What is Asset Management?
If you work with a lot of media – videos, pictures, and content from events or your internal team – then you must have a large cache of media assets that you don’t know what to do with. Undoubtedly in today’s digital age, media has increasingly become a large part of our everyday experience. We consume and create photos, audio files, video clips, and text content. Though the opportunities for use has increased, the rise in digital media also creates challenges in navigating through all of these stored assets.
But there is a way you can leverage them to be useful and lasting while giving you the control to easily access them whenever you want. That solution is asset management, whose overall purpose is to control the ownership of your content, make that content easy to find, be able to share that content with others, and finally, track that usage.
Simply put, asset management helps your company monitor and manage your assets using a systemized approach. This is how it can make your life easier!
Features and Benefits of Asset Management
With the effects of the digital boom, it’s advantageous to be able to organize the experience and consumption of digital media assets. And to be able to easily locate, categorize, and use them when and where you want and across multiple devices is an incredibly useful tool.
Whether the final function is to embed content into a video, share to social media, or write a blog post, the objectives are the same: to find content quickly and put it to use. Here are some of the wide-ranging benefits of asset management:
- Improves ROI
- Improves productivity, efficiency, and profitability
- Allows agencies to track the overall performance of their assets and easily access them when needed
- Improves time management
- Makes content accessible when and where you need it
- Reduces burden on searching for specific content
- Ability to collaborate across departments and users
- Powerful, quick searching across all stored items collected and managed in a single place
- Reduce costs and time by never having to recreate content
- Lower costs by centralizing all assets
Potential Solutions
Normally finding a well-established system can be very costly, but there are other options.
For many large businesses that carry millions of stored items, a very extensive (and expensive) digital asset management (DAM) system is needed, as well as a digital asset manager in a dedicated role. These high-end, enterprise solutions include names like Adobe, Bynder, Widen, and more and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to implement.
But for smaller companies that don’t have the budget or the need to store mountains of data, they may want to opt for a more low-maintenance solution.
The key difference is often the number of features and functionality provided, and how sophisticated the system is with respect to user-management and creative integration. For example, a mid-range solution will enable you to browse your assets and categorize them with metadata so they’re easy to find. But a high-end solution can also integrate video-editing tools into the file and customize them so the system is built around your existing processes and can be accessed or shared to your needs.
What To Do Next
So how should you go about evaluating the different asset management options? First of all, determine your budget. It’s a waste of time to look at high-end options if you know you won’t be able to afford it.
Secondly, understand what your needs are and how you would want to use the asset management system. Is it just to organize all of your media? Do you want to be able to tag metadata onto it and integrate a specific workflow that streamlines how you share your content?
Use your objectives and requirements to evaluate the options and their prices ranges for these products. Your vendor can help you gather your requirements but it’s always better to know some of the key features that you’re looking for. Keep in mind that it takes time to find out the costs of the solutions you’re looking for so don’t expect the process to be quick and painless!
Here’s some other things to keep in mind if you’re thinking of integrating an asset management system into your business:
- The cost of some products can be surprisingly high
- Similar products will likely have surprisingly large differences
- To save yourself time, screen for price ranges in the beginning of your search
- It’s important to devote all your evaluation and comparison efforts on options that fit within those parameters you set
