The world has unquestionably changed, and so have the short and long-term priorities for most organizations. They’re now focused on digital-first, remote-first and work-from-anywhere operations, and leaning into this shift as quickly as possible. This has cast a very bright light on the efficacy of our marketing strategies and, more specifically, the need to progress our digital capabilities in order to fully support organizational priorities over the long haul.

Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey found that chief marketing officers (CMOs) are quickly shifting to prioritize pure-play digital channels, allocating the majority of their total marketing budget to this area. As expected, this is resulting an increased spend in strategic marketing technology. One piece of technology that’s top of mind for CMOs is digital asset management (DAM).

While implementing new technology is often a necessity, it’s no secret that it can be an overwhelming task. The exercise of pursuing a modern tech stack takes a lot of time and effort, and even after implementing new technologies, some solutions might never get used properly. Another report from Gartner even found that on average, only 58% of an organization’s tech stack is used to its full potential.

Taking a Phased Approach

The most successful technology implementation plan is a phased one – and DAM is no exception. Taking on too much at once for a new tech implementation — expecting to build out your exact vision from the immediate implementation — can often cause frustration, along with the feeling of being overwhelmed. This kind of unrealistic benchmarking can make it feel like little to no progress is being made, and also makes it challenging to prove ROI for stakeholders.

A phased approach starts with identifying low-hanging fruit, then expanding from there. By taking a crawl, walk, run approach that’s tailored to your specific goals, you can improve company-wide adoption rates and better showcase ROI on tech implementations.

The Digital Asset Management Maturity Model

As much as organizations would love to ramp up overnight, it’s not often realistic or possible. This is why we built the DAM Maturity Model.

The model helps organizations identify their current state and creates a blueprint for meaningful steps they can take at appropriate times to progress toward their ideal state. It helps organizations:

• Get quick wins that prove immediate value to stakeholders,
• Keep their DAM implementation manageable, and
• Ensure high adoption of their DAM.

Let’s take a look at each stage in detail.

Stage 1: Chaotic

The first stage is chaotic. Typically, organizations in this stage see individuals using a mix of their own file storing systems and shared storage solutions, like Box, Dropbox or Google Drive. ​While storing files on the cloud is a good first step, it’s really the “wild west” in the sense that everyone on your team either has access to everything or no access at all. Additionally, there’s usually a lack of file naming standards and category structure which makes it challenging to find exactly what you need.​

This creates a lack of control. Some team members have access to files they shouldn’t, while others find themselves without access to what they need. There’s no clarity on what’s finalized or approved, often resulting in files being used for projects even though they may be outdated or simply not yet approved for use.​

​The majority of organizations begin looking for digital asset management solutions at this stage – and it’s not just smaller businesses – there are many global businesses that are facing these challenges as well.

When to Mature From This Stage

There are a number of factors to consider when evaluating if it’s time to mature from this stage.

The first consideration is time management. In particular, if your team members are able to find what they need and if there are members that are relied on to share the same files over and over again. Relying on a single person to be responsible for individual files can waste hours of time in key departments like marketing and design.

The other consideration is how well your brand and digital assets are protected and managed. Two of the biggest challenges we see with organizations at this chaotic phase are brand mismanagement (such as the wrong logo or an unapproved graphic being used) and asset loss – where they need to spend time replicating brand assets that they can’t find anymore.

Specific questions to ask:

• Can people find what they need quickly?​
• Are people constantly sharing assets?​
• How do you control asset use?​
• Can you still access assets if someone is out of the office?​
• Do you have recovery processes if assets are deleted?

How to Make the Move

When moving on from the chaotic stage, the goal is to get your assets out of chaos and into a form of structure within a single solution – namely, a DAM. We recommend starting within one or two departments and a smaller, core set of assets (such as logos, headshots, marketing graphics, etc.). This enables you to have a shorter time-to-value and iron out any wrinkles before scaling to the rest of your organization.

Steps to Get Started

1. Find a digital asset management solution that meets your goals in the short and long term.
2. Identify which users or departments to include in the initial roll-out.
3. Start consolidating assets from various desktops, hard drives, file management solutions, etc.
4. Work with your customer success manager to develop and implement a scalable metadata strategy.

