Digital Asset Management (DAM) for small businesses: A guide

As a small business, your teams face countless challenges every day. They are tirelessly creating marketing content for target audiences, launching new products & campaigns across multiple channels like social media, emails, and your website, testing creative variations for optimal conversion rates, and much more. And they do all of it with superhuman efficiency. As the scope of marketing work increases further, a small business might also rope in external agencies to help them scale and execute their marketing campaigns better.

The problem with managing digital assets for small businesses

With the explosion in digital channels and content formats with which you can interact with your audience, small business teams are dealing with a growing content volume.

With a small internal team and the addition of external freelancers and agencies, managing this large content repository, the iterations, variations for different platforms, etc., becomes difficult.

While tools like Google Drive or Dropbox provide storage, they fall short when it comes to asset organization, search, collaboration, and distribution of assets. They don't offer custom metadata to organize assets, have limitations on file upload size, don't provide hosting & delivery optimization for content, and their pricing plans aren't very flexible considering the fluctuating storage needs of small businesses.

A digital asset management (DAM) system for small businesses is the ideal solution to manage a large scale of digital assets. It addresses the issues in tools like Drive and Dropbox and acts as the single asset repository to manage all operations, from uploading to asset distribution, in one place. Small businesses, however, need to be mindful while selecting a DAM that is suitable for their scale and requirements instead of a DAM designed for enterprise-scale requirements.

In this article, we'll learn more about the characteristics of a small business-friendly DAM system and how it can help small businesses marketing and creative processes. We will also briefly look at ImageKit, a simple solution to manage the complete digital asset lifecycle for small businesses, which is easy to adopt and offers a pay-per-use self-service pricing model.

What is digital asset management?

Digital asset management is a system that simplifies the organization, retrieval, collaboration, and distribution of a company's digital assets, such as images, videos, slide decks, PDFs, HTML documents, and many more. A DAM system manages the entire lifecycle of these assets from upload to final distribution so that marketing & creative teams can manage the assets efficiently, locate them quickly, share them securely, and publish assets on various channels like websites, apps, or social media with confidence.

Signs that your small business needs digital asset management

Implementing a digital asset management system is a significant investment for any business. Therefore, before considering getting one for your organization, let's look at some clear signs you can observe in your teams to determine if your small business needs DAM software or if the problem lies elsewhere.

1. Delays in Product or Campaign launches because of creatives - Even though your creative teams start on time, they still face unexpected delays in taking campaigns live. It takes a long time for your teams to find the right creatives that have already been created in the past. Due to poor organization and limited search options, your current storage solutions don't help retrieve the right assets that can be used quickly.
2. Working with multiple stakeholders is a pain: There is no unified way of sharing assets with external stakeholders or teams in different cities globally. Feedback is shared on different channels; files and their iterations are shared as email attachments, leading to delays in addressing all the feedback, finding the approved assets, and even causing wrong versions to be used online.
3. Duplicate assets are causing inefficiency: Your teams have tried to organize content with proper folder structure and naming conventions. However, over time, new team members join, and existing team members deviate from the conventions, leading to a bloated asset library with several duplicates that require manual clean-up with time.
4. Security concerns are holding your growth - If your business deals with storing confidential digital assets for your business or customers, you must comply with different security protocols. The lack of a secure storage and sharing solution forces you to devise different ways to circumvent the problem.
5. Marketing and tech teams have no common platform to work on - The marketing team creates different variants for multiple screen sizes and platforms. They manually personalize creatives with discount offers, brand logos, product image variations, etc., which consumes significant time and effort and generates numerous duplicate assets. They spend time sharing these assets with the tech team, who then uses their own tools and have to re-upload assets to a different solution to compress and optimize assets for different platforms.

Benefits of using Digital Asset Management for small business

Now, if you resonate with the above-mentioned points, you would be interested in knowing the tangible benefits your small business can get from using a digital asset management system. Here are the 5 key benefits:

1. Centralization of all your assets under one roof: One core benefit of DAM is its ability to centralize digital assets in the cloud. Your small business may have teams located worldwide or collaborate with an agency in a different city or country. By having all the assets in one place in the cloud, a DAM streamlines accessibility to everyone irrespective of their location & time zone. There is no need to share assets via email or Slack. A central repository also makes asset organization & retrieval efficient, improves collaboration, and ensures the security of assets.

