Training is a driving force of DAM system adoption – it gives users the confidence, tools, and comfort they need to integrate digital asset management into their daily workflow. Building training materials and making them available to users is important – but the most integral piece to successful training is building a solid strategy. By building out an action plan that specifies what training resources you’ll provide to users, when you’ll make them available, how you’ll deliver the training, and more, you can ensure your users can maximize the benefits they gain from the DAM.

Here are four best practices to follow when building and executing your training strategy:

1. Tailor Materials to Each User Group

Training resources – whether it be a live demo session, how-to document, or video – should be tailored to each specific user group’s permissions. This ensures that you’re only providing content on functions and features they’ll actually use in the DAM. For example, non-admin groups don’t need training for creating categories, as that’s not something they have permission to do.

Training sessions and materials should also be tailored to the group’s overall skill set, technical level, and learning abilities. Certain users and groups with extensive software experience may need less training overall, whereas a group who’s never interacted with a DAM may need more.

2. Prioritize the Most Important Training

Exposing users to large amounts of information at once may confuse them or seem overwhelming to tackle. Identify a few key pieces of materials that will be necessary for users to rely on to get started and release those first.

If you’re having a hard time narrowing down which resources to provide them, think about the 1-3 main purposes the user group will be using the DAM for (for example, to upload assets, share assets with external users, or download assets for themselves). Build your resource suite to serve those specific use cases.

3. Deliver Training in Bites

It can also be valuable to ensure that each resource speaks to just one or two topics, at most. For example, a resource that focuses solely on how to upload or one that explains the different sharing methods. Creating resources with a specific focus makes it easier for users to identify which piece of material to use when they have a question or want to learn more about a specific system feature.

Also, if you upload the resources to the DAM if a user simply searches “Share” or “Upload”, the particular file with the feature or function they need help with will be easier to find.

4. Update Material Periodically

Remember that building your resources suite is an iterative process, just like your category structure or metadata strategy. Whether it’s quarterly, semi-annually, or annually, schedule time to review what’s in your training materials and make any necessary updates.

There are a few reasons your material may need an update, including new workflows or features, new user types, or a change in a user group’s permissions. When these kinds of changes occur, the set of training you previously offered a user group may not be relevant anymore.

Ready to take your DAM knowledge up a notch? Check out our Educational Webinars page for best practices, new features, and more.

Digital asset management (DAM) has become a critical part of the marketing technology stack for leading organizations around the world. The IDC even says that organizations that use a DAM can experience a 24% average increase in revenue and 23% reduction in risk of asset misuse. But not all DAM implementations are the same, and, often, the ones that get the most value are those that scale to the entire organization.

On a recent webinar, we shared the benefits of scaling your DAM and steps to take so your organization can scale easily and efficiently. In this post, we’ll summarize the webinar and share its actionable steps.

Benefits of Scaling your DAM

Scaling your DAM is easier than you think—it requires three main steps that this post will cover. But before we look at how to scale your DAM, let’s touch on what the benefits of scaling a DAM look like:

• Creates a secure single source of truth
• Eliminates content silos
• Maximizes asset ROI

Creates a Secure Single Source of Truth

Creating a single source helps teams know with confidence that they can access up-to-date, approved brand assets from the DAM. It allows organizations to provide a one-stop shop to find everything they need, reducing the need to request assets from other teams.

Eliminates Content Silos

The DAM is collaborative by nature and brings all digital assets together under one roof. For example, rather than a North American marketing team using and creating separate files than the corporate marketing team, the DAM enables them to collaborate and use the same tools and assets. This ultimately increases productivity, as well as the ROI of the assets themselves.

Maximizes Asset ROI

Regardless of the organization’s size or industry, everyone can benefit from scaling their DAM. With MediaValet, organizations can add an unlimited number of users to the DAM without any extra cost, so if they want to scale to a new team or group, it’s free to do so. On top of that, scaling helps prevent duplicate work, because all versions and renditions are saved to the DAM.

Steps to Scale Your DAM Today

There are a number of steps you’ll need to take to scale your DAM to your entire organization and your Customer Success or Onboarding Manager will support you through the entire process. Specifically, they’ll help to customize and modify any of the following steps to better suit your business case, and better suit your organization timeline, as well.