Customer Story: Community Associations Institute

Community Associations Institute (CAI) was in the chaotic stage when they first started looking for a DAM. They would save assets to their desktop, as well as to a server that everyone could freely access and manage. Not only did this make it incredibly difficult to find the assets they needed, it also generated a number of duplicates and exposed them to a significant risk of asset misuse. Now that they’ve implemented a DAM, they have the metadata and governance structure they need to enable their headquarters, as well as 64 global locations to seamlessly find the assets they need without trouble. Read the Community Associations Institute Story.

Stage 2: Compartmentalized

The second stage of the model is compartmentalized. In this stage, a single department may have migrated to a DAM, however, they’re most likely still experiencing siloes. For example, you might have two marketing teams in different geographic regions using their own solutions (such as a DAM for one and Dropbox for the other). This results in potential additional costs – both from having redundant solutions and recreating files that existed in another solution. At this stage, organizations typically have a basic level of user access or usage policies in place, meaning they’re still spending time fulfilling asset requests for other teams or departments.​

While not considered the “ideal state” for many organizations, the compartmentalized stage is a great first step for DAM beginners to strive for. Simply getting out of that chaotic phase and finding something for your department that works (and works well) is a huge win. Once you’re comfortable at this stage, you can start looking at how to address those additional siloes that other teams are experiencing.​

When to Mature From This Stage

One of the biggest considerations when evaluating if it’s time to mature from this stage is if your branding and messaging is consistent across teams and campaigns.​ As organizations grow and rely on more people to represent the brand, it’s common to see inconsistencies that result in brand dilution.

Secondary to that is evaluating if there are unnecessary duplicate efforts being made – either needing to upload files to multiple storage solutions, sending multiple emails to different teams or even recreating similar content because you didn’t know it existed in another storage solution.​

The last consideration is if there are bottlenecks that could be streamlined by integrating a single solution, like a DAM, with other cross-team technologies.​ While not every department needs direct access to the DAM, additional value can be derived from enabling others to access the assets they need from within the platforms they already use.

Specific questions to ask:

• Is there campaign misalignment across teams?​
• Have you experienced duplicate work or purchases?​
• Are projects or simple tasks taking longer than they should?
• Are there bottlenecks that could be removed?​
• Could workflows be improved?​

How to Make the Move

Moving on from the compartmentalized phase is about eliminating additional siloes to remove work duplication and ensure true alignment. The goal is to consolidate all adjacent departments (including other geographic regions) into a single DAM solution, as well as identify any workflows that could be improved by tailoring the DAM for additional use cases or integrating with other MarTech solutions. Some steps to get started include:

Steps to Get Started

1. Analyze where there are project gaps and miscommunication that could be improved with better alignment.
2. Prioritize which departments would benefit most from aligning to a single solution.
3. Map out your various martech solutions and identify opportunities to set up an integration with the DAM.
4. Start building customized user groups to facilitate the addition of additional departments and integrations.

Customer Story: Experian

Experian had gone through a major brand refresh back in 2016, and as part of that, wanted to mature from the compartmentalized stage. Specifically, they wanted to address the inconsistency of their brand across regions. There were dozens of different marketing teams and while they were running smoothly as individual departments, the brand had a different look and feel across regions. They wanted to ensure that all branches operated as a single brand, and to do this, they needed to consolidate into a single solution that would enable them to work collaboratively. Ultimately, they ended up choosing MediaValet as their sole solution and now everything, even down to tiny website icons, is stored in the DAM.​ Read the Experian Story.

Stage 3: Collaborative

The third stage of the model is collaborative. Organizations in this stage will have multiple teams using the DAM — common examples include marketing, design and sales teams. As more departments adopt and actively use the DAM, additional security measures are needed to keep assets protected. This is where custom user groups come into play, allowing each group of users to access specific categories, only perform various functions (downloading, uploading, etc.). These custom access and usage policies ensure that specific assets are only accessible to users based on their job function and permissions.

At this stage, the DAM may also be integrated into other martech solutions, such as project management software, like monday.com or social media platforms, like Hootsuite. Departments are able to access their assets from directly within these platforms, improving workflows and reducing bottlenecks.

The collaborative stage is the ideal state for a lot of organizations — especially those with a marketing-heavy DAM use case — and its where many will spend most of their DAM journey.

When to Mature From This Stage

While many organizations will stay in this stage, keeping their DAM within the marketing department, there are some factors to consider when evaluating if it’s time to move to the next stage.