2. Collaboration with external agencies and internal teams becomes easier: Small businesses frequently work with agencies and freelancers to speed up projects and supplement in-house capabilities. Without a central repository like DAM, the collaboration effort, feedback, iterations, and approvals are scattered on multiple platforms. A DAM brings all of it to one place. Everyone is on the same page; they refer to and use the same asset version, can see all the comments, and can find the asset easily when they want to use it.

3. Business-specific organization structure & AI-powered search: Organizing digital assets with custom metadata can be the game changer for any small business on the road to productivity. Here, a handful of marketers manage hundreds of creatives across multiple channels. With a business-specific organization scheme, you can tag assets with relevant information such as product category, color, size, gender, price range, etc.

Such organization structure helps you in retrieving assets faster by using all these parameters as search filters. When combined with other file attributes like file format, dimensions, upload date etc., you can locate the right assets in seconds.

Many DAM systems leverage AI to simplify the search process with visual search which understands your input text or image and quickly finds visually similar assets in your DAM.

4. Easily build great visual experiences with built-in media processing: With a DAM system, you get ready-to-use URLs to conveniently publish assets to channels like social media, websites, apps, etc., directly from the DAM.

Some DAM solutions also offer in-built media processing features like cropping, resizing, background removal, format optimization, etc. These real-time transformations help small business teams spend less time & resources on manual design variations or re-host and optimize the images before publishing on the web.

For example, a single video asset can be transformed in real-time through URL parameters to fit different placements and devices, saving time for your design teams.

5. Faster iterations and testing of campaigns: For small businesses, the messaging, creatives, and branding evolve quickly. They need

• Version control to easily review latest versions & quickly jump to older versions. It also ensures everyone in the team uses the approved version of the assets.
• In-browser editing to tweak creatives without much dependency on design teams
• Brand-compliant launches are made possible with the proper access control & unified feedback channel.

What to look for in a DAM for small business

If you're convinced to have a DAM system for your small business by now, you must learn the following crucial aspects of the right DAM system for small businesses.

1. A system that solves business use cases:

No matter what advice you receive from us or any other source, the key is that a DAM system must meet your specific business requirements. Many small businesses evaluate DAM based on the following use cases:

• Organizing assets your way: Custom metadata and tags allow you to organize assets with business-specific parameters. For example, an e-commerce brand selling footwear might use parameters like Gender, Shoe Type, Color, Shape, Size, etc. Additionally, you can leverage AI-tagging features to tag assets and organize them faster automatically.
• Increasing speed of asset retrieval: Many DAM systems leverage AI to simplify the search process to a few clicks. Visual search interprets your text query or input image to discover visually related assets in your DAM. You also get content suggestions for relevant content as you type your queries. Advanced search mode combines multiple search parameters, such as metadata, tags, and file attributes to find the exact assets.
• Centralizing creative iterations & feedback at one place: Version control lets you preserve and restore any version of an asset stored in your media library. You can view all feedback comments on different versions of assets and easily share the latest approved version with everyone through URLs.
• Having granular control over who can access and edit assets: You can assign different user roles & permissions to various team members depending on their responsibilities. This ensures no unauthorized edits happen.
• Managing asset duplicates effectively: A DAM offers features like virtual collections or albums that create a virtual, shareable collection of assets stored initially in different locations in your DAM, instead of creating multiple copies of the same.

2. Easy integrations & User-friendly interface:

An ideal DAM system should be cloud-based and should easily integrate with your existing systems and platforms. These integrations ensure that designers, content managers, marketers, e-commerce managers and others can access the assets stored in the DAM without leaving the tools they work on or without any significant disruption to their workflows.

And because small businesses often lack the time & resources to integrate and then train their teams on complicated tools, the integration, and the learning curve should also be easy.

The above two are the most critical features for a small business that a DAM should have, from a wide range of features covered in detail in this article.

Pricing of a DAM system designed for small businesses

As a small business, you need an efficient and affordable DAM system. You can't implement an enterprise-focused DAM with feature bloat, which is difficult to learn & use and has an exorbitant price. You should invest in a solution that enhances productivity and resource optimization by solving business use cases rather than paying for fancy features which you would never use.

Enterprise DAM systems often require significant upfront investment and onboarding costs to start. Their pricing plans don't always accommodate lower storage & number of users that small business marketing teams may require.

Therefore, a small business should look for a Digital Asset Management system with minimal upfront costs and a small starting price point that includes the features, storage, and user seats you need at your scale. It would also be great if the DAM software offered a pay-per-use pricing model beyond the inclusions, ensuring your costs grow slowly as your team or storage requirement scales up gradually.