• Migrate your assets
• Give new users access
• Distribute your assets

Step 1: Migrate Your Assets

The first step is to migrate any new assets into your DAM.

Before migration though, it’s recommended to complete an asset audit – meaning you need to identify and consolidate the set of files you want to move into the DAM. For example, your assets might currently be sitting across network drives, another file management system, and on team members’ local machines. You’ll need to compile those assets together and get them ready to move into the DAM as a batch.

The asset audit is also an opportunity for you and your team to identify which specific assets you want in the DAM. This means going through your files and making sure you’re not migrating any “junk” (duplicate and low-res files). Alternatively, if you don’t have time to do a thorough audit, they can be cleaned up afterward.

If the assets that the new group need are already in the DAM, however, the migration process isn’t necessary – all you have to do is add in the new users. An example of this would be if the marketing team is already using the DAM, and want to scale to sales. Marketing is already creating and sorting all the collateral that sales needs, so all you’d need to do is add them as new users.

Step 2: Give New Users Access

The second step is to create the new users, as well as a custom user group if needed.

When you’re creating a new custom user group, your Success Manager can walk you through the process and help provide insights into the permissions you should consider. The reason we often create custom groups rather than using the default user groups is that it provides us with more flexibility for action permissions, such as if they can download, share, upload, etc.

Once your custom user groups are set up, you add in your users. If you have Azure Active Directory or SAML, the process is very simple and fast. We’ll coordinate with your IT or support team and get the groups mapped over and synced. If you don’t have Active Directory we can add users manually, which is also a simple process. For a small number of users, you can easily add them within the platform. Otherwise, you can send your Customer Success Manager a list of the users you want to be added and they’ll add them in bulk.

Step 3: Distribute Your Assets

Now that the assets are in the DAM and your users are added, we do a few final touches to make sure the files the new users’ needs are front-and-center. Two features of the DAM that are very handy here are Pinned Searches and Branded Portals.

Pinned Searches
Pinned searches allow you to save a simple or highly complex search and then pin it to your category structure. This can be done for yourself, a group, many groups or your entire organization. Pins are great for supporting daily tasks and workflows or doing something as simple as surfacing assets for specific users. Think of pins as dynamic categories that can be created and customized at will, whereas your existing categories in your taxonomy are static.

Branded Portals
Branded Portals act as dynamic micro-sites that you can customize and use to distribute materials to your internal or external stakeholders. We have clients using branded portals to address a variety of unique use cases —for example, to share branding guidelines and logos, or to share up-to-date product images to a reseller.

Use Cases by Industry

Scaling can bring benefits to an organization, regardless of its size or industry. Here are 3 use cases that we’ve seen across various industries.

Higher Education

A university’s marketing department already has a DAM in place but wants to scale it to other departments, such as student services, student union, and enrolment. These departments require files that the marketing team creates, such as brochures, logos, and photos and videos used for social media, and would benefit from direct access to the DAM. Their workflow is currently to email the marketing team to ask for an approved social media image and someone in marketing locates it and emails it back. With direct DAM access, these departments can self-serve instead, which saves both them and the marketing team time.

Manufacturing

A manufacturing organization wants to scale its DAM to its licensed external re-sellers. Currently, if the re-seller wants to see files, someone has to gather them up and share them as a web gallery from the DAM. With the custom permission settings in MediaValet, the organization can ensure the re-seller group is only given access to specific, relevant categories. By giving the re-sellers direct access instead, the organization can cut out the manual work and give the re-sellers access to browse the products and SKUs as they need them.

Healthcare

A leading healthcare organization wants to open their DAM to contracted photographers who help capture professional photos and videos for awareness campaigns and their website. With a user account, they can upload straight to the DAM rather than email the files to someone who then has to upload them on their behalf. With MediaValet’s permission settings, the organization can limit the photographers’ access to upload only – not download or share – and they can only see the specific category they’re uploading to.

Seamless Transition

The steps of scaling your DAM are simple, but of course, your Customer Success team at MediaValet is always available to help. There are so many different options when it comes to scaling your DAM and getting users well-acquainted. Through the basic steps of migrating your assets, giving new users access and distributing your assets, you’re sure to achieve a smooth, efficient scaling process.

