How do you leverage your DAM data and analytics to improve your decision making?

At the very foundation of the processes themselves, there needs to be an understanding of the business goals of the organization as well as the relationships that assets need to have amongst each other built into the system itself. You need a process that doesn't just store assets and track usage. The digital asset management system needs to align with project management, track the relationship to the outcome aka deliverable, analyze the quality of the assets, and have the ability to communicate all pertinent context related to the asset itself. The analytics should be directly tied to business outcomes. Quality has to be one of those outcomes if you serve customers.

This touches on one of the fundamental realities behind the reason that justifies the existence of a DAM: content is expensive. This is because digital assets are expensive to craft. Whether they are pieces of text, multimedia, or documents, good pieces of content are expensive. When you have to justify the budget to create new content, you must depict the value of that content, and the only way to do it is by leveraging analytics. An important frame of mind is that the quality of an asset is not judged by how "beautiful" it is but should be on how profitable it is in the long run. When you talk about quality assets, you should be talking about "high-converting" assets. And, of course, you want to ditch "expensive" low-converting assets.

There are different types of assets, as in parts of a whole. For example, suppose you are tracking marketing content performance within the customer journey. In that case, references or images within that piece of content may need to be updated due to branding, compliance, and business requirements. Often marketing content is repurposed and tied to a greater campaign (i.e. a product launch). You want to be able to tell the story of success as it pertains to profit above all. However, you will be required to identify the parts of the whole and track their usage and quality.

Your platform should have accessible data across the board. On the following: Individual assets & across each collection or group of assets. This data should be accessible to different users. Who? That's for you to decide!

This all comes down to what assets you are tracking and why. Satisfaction from the branding perspective is one aspect and accessibility is something completely different. It is also important to have a process in place that allows you to know where assets live and have the ability to end the ability for them to be used. A good example of this is when third parties are referenced or licensed. Third parties usually grant limited usage. Another example is when new accessibility compliances are required and you need to review all of your existing content to analyze the necessary updates.

Understand what assets you wish to track, marketing, sales etc. Then once you know, it's important to get the right data delivered to you in a format that works for you.

An asset should never be deleted. Assets do expire, however, legal exposure is never-ending. Creative environments will need to have a current pool of pre-cleared assets as well as assets that are simply being played around with.

Use hot and cold storage (backend) to help with asset lifecycle. Depending on your industry and content type, this might be relevant or not. Duplicate detection often solves one aspect of an asset's lifecycle. The other aspects need to be managed carefully and considerately and often manually.