First is if there are other departments that are working with large amounts of media-rich content or large format files. It’s normal to extend the DAM to complementary departments, like social media or events, but there are other departments that can get value out of accessing the DAM or adding their own assets. Some examples of this include:

• Training documents and forms from the HR department
• 3D models from the engineering department
• Sketch files from the development department

Second to this is if it’s possible to scale the DAM to your entire organization, to ensure easy access to the organization’s core brand assets, such as logos, templates, leadership photos and more.

Specific questions to ask:

• What other departments could benefit from direct access to the DAM?​
• How can the DAM be adapted to address more use cases across your organization?​
• Can adoption be improved with additional integrations?

How to Make the Move

Moving from the collaboration stage is about adapting and tailoring your DAM to maximize value and ROI. It’s possible to extend the DAM to the entire organization and even address additional use cases by simply tailoring the permissions, category structure and workflows. Some steps to get started include:

Steps to Get Started

1. Work with your customer success manager to assess how to extend the DAM to other departments without compromising on security.
2. If your organization has SSO in place, work with your IT team to take the necessary steps for integration.
3. Evaluate if integrating into organization-wide tools, such as Microsoft 365, would help improve adoption or workflows.

Customer Story: ACAMS

ACAMS took an excellent phased approach during their DAM onboarding. They planned to extend the DAM to their entire organization, but first, they wanted to focus on getting their core assets in the hands of the marketing and creative departments. They used this phased approach as an opportunity to ensure everything was clean and useable, before extending it to other departments. Now, they’re just about to open the DAM out to the rest of their organization. Custom permissions are critical to them, as they expect 90% of their workforce to have tailored use and visibility.​ Read the ACAMS story.

Stage 4: Connected

At the last stage of the DAM Maturity Model, your assets are fully connected with your entire organization. Your DAM becomes the foundational layer to manage all high-value media assets; not just marketing assets, but every media asset created across the organization — source assets, work-in-progress, final creative assets and content. Everything is stored in a single location, making it easier to drive collaboration and efficiency across different departments, agencies, third-party vendors and partners.

While everyone is using the DAM, many don’t log directly into the DAM. Instead, integrations enable employees to access the DAM from within the tools they already use, like Microsoft 365. When organizations take this approach, an identity management integration is often critical, as it enables them to easily manage thousands of users.

Customer Story: The University of Wollongong

The University of Wollongong’s goal was to implement their DAM as an organization-wide tool. They wanted to provide more transparency to the assets being created and surface them for others on campus. With over 3000 users, Single Sign-On enabled them to easily scale across multiple campuses, locations and access levels. It also enabled staff administrators to manage users without needing to know the ins and outs of the DAM. If anyone left the university, SSO ensures their DAM account is instantly made inactive. Read the University of Wollongong story.

Move Forward with the Right Partner

The DAM Maturity Model is a handy tool that enables organizations to identify quick wins and plan for the long haul – when working with the right partner. At MediaValet, we help customers evaluate their use case and find the path out of their current phase – for example, from chaos to compartmentalization. When they’re ready, we then help them navigate through the next phases of the model. This, along with our unlimited users, support, and training, has helped our customers make the most of their DAM and maximize success within their company.

Ready to get started? Let’s talk!

The past years have seen an unprecedented demand for video content. A study from HubSpot even found that 54% of consumers want to see more videos from the brands they follow. With more consumers wanting – and expecting – video content, there’s been a rise in the number of businesses investing heavily in video. Creating video content is one thing, but managing it afterwards has been known to bring a set of challenges, specifically around sharing and ensuring discoverability.

It’s crucial that businesses tackle this challenge today in order to continue to scale and achieve their campaign goals – while keeping their videos organized and accessible to their users. In this post, we’ll cover the benefits of using digital asset management to help manage their videos, and highlight some best practices and considerations for managing your own videos within a DAM. ​

Benefits of Managing Video Content in a DAM

Instant Previews
Users can play videos in full-screen to easily check if it’s the video they need before downloading or even just refer to the information without needing to download it. Each video also has a thumbnail preview, similar to your images and PDFs, for quick reference.

Easy Searching​
Categories, auto-tags and other metadata can be easily added to your videos to increase their discoverability. This means that your users can find the videos they need just as quickly as an image or document using the search bar or Advanced Search.

