How to choose a Digital Asset Management solution?
DAM systems can solve your problems in marketing efficiency and ensuring brand consistency. However, industry reports say that 50% of technology projects fail.
To ensure a Digital Asset Management solution is an added value to your company, you need to make sure the solution you choose is the best fit with your needs. To do this, you must recognize your bottlenecks regarding the management of digital content, set up goals and determine what features you need.
What should you consider when choosing a DAM system?
Are you considering a Digital Asset Management system? We understand that you are probably unsure what features your new DAM system needs. This all depends on your situation. What are the needs of your people? What possibilities does the technology offer? What features do you need?
Start by downloading our self-assessment checklist and consider the following questions:
- Who will be using the DAM system and why?
- What is my budget?
- Would we benefit from workflow management?
- Do I need a Brand Center with branded guidelines?
- How many assets do I have and what types of assets we normally work with?
- Do I need Adobe InDesign for creating marketing material?
- Do I want a Create & Publish feature for fast template-based creation?
- Should I implement a SaaS or on-premise solution?
How to choose the best digital asset management solution for you
1. Determine your bottlenecks
The first step in finding the perfect solution, is thoroughly assessing the recurring organizational issues that you are facing. When you know what to aim for, DAM software can save you a lot of time by resolving such issues.
Examples of typical problems we see are: not being able to produce a desired amount of content, constantly losing track of images/videos/other digital assets, and having little control over how different colleagues use your brand.
2. Set your goals
When you’ve located the recurring issues you’d like to tackle, you need to set goals. Think of the ideal situation where these bottlenecks would no longer be a problem and how that would affect your team or business.
For example, if your problem is that your digital assets are often misplaced or lost, your goal could be to have all assets in one central location where anyone who needs them can find them in less than 10 seconds. This would improve efficiency and increase the ROI of your digital assets.
3. What features do you need
Before you go search for different vendors, determine what features you really need. Otherwise, you might miss out on the features of a DAM that could be most useful to your team. Don’t make a checklist in Excel, describe what you need with actual use cases and your goals in mind.
4. Define your ideal DAM system
Based on your use cases, determine the requirements your ideal DAM system needs. Use these requirements to shortlist two or max. three vendors.
5. Compare different vendors
Now you know all the parameters to select a DAM system, you can use them to filter different vendors. Tip: don’t look for the cheapest option, look for the vendor that provides adequate support and fits best with your organization (features).
6. Demo your scenarios
Each vendor should allow you to demo the same scenarios (use cases). The demo should give you an answer which solution best fits your organization.
Find the most suitable DAM by trying to look for:
- a fit with your scenarios
- the best fit with your other technologies
- how easy the solution is to implement
- the fit between you and the vendor
- most value for your money
7. Prototype with one vendor in pre-live phase
Test the most ideal DAM system with real scenarios, content, people and in the real environment. This way you get a good grasp how the DAM actually works within your organization.
8. Go live
Based on pre-live learnings, your DAM system is ready to go.
Download our Digital Asset Management resources in one bundle for free.
Digital Asset Management
- What is digital asset management?
- Why use digital asset management?
- Features of a digital asset management system
- Digital asset management in 60 seconds [video]
- Digital asset management terminology
- What is the future of digital asset management?
- Digital asset management benefits
- Digital asset management user experience
- Digital asset management checklist
- Digital asset management security
- Digital asset management ROI
- How to choose a digital asset management system
- Digital asset management taxonomy
- Digital asset management implementation guide
- Digital asset management integrations
- Digital asset management customer cases
- Digital asset management vs. document management
- Digital asset management vs. brand asset management
Originally published at https://www.lytho.com.