If you are concerned about the ROI of investing in DAM software, you should consider the optimized workflows and saved employee time that will translate to significant cost savings and better marketing for your business. You can use these factors to calculate the estimated ROI for your small business.

Choosing between DAM software or Drive or Dropbox

Tools like Google Drive & Dropbox are popular and effective when you are just starting, without a doubt. Their simple interface and self-service pricing especially favor the requirements of small businesses for a cloud storage solution. But they can't fulfill the media management needs of businesses with a high volume of assets or collaborators. Here are some limitations of such general cloud storage solutions.

• They don't offer advanced organization capabilities that become crucial as your small business grows and you manage hundreds of assets across various channels. A DAM offers custom metadata and AI-powered tags to organize efficiently at any scale.
• They lack specialized search capabilities, such as searching through metadata. In contrast, a DAM offers advanced search, which combines multiple filters to find the exact assets in a few clicks, increasing your team's productivity.
• They don't support advanced access control features like secure public links and virtual media collections.
• They have less sophisticated security measures compared to a DAM. For example, if you use Google drive for your small business, you have limited insights into the security practices of third-party apps integrated via APIs. A DAM solution safeguards your digital intellectual property. Security protocols such as identity and access management, data loss prevention, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) contribute to a secure DAM environment.
• They don't have media processing & delivery optimization support, which could save a lot of time for your small business currently spent creating design variations, hosting & publishing content, and optimizing images & videos for various channels. A DAM offers in-built media processing & delivery optimization with real-time APIs.

Choose a DAM when you need a unified solution for all your teams and external collaborators to manage the entire asset lifecycle, simplifying the workflow for designers, creative directors, and marketers (and even technology and other teams).

ImageKit for Digital Asset Management for small business

ImageKit is designed to fulfill all digital asset management requirements of a small business. It offers a low starting price point (especially compared to enterprise DAMs), so you can experience how a DAM simplifies your workflows and then scale accordingly. ImageKit streamlines asset organization, retrieval, collaboration, and automates media optimization.

ImageKit ticks all the checkboxes regarding features like centralized cloud storage, third-party integrations, security & authorized access, asset performance analytics, and a great pricing structure suitable for small businesses. Let's look at some situations where using ImageKit DAM benefits a small business.

• Uploading assets without restrictions: ImageKit offers a drag and drop interface to upload files in the DAM. It also offers API support for bulk upload of assets from multiple sources. You are not limited by the volume, file type, or size of assets to be uploaded. For example, you can easily upload heavy video files (100s of GBs) or varied file formats like PPTs, PDFs and even 3D formats, in addition to images & videos, as per your requirements. You can save software resources spent on different storage & upload solutions and bring everything to one place.
• Organizing assets with business parameters: Build your own organization scheme with custom metadata using attributes like product ID, price range, campaign, channel, or any other preferred parameters. AI tags help you organize content faster based on their visual content with automatic tagging powered by Google and AWS. This saves a lot of time for your employees in manual organization, which they can use to focus on launching more creative campaigns.
• Faster time-to-market with powerful asset retrieval: ImageKit's AI-powered search provides content suggestions as you type, and can find content visually similar to your input text or image. You can also combine multiple filters, including custom metadata & different file attributes, to pinpoint the specific assets you need.
• Collaborating with internal & external teams seamlessly: ImageKit offers media collections, allows precise comments on images & videos by pinpointing areas or timestamps for feedback, and provides rich versioning. For example, you can provide contextual feedback for a video asset by starting a discussion thread at a specific timestamp. It saves a lot of back-and-forth on chat and thus increases the productivity of your already busy team.
• Simplified asset distribution and optimization for all channels: ImageKit lifts the burden off your small team to design multiple variations of assets for various devices, campaigns, channels etc. You just have to generate one master image and you can deliver variations on your website or app in real-time, using ImageKit's media processing API.

To learn more, checkout ImageKit DAM.

Conclusion

Small business teams need less busy work and more time to execute. An ideal digital asset management system for small businesses brings all assets, conversations, and optimization abilities under one roof. It offers storage integrations, an easy-to-use interface, affordable pricing, and solutions for business-specific use cases, helping you unlock your team's potential to execute great product launches and marketing campaigns.

Want to learn more about how ImageKit can help manage media assets for your small business? Get started for free.