The Customer Success team at MediaValet is here to support you, 24/7, and help transition new teams and departments into your DAM. This support includes:

• Live training sessions.
• Support training collateral.
• In-app training for new users.
• In-app help, feature guides and step-by-step walk-throughs.

Content has become a cornerstone of all good marketing strategies. Marketing teams need to constantly deliver new and relevant content to keep their brand top of mind. Unfortunately, many teams are unable to act independently and rely on other teams or individuals to resize images for various channels, such as their website, social media, and more, ultimately slowing down their productivity and content creation.

With MediaValet’s new cropping tool, users can quickly crop images to any size directly within MediaValet, allowing them to alter images without needing creative team help.

In this post we will cover

• How Cropping Works
• Common Use Cases for Cropping

How Cropping Works

MediaValet’s cropping feature allows users to quickly freeform crop images. Using this tool, users can quickly set crop dimensions and download a cropped version of the image directly to their device.

And, we’re not done yet! Just around the corner, we’ll be releasing cropping templates and ratio cropping. With templates, users will be able to create and save custom cropping templates for social media posts, banner images, hero header images, blog posts, and more. Ratio cropping will allow users to crop images using default ratios for common file formats, or create custom aspect ratios that they can drag to a specific area of an asset.

Common Use Cases for Cropping

While the use cases are truly unlimited, the two most common use cases we see are content creation and asset management. Let’s dive into these two use cases in more detail.

Content Creation

Robert is responsible for creating a monthly newsletter for Travel North America, an organization dedicated to promoting travel across North America. While preparing the June newsletter, he finds an asset in MediaValet that he’d like to include – however, it’s not in the correct dimensions for the newsletter. Using the custom newsletter cropping template that Travel North America created, Robert is able to crop the image to the appropriate dimensions. He then downloads the image to use in the newsletter.

Asset Management

Jennifer is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Infinite Bio, a pharmaceutical company, and oversees the company website. Recently, two new executives joined the team that needs to be added to the “About Us” page on their website. The new executives upload their headshots to the DAM and share the photos with Jennifer, however, they’re in portrait format. Erin uses the MediaValet cropping tool to optimize the images for the website, cropping them to a standard 1:1 ratio. She then downloads the cropped headshots to her desktop and adds them to the company webpage.

Learn more about MediaValet’s cropping capabilities

Ready to see cropping in action? Watch our webinar “Boost productivity with our NEW cropping tool” for a live demo of the cropping tool and see first-hand how you can use this feature to achieve your business goals.

A consistent and well thought out keyword strategy is at the core of any successful digital asset management initiative. Your users’ ability to quickly and easily find their assets is essential in ensuring both productivity and consistency remain high. Keywords give users the power to label assets in a way that’s relevant to their unique business needs. If used incorrectly, they can seriously hinder the effectiveness of a DAM.

Below, we share some of the most frequently asked questions, asked when creating a keyword strategy that is consistent, clear and has the end-user in mind.

1. If I buy a stock image online, do the pre-existing keywords automatically transfer over when uploaded into the DAM?
Yes, any pre-existing embedded keywords transfer over automatically and will become instantly searchable. Additionally, if you’re working on a platform like Adobe Bridge or Adobe Illustrator, you can embed your own keywords within XMP, IPTC, and EXIF metadata fields, all of which will be automatically mapped into the DAM.

2. If a word is hyphenated or separated by a space, do I need to input the keywords as two separate words for it to be searchable?
No, anything separated by a space, underscore or hyphen will be treated as separate terms once searched. For example, you don’t need to have ‘tour’ and ‘tour guide’ as separate keywords. If you search the word ‘tour’ it will also bring up any assets labelled as ‘tour guide’.

3. Can I map over keywords from embedded metadata?
Yes, values embedded within the XMP, IPTC, and EXIF “Keyword” field will be automatically mapped over by default, which means there’s no manual work required to map over it.

