Digital assets are the lifeblood of businesses. Corporations use them to communicate with clients, market their brands and products, and keep track of important information like client contacts and sales leads.
But suppose their digital assets are not organized and managed correctly. In that case, it can become a disaster as they grow more prominent, with exponentially more assets to deal with. Working professionals spend over 25% of their time searching for information they need to do their job – a huge productivity loss for most companies.
Furthermore, these documents, images, videos, and visuals only truly become an asset when they can be well-understood and are easily accessible by employees within the organization and external stakeholders.
If you don’t know where to start when organizing your company’s digital assets, or if you’ve tried numerous systems but have not found one that works for you, we’ll cover some tips you can adopt to organize your digital assets better.
Table of Contents
Do a digital asset inventory
Before organizing anything for your business, you must start with a plan. You need to know what you need to manage (Are they primarily images? Videos? Or documents?) and how much it will take for each item (size of these files). That’s why a digital asset inventory is required. A proper one can help set a robust basis for creating folders and structures and help you determine what type of asset management system you need.
At a loss as to how to start? Begin with the assets you use the most.
Use a Digital Asset Management solution
Now that you have gone through the comprehensive list of assets you have to organize, most companies will find themselves having numerous types of assets. Media companies may have images and videos but also collaterals and media decks to share with their clients. E-commerce businesses will have product images but also need to store product information like descriptions, inventory lists, and more.
As such, an all-in-one Digital Asset Management solution and integrations with other asset management systems (when required) will be the most useful.
Create a project folder structure
After that, you’ll need to sit down with your teams to decide on the best project folder structure. There are numerous ways to organize your digital assets, with different opinions on the naming structure. These project folder structures and systems will eventually only work if it makes sense to you and your team members.
Your assets must also follow a naming convention to be easily searchable when needed. Most importantly, once you have created a structure, you’ll need to stay consistent and stick with it!
Label your assets and ensure it has the right metadata
For images, visuals, and media assets, tagging them with the correct metadata can help you enrich the search capabilities of your digital asset management. We know this is a tiring and manual process; that’s why many DAMs nowadays have modern technology tools and automation like AI-powered tagging features that do this job for you.
DAMs auto-tagging features will recognize and detect the image’s colors, categories, subject matters, and even faces.
Protect your digital assets
The last tip, and one of the most important ones, is to ensure your DAM has permission controls and layers of security to govern your prized possessions. Features like this ensure that only the right pair of eyes access and view the correct digital assets, especially for finance, banking, and insurance companies where confidential information is stored.
In Conclusion
The loss of digital assets may not necessarily be a deletion of files, but being unable to search and retrieve them means they are no longer valuable.
Even though many startups and small businesses may not necessarily see a need to look for solutions to manage their digital assets yet and usually put this thought on the back-burner. However, now is never too late to start investing in it. The fact still remains that your images, videos, documents, and all other types of assets will only grow in number. Furthermore, your competition may already have started to look into ways to manage their digital assets effectively.
Forward-thinking businesses then will see the benefit of organizing digital assets as they help internal teams collaborate better, search and retrieve information faster and ensure that the company runs smoothly in the long run.
