Your team has worked extra hard to release new collateral that was requested by the sales team. Following company protocol, you upload all the final assets to your DAM, and categorize and keyword them appropriately for discoverability. You then send out an email to the sales team letting them know that the new assets have been uploaded.

Mission accomplished!

You’ve done your part to get this new collateral in front of the sales team. But then, a week later, you’re surprised to see that very few people have used the new material. After a few inquiries, you discover that many of the salespeople missed your original email and didn’t realize the new assets were ready.

Even when you upload completed assets to your DAM, it can still be a challenge to educate your fellow teams on when and where to access them. By putting your most important assets front and center, you can save your team significant time and enable them to focus on what matters most.

In this post, we highlight Pinned Searches and how they're being used by customers to distribute content to their users and increase productivity.

What is a Pinned Search?

A Pinned Search is a feature that allows users to save a search and pin it to their DAM’s category tree. These Pinned Searches can be added for yourself, a specific group or the entire organization. Pinned Searches can be simple, like a text search, or complex, including specific filters, like file type, asset rating, uploaded date and more.

A key benefit of Pinned Searches is that they're dynamic. They will continue to update in real-time against the search criteria you set. What this means is, if any new assets are uploaded to the DAM that meet the criteria, they will automatically be added to that Pinned Search.

Use Cases for Pinned Searches

Pinned Searches have a number of benefits for both administrators and end-users. They support daily tasks and workflows by allowing users to access high-value assets in an efficient manner. Instead of having users construct their own search queries or browse through numerous categories to find what they are looking for, a Pinned Search will make the assets they need easily accessible, right within their category tree.

As Pinned Searches serve both administrators and end-users, they’re fantastic in supporting a number of use cases. Let’s dive into some of our customers' favorite ways to use Pinned Searches.

Campaign Distribution

A higher education organization is preparing a campaign for its 2020 summer enrolment. The creative team has finalized all the campaign collateral, and the VP of Marketing needs to ensure that the appropriate departments have access to these new assets. However, the VP of Marketing wants to ensure that only the final asset versions are accessible. She searches the name of the campaign “Summer Enrolment 2020” and restricts the file types to only include JPGs, PNGs and PDFs. To ensure that only the latest, approved assets are included in this search, she also adjusts the asset status to Approved in the last month.

This search is saved, then pinned to the digital, email and social media marketing user groups’ category tree. Each marketing department can now easily access all assets related to this specific campaign, without having to search for the assets themselves.

Product Launches

A fridge manufacturer has released a new line of fridges and wants to ensure that the sales team has access to the new product collateral, including spec sheets, images, product manuals and flyers. The Head of Marketing has created a category specifically for the new product collateral and has also created a custom attribute for the SKU number, which will be applied to all the new assets.

To help share the product collateral for the new fridge line, the Head of Marketing performs a search for the new SKU number, also making sure to include the new category. From here, he creates a Pinned Search and shares it with the sales user group. The sales team can now easily access all of the new product collateral straight from within their category tree.

Contractor Management

A tourism agency that uses contract photographers is looking for an easy way to access the latest assets uploaded by each photographer. The DAM administrator performs a search for assets that were uploaded by a specific photographer – in this case, John Smith - within the last 7 days.

Instead of performing this search on a regular basis, the admin user saves these search criteria and pins it to her category tree. Every Monday, the admin user uses the Pinned Search to quickly review the assets uploaded by John Smith in the last week.

Expired Asset Management

An administrator is struggling to manage expired assets in the DAM and is looking for a solution to help him identify newly expired assets quickly. To help stay on top of these assets, the administrator performs a search for assets that have expired in the last 7 days. He then saves this search and pins to his category tree, as well as the marketing user group’s category tree.

As assets expire over time, they will automatically be added to this Pinned Search, ensuring they're easily visible to the admin and marketing team. By creating this Pinned Search, expired assets can be more efficiently managed, archived and renewed.

Want to see how Pinned Searches in action? Make sure to check out our webinar Get Your Team Up, Running and Thriving Remotely with DAM in 48 Hours, where we demonstrate how to set up Pinned Searches for various use cases. You can access the webinar on-demand here.

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.