4. What program would you suggest to set up keyword documentation?
At the beginning of mapping out your keyword strategy, a shared document can be quite useful as the whole team has access. However, for ease of reference and to ensure keyword continuity, the majority of people export the file and upload it into the DAM once everything is set up in terms of governance and policy.

5. Can special characters be used in keywords?
It’s recommended to avoid using any special or Mac/PC-specific characters to ensure searchability remains high. That being said, simple characters, such as a dash or underscore are fine to use.

Ready to optimize your keyword strategy? Take a look at our 30-minute on-demand webinar, where we highlight six best practices to help you better manage your keywords and enhance discoverability.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.

Digital asset management is a tool used by organizations worldwide to help them manage their brand and scale marketing performance, but DAM wasn’t always the vital part of the marketing stack that it is today. Here’s how DAM for marketing transformed from a niche media storage tool to an organization-wide enabler.

• Evolution 1: A basic print and media library
• Evolution 2: A creative library for big brands
• Evolution 3: A key part of the MarTech stack
• Evolution 4: A storage solution for the whole company’s files

Evolution 1: A basic print and media library

DAM first emerged about 30 years ago as a specialized solution for media, publishing and print companies who needed a way to store and organize their videos and photos. At the time, these systems were mostly on-premise and only met the basic requirements of the DAM systems you see today. A few major tech companies were also in the market for these on-prem DAMS, but they required lots of customizations and a complex implementation process to meet the functionality the companies required.

Evolution 2: A creative library for big brands

It was only recently, in the last 5 to 10 years, that DAM reached its first evolution out of the basic media solution stage. With the growing importance of branding and visuals, DAM vendors expanded their storage offering to include graphics and visuals to meet this demand and the increase in asset production. With this new use-case, retail and major consumer brands started adopting DAM systems within their creative, photography and video production departments to allow for easy access to brand assets. It also became common for general marketers to use a DAM as a brand portal for sharing logos, ensuring brand consistency and enabling their team with on-brand visuals. But the DAM was still primarily focused on managing photos, videos and visual documents.

Evolution 3: A key part of the MarTech stack

In the last few years, with the rise of content marketing, asset types have become drastically more complex. Organizations started investing more money and time into developing brand visuals, and the need for more content had created a whole new priority: re-use.

As companies began spending more on developing and using content, it became vital to stretch each visual to multiple channels in multiple formats. This change made DAM essential to scaling marketing strategies and made metadata that much more important for automating the marketing process. This shift also meant DAM vendors began investing heavily in creating and improving integrations with key martech platforms, such as eCommerce, marketing automation and social media management tools, as well as content creation tools, such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Office Suite.

Evolution 4: A storage solution for the whole company’s files

It wasn’t until the last year and a half that DAM vendors truly began unlocking the potential for DAM to be an organization-wide tool. A few key changes were made that made this possible. First, media file storage expanded into nearly all digital file types, such as Autodesk AutoCAD files, and major improvements were made to the user experience (UX) around viewing multi-page documents. Second, the ability to work with digital assets in Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents was added, expanding DAM capabilities to the documents used in essential business activities. This change, along with pre-existing permission structures, made it possible for departments such as sales, HR and support, to enjoy the benefits of a DAM system. And with DAM vendors that offer unlimited users and training (sometimes for free), organizations had no barriers to extending the benefits to anyone that needed them. DAM became the tool for managing and distributing all company collateral, from sales presentations and training manuals, to onboarding documents and budget spreadsheets.

Evolution 5: The center of digital transformation

So where is DAM now? It’s certainly still being used as a cross-organizational tool, a creative library, and honestly, even just as a media solution, but with the emergence of “digital transformation,” it’s clear that DAM can be so much more.

DAM is now working towards not just enabling different departments with assets, but encouraging those departments to work in cohesion with each other. By breaking down these operational siloes and using a DAM to connect all internal and external platforms, organizations can have the ability to create a “consolidated ecosystem” that can provide all its customers with a seamless, consistent experience across all channels. By using a DAM to connect company assets and content to every touchpoint, from sales to support, companies can strengthen their brand identity and truly transform into a digital workforce.

Many companies are still in the early stages of digital transformation. If you’re looking to get started with a digital asset management system, make sure you check out Vendor Comparison Guide here.