Quick Renditions
With DAM, there are more sharing and distribution options in comparison to other platforms. Users can share videos in web galleries, zipped files, lightboxes and more. And if needed, the user can share the video file in a different format – for example, an MP4 can be shared as a MOV, FLV, AVI or MPEG. Similarly, they can also share and download the video in customized dimensions – all in-app and without any extra work.

Best Practices and Considerations

Make use of custom attributes and ​embedded metadata
Users can search against any values in your custom attributes and embedded metadata to find the file they’re looking for. With that being said, it’s important to create custom attributes that hold searchable information that’s relevant to your users, so they’re able to quickly and efficiently find the files they’re looking for. ​

Your custom attributes also act as a filtering system within Advanced Search. If you create a number of custom attributes your users can select and deselect, it can help them narrow down the batch of videos they need and, ultimately, enhance discoverability.

Be descriptive with ​your video tags
Unlike image assets, videos are complex and can include multiple elements – like products, people, themes, and objects – so it’s best to include this information somewhere in your metadata to help your users understand the file better.​

Whether you include these tags in your system attributes, custom attributes or keywords is up to you and what works best for your DAM set-up, but it’s valuable to put it somewhere your users know to look to gather context about files.

Have a specific file​ naming convention ​for video assets
A proper file naming convention can help users understand the file, enable organization, and enhance consistency amongst the user experience. ​The elements you include in your file names or file titles should be specific to your organization, but popular elements include the project name, whether it’s meant for internal or external use and a general descriptor of what the video is about.

Only upload the highest resolution file
Your users will be able to download and share video renditions in multiple formats and sizes. With this in mind, only the most high-resolution version of a video needs to be uploaded to the DAM. ​This not only saves a significant amount of storage space, it also saves uploaders time, as they only need to upload the video once.

MediaValet’s advanced video management capabilities help leading organizations make the most of their high-value videos. Learn more about how you can scale your video content strategy with DAM.

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.

Often, the greatest challenge with rolling out a digital asset management system (or any new software) is getting people to use it, yet a DAM implementation is infinitely more successful when people do. Building a user adoption strategy is key in driving system engagement and achieving significantly higher ROI on your DAM.

Whether you’re new to DAM or have had one for years, it’s never too late to start exercising user adoption strategies. Here are seven tips and tactics to consider if you’re looking to increase DAM user adoption and engagement with your system.

1. Implement a Communication Plan

Users tend to be more interested in new software if they believe it will make their day-to-day easier. With this in mind, it can be beneficial to build a communication plan that educates users on why the system is going to benefit them and create excitement.

The best practice is to span your communication plan from pre-launch through post-launch, in order to gain and maintain engagement throughout the roll-out. Some tactics to try are sharing system teasers during pre-launch, providing training material during launch, and releasing periodic system usage tips after the launch.

2. Establish Change Champions

A change champion helps motivate organizational change by leading their circle of co-workers toward understanding the system’s benefits. These individuals can be appointed or volunteer for the position, and often come from any level within the organization.

Change champions act as a source of DAM wisdom by answering any user questions and ensuring each user is getting value out of the tool.

3. Plan a Soft Launch

A soft launch is a pre-release of the DAM given to a limited number of users. The primary goal of a soft launch is to gather user feedback on the system set-up and training methods – allowing you to make any necessary adjustments prior to the official system roll-out. After all, there’s no better expert on how a system should look and feel than the users themselves.

The best practice is to include power users in the soft launch – individuals who will be frequent users of the DAM and, typically, have a high permission level. Of course, if you have the capacity, include additional users as you wish.

4. Schedule Regular Training

Training is a driving force of system adoption because it provides users with the confidence, tools, and comfort they need to use the DAM. For the best results and to cater to differing learning styles, offer a combination of high-touch options, such as live system demos, as well as low-touch options, such as FAQ documents.

Training can be provided by MediaValet or created and led by your internal DAM team. Keep in mind that different user groups will require different levels of training, depending on their permissions or use case, and how frequently they’ll use the DAM.

5. Create a Go-To Resource Area

Even after training, many users will need documents to quickly reference best practices, step-by-step instructions, and company DAM guidelines. Create an area the users know they can go to find these additional resources. Typical material to store in a resource hub includes system training videos, FAQs, and system walk-through documents.

To create a space for your resource hub, you can leverage category access management within the DAM or simply create Branded Portals that are tailored to each user group type.

