions and expirations, so you always comply with agreements and respect copyright information.

Facilitates Content Distribution

A significant advantage of DAM for small businesses is publishing content from a centralized source. You can distribute assets with public or private links and add expirations for content meant only for a specific timeframe, such as a limited-time offer. Using DAM for storing assets like brand imagery ensures that your visuals stay consistent across all platforms. Any changes or updates will appear in real-time on all of the places it has been published.

Provides Digital Asset Storage

Digital engagements are on the rise. Twilio reports that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation by 6.5 years, with 70% of companies investing in digital customer engagement in 2022. More digital customer engagement means more digital assets.

For small businesses looking to get their digital asset management in order, there are plenty of solutions available with free unlimited guest seats and customized file storage options. Plus, you’ll never have to worry about duplicate content cluttering up your platform – a good DAM solution will take care of that for you!

Shortens Time to Market

DAM software’s capabilities, including faster searches, easier distribution, and easy confirmation of licensing and compliance, all lead to more efficient, streamlined workflows and quicker campaign launches.

Also read: Best Digital Asset Management for Photographers (+ 9 Runners Up)

How to Achieve Success With Small Business Digital Asset Management

If you have ever spent an hour or more looking for a digital asset that was misnamed or misfiled, used an image with an expired license, or manually uploaded content to multiple platforms, you understand the logic of DAM solution features for small businesses. However, you can use DAM solutions more strategically to maximize their value.

Digital Asset Management Strategies Increase Brand Consistency

Your DAM solution will play a key role in ensuring that you portray your brand consistently. DAM for small businesses gives you visibility and control over which content is published and guarantees team members won’t select old versions of logos or assets for campaigns. You can also control which assets are available to your creative teams, collaborators and partners so you know they’ll use only approved assets.

The benefits of brand consistency can be significant. Businesses that begin to portray their brand consistently can expect a revenue increase of 23% on average.

Improve Marketing ROI

Small businesses can make large investments in digital assets. It’s more than the cost of licenses. It’s graphic designers' and content creators’ time. It’s the time of your collaborative team and, possibly, fees to agencies or consultants. The return on marketing investments is always higher when you make the most of your assets. However, if they’re difficult to find and reuse, ROI is lower.

DAM for small businesses ensures that your digital assets are organized, dated and distributed to all applicable platforms and media sites, helping you make the most of your investments.

Gain Insight into How Your Digital Assets are Used

When you store digital assets in cloud platform folders or various platforms, you can pull a report on who accessed them and when. Still, you won’t know how often your team uses them.

A DAM solution can provide you with analytics on asset placements and engagements that they produce. You can use these insights to track performance over time, update content that may not be performing well and model future campaigns after those that have been the most successful.

How to Choose a DAM Solution for Your Small Business

Digital asset management technology has the potential to provide your business with a range of benefits that can help you elevate your brand and increase revenues. However, you need to choose DAM software.

Companies ready to implement DAM software will quickly discover that not all solutions on the market are the same. Before investing in DAM for your small business, ensure it will provide you with the necessary functionality you need and value-added features to give your business an edge.

Brandfolder makes digital asset management even easier with built-in integrations and tools that creative teams commonly use, such as Adobe Creative Suite and project management platforms. It also has a built-in content delivery network (Smart CDN) that allows you to host the files you publish online and, when necessary, make updates that are automatically applied wherever that content appears.

Brandfolder also automates asset tagging, using artificial intelligence (AI) based on what it “sees,” making search more effective with minimal employee intervention. However, Brandfolder also allows you to customize how your business tags assets, so the search function more closely aligns with how your team works.

Get Your Small Business DAM in Action

Once you implement a solution designed for DAM for small businesses, you can expect more control over which assets you use, how you use them and greater insights into their performance.

Give your marketing team the advantage of a tool that helps them work more efficiently and launch on-brand campaigns more quickly. Contact us for a quote and more information on how easy it is to implement DAM for your small business.