Managing your digital assets involves a lot of moving pieces, with a lot of information and data being shared. With so many files and assets to keep track of, the process can be a tedious and overwhelming one. In these cases, it is important to do what you can to maximize the efficiency and productivity of your system and your business.
Here are some ways to help you manage your digital assets.
1. Outsourcing Asset Management
The easiest and least stressful way of managing your digital assets is by outsourcing the job and management responsibilities to other individuals or companies. Professionals from IntelligenceBank Digital Asset Management are tasked to effectively organize, and manage your media files in a way that will be easily accessible to you and your company. However, this ease of work will come to a price tag. The work itself is tedious and many Digital Asset Management companies will be working with a multitude of other businesses, meaning costs to host and manage your data will be higher. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t able to afford their services though, as many larger companies with large libraries of information they cannot handle themselves, outsource their work. It is important that you consider the size of your business, your budget, and see your options to find the best decision for handling your assets.
2. Collective Approach vs. Designated Team Members
If your company chooses to take on the management duties and responsibilities, you have to develop a plan to approach your task. The first thing you are going to use to help you in managing your assets is to evaluate the amount of information, data, and files you are working with. The size of your company is also a good barometer to measure your data. With this understanding, you can decide whether you will need a dedicated employee or even team to take on the job, or if your company as a whole will manage your assets. For smaller companies, it is best to have your whole team to develop a system and organize your assets. However, when your company starts to grow, this is not always a viable option.
3. Organization And Development
Once you have distinguished who will be managing your assets, you want to work with them to develop a system for an organization. This is the most important aspect of DAM, or Digital Asset Management, and will be crucial in your day to day operations for when you need assets and how you store them. You want to establish a flow for the assets, from the creation of them to labelling, categorizing, storage, and accessing them. Developing this flow will best facilitate a chain of communication that makes it easy to know who to ask for specific details or jobs. Not developing a system for your DAM will leave your company wasting a lot of time and appear unprofessional.
4. Designated Managers With Varying Authority
Having a specific manager with roles to oversee the data is important as they will be more focused on how the information is filed and stored, ensuring that nothing goes overlooked. This emphasizes flow management and the hierarchy of production and responsibility. Not having a person designated to this job runs the risk of files being misplaced and when you suddenly need those assets, time, and energy will be lost trying to communicate and find them. As previously stated about asset flow, you want to understand who you need to communicate with to attain certain data. At the same time, having designated leaders with authority can also help with the organization aspect as data misfiled can be acknowledged in terms of where the errors occurred. This increased responsibility will focus your team to become more efficient in its management.
5. Implementation Of Keywords
Searching for specific assets in a library full of information is extremely time-consuming and will often lead you to feel more lost. One of the best ways to ensure that you are emphasizing an effective way of storing your assets is through the implementation of keywords. Associating files with specific keywords will help when you are trying to relocate said file. Avoid being generic with your labelling, and ensure that you use multiple keywords. The more specific you are with your implementation, the easier it will be later to find what you are looking for.
6. Sorted By Categories
Another way to organize your files is through different categories. These will range and vary depending on the structure and focus of your business. For some, you might consider filing your information project by project, grouping data together that you know will be needed simultaneously. Other categorizations would be date specific or sorting by assets themselves. It is best to evaluate how you most often access your assets and organize them accordingly.
7. Building And Training Of Practices
An effective way to ensure that you are managing your digital assets best is to train and develop practices that your employees will carry early on through habit. Creating data and files, it will take a lot less time to have your employees labelling and creating keywords at the beginning. If you tie this back to the filing and organization system, and understanding which file is tied to specific projects, that employee should record it as such. It will take your asset managers a lot more time and effort to have to retroactively look for and change relevant information. Train your staff to be able to work effectively and efficiently based on how your management system is designed.
8. Reorganizations, Updates, And Audits
You must frequently make audits and updates in your systems to ensure that you are staying organized. Doing this will allow you also to get rid of assets that you do not need, reorganize or relabel mismanaged assets, which will save you a lot of time in the future looking for data that is incorrectly managed.
The assets within your company are important products that you use on a day to day basis. You must manage them in a way that is easy to access and secure to store. There are many ways to ensure your company is effective in its practices, it is just a matter of the attention to detail you to provide, making sure nothing goes overlooked.