6. Review Ongoing User Feedback

Allowing users to voice their opinions – both positive and constructive – provides insight into their experience with the platform and how it can be improved. In addition, it provides users with a sense of ownership and ties to the system when you get them involved.

Eliciting user feedback can be a formal or informal process and should be exercised across each of your user groups for the most accurate results.

7. Continue Post-Launch Engagement

Even after your initial launch, it’s important to ensure that users continue to engage with the system. To maintain excitement, leverage various post-launch engagement tactics on a regular cadence. Some tried and true ideas include optional system demos, emails with system usage tips, and Q&A sessions.

While this list can give you a head start on improving user adoption, there are plenty of additional tactics you can implement, depending on your industry or use case. If you’d like help with building a customized user adoption strategy, your Customer Success Manager is always here and ready to help.

Creating your category structure is arguably one of the most important steps during your onboarding. It sets the foundation for your metadata strategy and, ultimately, can make or break your DAM implementation. But, while taking the time to build a strong category structure is important, it can also be the cause of major delays in getting your DAM implemented.

As a Customer Success Representative at MediaValet, I’ve helped a large number of organizations with their DAM implementations and seen many projects get delayed due to category structure decisions. Here are the five common challenges I see organizations experience while developing their category structure, and ways you can anticipate, avoid and overcome them.

Not having enough information

As a DAM administrator, one of your tasks is to build a category structure that will represent multiple groups of users and departments within your organization. If you aren’t familiar with each team’s workflows, preferences, and processes, you may run into difficulties with setting up a category structure that’s beneficial to them.

To remedy this, speak with key system users and department champions to gather information on their workflow and current folder structure. With this new-found clarity, it’ll be easier for you to develop a category structure that aligns with user needs and enhances the user experience.

Quick Tip:
Sometimes it can be intimidating to approach department leaders when you know they’re busy but keep in mind that the purpose of the meeting is to better tailor the category structure to their team. A bit of effort from them in the short term will lead to less frustration in the long term.

Involving too many people

It can be difficult to come to an agreement on a final category structure when you have too many decision-makers involved. The definition of “too many” will vary from organization to organization, but if you find yourself in a multiple-week standstill as a result of an inability to come to an agreement, this may be your team’s downfall.

While a larger team can provide ideas and support in building the category structure, most of these users shouldn’t be involved in the final decision-making. The purpose of involving them is so you can gather information to help you make that final decision on your category structure – not for them to make decisions for you.

Quick Tip:
Depending on the size and complexity of your implementation, sometimes the best decision is to be the sole decision-maker for your organization’s category structure. Listen to each user’s advice and suggestions, but make decisions based on what you think will best benefit the organization as a whole.

Not dividing the project into tasks

Although you don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen, there’s value in slicing your pie into multiple pieces. Translating this into DAM implementation terms – it can be beneficial to split your category structure creation into smaller tasks.

Rather than setting a single completion date for the entire category structure, set shorter milestones for yourself to complete different tasks. It will help keep you on track and make the project less overwhelming. Plus, it’s satisfying to celebrate the small wins as you complete each milestone!

Quick Tip:
Logical category milestones can include breaking your categories down by business unit (i.e. Marketing, Graphic Design), subsets of users (i.e. Sales North America, External Vendors), geography (i.e. Washington, Kentucky), or asset theme (i.e. Branding, Product Images).

Starting from scratch

Oftentimes, DAM administrators make the mistake of starting their category structure with a blank slate. This can make the process feel infinitely more overwhelming and often lead to problems in the long run, as the structure is built entirely from a single person’s perspective.

The best place to start building your category structure is by using your organization’s current folder structure as a base. From there, you can analyze what works and doesn’t work, and add, remove, or adapt categories accordingly. This will not only reduce work for you, but it can also improve user adoption, as users will already be familiar with the structure.

Quick Tip:
If your organization is currently storing assets in multiple different places – such as on network drives and a legacy DAM – remember to consolidate the folder structures from each of these systems. It will provide you with a clear view of everything that you’ll need to store in your DAM.

Striving for perfection

As the DAM administrator, it’s normal to feel pressure to have your DAM set up perfectly right from the get-go. But, striving for perfection can stall your project and prevent you from moving on to subsequent steps, such as migrating your assets and creating user groups. Keep in mind that the category structure you implement within your DAM is not set in stone – there’s always the opportunity to make adjustments if needed!

