Digital Asset Management (DAM)

DAM 101

Digital asset management consists of management tasks and decisions surrounding the activity of each individual’s or enterprise’s digital assets . The latter is a fancy term for images, podcasts (or any form of audio file) and, of course, videos.

Individuals, and even some major enterprises, still apply a multi-channel approach toward digital asset management. Often relying on a number of solutions, it isn’t uncommon to see companies use a separate platform for video hosting and management, podcast and music streaming,  and image presentation. Besides costing a fair amount of money, settling on such a convoluted approach can see you and your company falling into disarray, quickly.

With so many businesses, even small to medium ones (SMBs) relying on dozens of platforms, apps and integrations, having to manage and coordinate between separate digital asset management platforms can over-complicated matters. There’s no need to add more noise to an already cluttered environment.

The surest way for you or your company to gain complete control over your videos, images and audio files is by using a digital asset management platform; or DAM, for short.

 

computer

 

How does Digital Asset Management work?

When working with a DAM, company personnel (i.e. those whom have been given administrative rights) upload videos, images, podcasts and songs to the platform.

Depending on the platform, users will be presented with a variety of configuration options (or galleries) through which these digital assets can be presented on the company’s website.  These assets are then stored on the DAM’s cloud, benefiting from the latter’s typically advanced security features and considerable speed.

Finally, the digital asset management platform will produce an embed code; this can be placed on a variety of platforms, such as WordPress, social media, blog and a company’s central management system (CMS).  After copying the embed code, pasting it in the appropriate platform and publishing it, your digital assets can now be accessed by site visitors!
You can always add additional videos, images and podcasts to existing galleries, or create new ones after you’ve uploaded them.

 

What are the benefits of using Digital Asset Management?

Increased marketing productivity

Time is money; and, with a good digital asset management platform, you’ll be significantly cutting down on wasted time. By giving marketing personnel user rights, the latter will be able to easily access relevant assets whenever they need them. With advanced search features (think Google) any  asset can be found and purposed instantly.

Increased security

With a DAM, you get to decide who gets to upload and manage digital assets. You can designate these tasks to specific personnel and even give specific employees access to certain elements of your DAM (e.g. Employee X can upload and manage images, exclusively. Employee Y can upload and manage images and podcasts).
Collaboration or sharing documents is allowed only with secured / rule-based permission.

You can manage all your assets, anytime you want, from a single location, using a comprehensive solution for every level of the digital asset lifecycle. In this way, you can share, re-use, deliver assets across every channel and device, without installing any software or buying and hardware.

Flexible digital assets creation

Good digital asset management platforms allow you to edit your asset. If you are unsatisfied with your work, you can easily revert back to prior versions your assets. You can resize or convert files without any complex desktop software, manage and re-use any of your assets more easily, using built-in taxonomy, folders and tags.

Metadata management and advanced search for your files

With a DAM you can easily surf among your terabytes of data, using filters or customizable metadata fields to locate your digital assets. This feature gives you the opportunity to assign metadata to every asset entered in your system, creating shareable collections of digital assets structured by attributes.

A more effective brand experience

DAMs enable you to ensure a consistent brand experience and far more immersive and impactful customer service by facilitating the deployment of the correct digital assets, and them only.

 

mobile woman

Cincopa: A robust, comprehensive DAM

In 2020, visitors to your site expect more.
Regardless of industry, prospects and potential customers who reach your website will need to be engaged with stimulating images, cool podcasts and audio files, and, of course, videos.

Cincopa is your way of ensuring that kind of user experience. With dozens of templates, you can have your images and audio files appear on your site in a way that seems completely native to its brand and feel. Cincopa’s templates and galleries are completely responsive, catering to users anytime, anywhere. You have unlimited access to media galleries, you can create any number of image, audio and video galleries and upload to each one an unlimited number of media files.

When a visitor engages with your assets, be it with a tablet, mobile or PC, Cincopa sees to it that they are presented with a visual experience that is compatible to them, specifically. Of course metadata is an integrated part of the solution.  This transforms your assets into rich media, an essential step to have your digital assets rank higher. You can add meta-tags, titles and descriptive information to each gallery and each item for cataloguing and SEO purposes. Cincopa gives you the opportunity to share or reuse your assets as you please, through hundreds of social channels and/or embed it in multiple websites using the same gallery. Cincopa’s DAM will provide you with the rules, actions and procedures required for handling your valuable digital content.

Finally, the game changer: Video.

Using a host to showcase videos on your website is always the best route to take. Relying on free platforms present businesses with too many challenges; the drawbacks of embedding YouTube links on your company website should lead anyone to seek a third party solution.

Unlike other video solutions, Cincopa gives you all the benefits of a powerful video hosting platform as part of a comprehensive digital asset management platform.

You can say goodbye to visitors watching a YouTube videoand bouncing out of your site. When you upload and embed a your video with Cincopa, your visitor will be engaging with your videos, and your videos only. No pre-roll video ads, and no competitors’ videos at the bottom of the video player.

With advanced analytical features, Cincopa introduces you to every member of your video audience. You’ll know who watched each video, how much of it he or she watched, the type of device used to view the video and much, much more.

Just as importantly, Cincopa sees to it that your videos rank higher on search engines (SEO). With JSON-LD injected into any page a Cincopa-hosted video appears on, the former become optimized for Google, resulting in increased traffic sent to your site, and the site as a whole ranking far higher on queries.

Conclusion

With  digital asset management platforms and content management systems covering such a broad palette of software solutions, it is critical to find one that addresses your specific business needs.

Cincopa’s DAM caters to any customer persona: from a photographer photo database to a multinational corporations which needs enterprise content management that emphasizes video hosting and security.  A robust cloud-based DAM (including CDN), Cincopa empowers you to untap your media assets true potential. File sharing, and convoluted management processes are traded in for intuitive creative workflows, that translate to an extremely effective and easy user experience.

 

 

Originally published on August 30th, 2016, updated on September 22nd, 2020
The Blog

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

by Nicoleta Halaciuga time to read: 5 min
0