Your Guide to Driving Creative Content with Digital Asset Management Workflows
The average US household has an average of 16 connected devices and with every device comes more digital assets.
Parks Associates
As the world spent more time at home over the last few years, digital content became increasingly important in driving sales and engagement, however, marketers had a harder time keeping these assets straight due to the quick pivot to remote work and a deficit in streamlined infrastructure. This lack of a centralized approach to identify and leverage these assets creates additional costs for organizations such as decreased productivity and brand inconsistencies.
A creative campaign is only as strong as its supporting data and internal workflows, and these issues dramatically reduce the reach of a campaign— resulting in the exact opposite of what the team set out to accomplish.
The Remedy To Ineffective Workflows And Overall Marketing Migraine
With the workforce already stretched thin, teams have little patience for the custom coding, ballooning expenses, and vast delays that can come with legacy digital asset management (DAM) solutions. Marketing campaigns touch many departments, and these teams all utilize different organizational strategies relevant to their specific work. This becomes a huge issue when using inflexible DAM solutions. Using a legacy DAM system, marketing content teams arrange their materials around creative campaigns, while the legal team insists on an aggregation of materials that is ultimately irrelevant to marketing communications at the same time the product management team is thinking solely along the lines of products — leaving all departments frustrated.
This tension often results in teams creating impromptu asset management flows, a problematic solution to the issue DAM was meant to solve in the first place. A successful digital asset management system gives teams total control over assets and relevant metadata visible to users while developing a transparent asset supply chain.
Effective DAM solutions enable users to oversee a creative workflow from one location and streamline the overall asset management process. This is clearly outlined by a much more digestible interface, most notably, automated approvals, task lists, reminders, task reassignments, and delegation features eliminate manual processing, so users don’t have to waste time re-routing assets across multiple departments.
Leading edge cloud-based DAM solutions like Hyland’s Nuxeo Content Services Platform include native content management workflows that eradicate the need for custom coding to generate new processes— meaning non-technical users who compose departmental or project workflows don’t have to code. The platform empowers employees to easily design unique process flows from scratch with a workflow engine that they can utilize via drag and drop. The workflow engine allows users to decide when workflows advance from one phase to the next.
DAM Solutions Enable Creative Juices To Flow More Freely
Traditional DAM platforms don’t execute reliable file transfers, leaving 3D graphics, 360-degree videos, and other robust media compositions to consume large amounts of bandwidth and take copious amounts of time to process. Far more frightening, these solutions can lack the capacity to process emerging formats such as live videos, augmented reality (AR), or other visual and artistic storytelling technologies, causing marketing teams to fall behind on content trends.
Cloud-based digital asset management solutions eliminate convoluted and unpredictable workflows by empowering one with structured workflows that regiment and automate the asset management process — resulting in more imaginative freedom to create. For instance, whenever a designer uploads a new asset, the workflow can routinely send a notification that a new asset is up for review which can then be added or declined. The system is then able to tag accepted designs with relevant digital assets metadata and store them on the platform so that others can find them with ease. Concurrently, the system can send rejected designs back to the designer for further editing. By automating these tasks, the time spent on administrative labor is drastically reduced and the creative team can spend more time executing their vision for the brand.
DAM Workflows Enable Success And The Evidence Is Prominent
Mistakes often arise when the decision to invest in a DAM platform is led by a non-technical department or team and the complexities of system configurations take the back burner to other worries. But when sticking to outdated content services architecture, the illusion of an effective workflow begins to fade almost immediately: DAM may implement some of the technologies a team uses, but not the entire stack – or none at all. Effective business leaders acknowledge that allowing more time and space for the creative process not only enables a more fulfilling work environment for their team but also reduces the likelihood of losing assets that will need to be replaced.
Your business is only as strong as your culture, and that empowerment hinges on efficient innovations in work processes that create streamlined productivity and collaboration across the board. Efficient DAM solutions enable my team to automate tedious, manual tasks with ease so they can focus on what matters most: their passion for being visionaries. The potential for organizational success is maximized when employees can cultivate their imaginative ideas. This is simply not possible with outdated DAM solutions.
Ed McQuiston, EVP and CCO at Hyland
Manage, access, and use all of your rich media and digital assets with Nuxeo’s enterprise Digital Asset Management capabilities.