Quick Tip:
Once you have your category structure in place, upload a sample batch of assets in your DAM and have key users experiment with it. Use their feedback to drive any changes and help you reach your goal of category structure perfection.

While developing your category structure can take some time and effort, it doesn’t need to be overwhelming. If you ever feel stuck and need some advice to get your project back on track, your Customer Success Manager is always here and ready to help.

Artificial intelligence brought the promise of automating one of the most time-consuming and manual processes in digital asset management – asset tagging. With artificial intelligence, thousands of existing and new assets can be processed in a matter of hours, rather than weeks.

But, while AI is able to suggest relevant metadata, human verification is still required to evaluate the levels of accuracy and relevance to the business. As we implement AI into a DAM, we need to be careful to do so in a way that makes asset metadata more meaningful, not less, so that DAM administrators can make assets more easily discoverable.

Here are 6 best practices to help you achieve this and ensure your team successfully implements artificial intelligence in your DAM.

1. AI-Generated Metadata Should Be Kept Separate

When implementing AI in a digital asset management system, it’s important to keep your AI-generated metadata separate from your human-generated metadata.

When kept separate, the organization can toggle the availability of AI-generated metadata on or off and enable users to decide whether or not to use it in any given search. The primary purpose of this is to ensure that metadata derived from the AI service doesn’t corrupt the quality of existing metadata.

This is especially helpful for organizations piloting the use of a machine learning service, like Microsoft Cognitive Services or Amazon Rekognition. DAM administrators are able to see the quality of metadata being generated by the service before allowing users to include them in searches.

2. AI Providers Should be Tracked as a User

One of the primary benefits of a DAM is its ability to track actions taken by specific users, and AI should be no exception. Tracking your AI just like any other user allows actions performed to be more easily tracked and audited. This becomes even more important if you plan on using multiple AI services.

For example, if you’re using Microsoft Cognitive Services for some metadata and Google Vision for others, by creating a user account for each you can better audit the services, as you’re able to isolate the metadata that was added by each service.

3. AI Providers Should be Tracked by Feature

When implementing an AI service, it’s important to separate the services by project or feature to associate training data and test data with a particular attribute.

For example, if you create a test set for your AI service to identify phones, you would define a Cognitive Metadata Attribute called “Phones” to map to that corresponding AI project. You could also create a more general Cognitive Metadata Attribute called “Keywords” to associate with untrained auto-tagging features provided by the AI service.

Separating your services in this way allows you to transfer the data set to another service provider if you’re not satisfied with the results of a feature.

4. AI-Generated Metadata Should be Filterable

When using AI within a DAM, users need to be able to search for an asset based on AI-specific filters, such as AI provider, API/model version and prediction date. Depending on company policy, users should also be able to increase or decrease the acceptable confidence level for any given search.

For example, a user could search using the keyword “Dog” and then filter it to only show results that were tagged using IBM Watson and have a confidence level of 95% or higher.

5. AI-Generated Metadata Should be Convertible

Most digital asset management systems allow embedded metadata to be converted to a regular asset attribute (such as a keyword) and auto-tags should be no different. When implementing AI into your DAM, consider setting rules so that if a tag is generated with a high confidence level, it can automatically be converted into a general keyword (so it will still be available, even if AI services are toggled “off”).

For example, you can set up your AI with a set of rules so that any auto-tag with a confidence level of 99.9% or higher can be converted into a keyword.

6. AI Should Improve Over Time

One of the benefits of AI is its ability to progressively improve its performance on a specific task. As you get more data, you’re able to retrain the model and get better precision.

With this, any deleted/incorrect auto-tags can be treated as negative feedback and any confirmations of auto-tags into a keyword can be treated as positive feedback for the model. You can choose to retrain the model manually or it can be automatically triggered after a certain volume of asset data points has been collected by the DAM.

This capability, however, is only applicable when you’re using Guided or Specialized MLaaS, where you own the model and supply it with the “right information”.

Getting Started with AI and DAM

These are a few best practices when implementing artificial intelligence into your digital asset management system, but there are other important factors to consider. Download a Quick Guide to AI in DAM to learn the levels of customization available, important factors to consider and key steps to implementing AI in a DAM.

Ready to get started with artificial intelligence? Let’s talk about your unique use-case!