DAM Solution for Creatives: The One Tool to Take Your Creative Workflow from Mediocre to Effective

Picture this. It’s one of those Monday mornings when everything seems to go haywire.

One of your colleagues sent you an email over the weekend with an updated logo for a client you recently signed. You’re supposed to present it in an hour or so, but it’s buried deep in your inbox, and you can’t quite locate it.

Meanwhile, your other colleague is trying to finalize a blog post for a client, and it’s supposed to be published in 30 minutes. The corresponding graphics and images are on a coworker’s laptop, and he had to take the day off because he was feeling a bit under the weather.

If you’re a creative professional, you’ve probably encountered a situation like this more times than you can count. Trying to manage a creative project can sometimes feel like herding cats. Everything is in total disarray, everyone is working under their own deadlines, and there’s no real harmony. Messages are flying across multiple platforms (think: text, Slack, email, etc.), and there’s often different versions of any particular document, logo, or graphic floating around on different hardware locations.

What if there was a system that allowed you to pull all your digital files together? A software solution that empowered you to do more creating and less organizing? Fortunately, there is.

Say hello to Digital Asset Management (DAM), the literal lifesaver in an otherwise chaotic creative world.

What Is a DAM System, Exactly?

Digital asset management is a term that sounds pretty boring.

What’s not boring, however, is potentially falling behind your competitors and losing plenty of business by not organizing and utilizing the full inventory of audio, video, graphics, and other assets in your digital stack.

If you want to survive in the creative space, let alone thrive, you need a cutting-edge system for digital asset management.

This brings us to the actual definition of DAM software.

A digital asset management tool is simply a solution that enables you to store key digital files online, so you’re able to easily find, organize, manage, analyze, and give access to these files – not just to your colleagues but also to clients and stakeholders. Think of it as the final piece in your creative jigsaw.

In other words, without a DAM tool, you’re not going to be utilizing your digital assets to the best of their abilities, no matter what you do.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The stats out there show just how much of a big deal digital asset management is.

According to Global News Wire, the size of the DAM market has been growing at a fascinating rate in recent times. In fact, it’s expected to have a market share of $6.9 billion by 2024. This could only mean one thing: you’re not the only one who needs to organize and manage their digital assets safely on the cloud.

It’s also worth noting that creatives play a crucial role in content creation. In the last two years alone, creatives contributed to 90% of the world’s total data. The need for content is coming thick and fast and showing no signs of slowing down.

Beyond the insatiable need for content creation, creatives also have to deal with a huge workload. According to InSource, 60% of creative professionals serve more than 20 employees or stakeholders in their respective companies. Dealing with such a huge number of stakeholders means even tighter deadlines—when all creatives really need is ample timeframes to excel in their jobs. DAM solutions come in handy to alleviate such bottlenecks.

Speaking about the benefits of DAM software, here are four ways such a solution can benefit your creative workflow.

4 Ways DAM Systems Help Creatives Do Their Work

1. Establish a Single-Source-Of-Truth for All Your Files

Have you ever been part of a team where members stored files in different pieces of hardware?

Frustrating, right?

Searching through messy desktops and varied online storage platforms looking for that one document isn’t exactly a cakewalk. Worse still, you get to watch your colleagues pick the wrong files over and over again.

A secure, centralized cloud-based storage tool can put an end to such frustrations. By organizing files taxonomically, a DAM solution makes it a whole lot easier to locate files using tags, filters, and other next-level search techniques.

2. Control Revision History Using Asset Versioning

If you make alterations to a document or file, DAM solutions allow you to upload it as a new version.

That’s right—the file number or name remains intact as well as all the metadata. The file also remains in all collections it’s been added to previously. And all the links to the file remain active. That’s pretty cool if you ask us.

The best part? You can always revert back to a previous version of the file via the appended menu.

3. Experience the Power of Branding

Consistency is the overarching rule of branding. A great brand should always communicate in the same tone, voice, and style across all channels.

In the creative sphere, branding breaks down to fonts, templates, logos, colors, and the like. The issue here is that while most DAM solutions promise a seamless brand experience, most of them fall at the first hurdle. But if you’re lucky to get a DAM tool that offers custom portal branding, then you’ll no doubt experience the full benefits of having a unified and consistent corporate identity.

4. Manage Usage Rights and Expiration Dates

Let’s assume you’re a photographer.

If you purchase a lot of stock photography (which, in fact, costs a pretty penny), hire photographers to shoot original photographs, or have other licensed digital assets in your stack, you can benefit from this feature. Your DAM solution can be set up in such a way that only privileged users can assess your files.

So, in the case of stock photography, you could make the photos available only to internal users. You can also set, change, and manage expiration dates as they pertain to individual creative assets. Some DAM systems automatically send you notifications when an asset is about to expire and is no longer available to users. Isn’t that awesome?

In the grand scheme of things, usage management makes your life as a creative a ton easier and helps ensure you’re on the right side of the law.

Don’t Just Settle for Any DAM Solution, Settle for the Right One

As a creative, it’s easy to be pegged back by the sheer amount of work lying on your (digital) desk every day. But with the right DAM solution, you can streamline your creative workflow, stay organized, and knock your productivity goals straight out of the park. Question is, are you ready to invest in the right digital asset management tool?

Dig less, create more with our DAM solution. Try out MarcomGather free.