‍

‍

Digital asset management (DAM) is both a business process and an information management technology. It is a unified system for organizing and accessing media assets.

In 2021, the market for digital asset management was estimated to be worth $3,497 million. By 2030, it is anticipated to reach USD 8,159 million, recording a CAGR of 18% over the projected period (2022-2030). The proliferation of IoT devices, cloud use, and other factors are all contributing to the acceptance of the Digital Asset Management (DAM) industry in the United States.

What is digital asset management?

To effectively store, organize, manage, retrieve, and distribute an organization's digital assets, organizations use a digital asset management (DAM) solution. A digital asset management system is a form of information management technology that enables businesses to have a central location where media assets may be accessed.

‍

‍

The future of digital asset management

DAM is much more than just tagging and sharing media assets; it's a primary content hub for managing, organizing, and optimizing a never-ending stream of digital media assets, then distributing that material to various user groups and channels. 

Digital asset management solutions offer a strong framework allowing users to distribute content to numerous devices, systems, and repositories. Any kind and amount of assets may be handled and delivered fast and effectively using application programming interfaces (APIs). Here are some of the key driving factors of digital asset management trends.

#1. The marketing landscape is changing

Marketing executives believe that better targeting and content personalization are the keys to enhancing brand performance and driving up sales.

Today, a major force in marketing technology stacks supporting marketing strategies is digital asset management. Additionally, ML and AI are changing the DAM industry through picture and facial recognition, among other applications.

#2. Going beyond user experience

To offer the right information at the right time, brands are concentrating on combining behavioral patterns and consumer data with content delivery logic.

Brands can govern all forms of digital media with the use of a DAM platform, enabling them to provide individualized, dynamic experiences. Additionally, it enables the construction of larger, more pertinent experiences out of smaller content components.

#3. More emphasis on returns-on-investment

Organizations prioritize topics such as revenue development, productivity improvements, and brand value creation.

The expanding ability of digital asset management (DAM) systems to produce improved ROI is a key motivator for adoption. As a result, rather than conventional advantages, DAM solution suppliers are concentrating on value-driven features and functions.

Emerging trends for Digital Asset Management

It will be crucial to comprehend the major megatrends that will shape business opportunities in the upcoming decade when returning to the strategy whiteboard after COVID-19 to decide how to play the "new normal."

New trends are also arising in the DAM sector, some of which are already apparent. Digital assets are becoming more widely recognized, which gives companies additional opportunities to enhance customer service and attract more potential customers. The following are some digital asset management trends that will be crucial soon:

#1: Digital asset management as a central content platform 

Nothing is more crucial for remote work than having unrestricted access to data. That also holds for digital assets developed, maintained, and used by various teams, such as pictures, videos, audio files, text documents, and presentations. A DAM system may act as a central content platform that provides necessary material to all areas of a firm, regardless of where an employee is located.

In addition, DAM systems make sure that only authorized and current assets are used. They also make it much simpler to discover files because of their strong search capabilities. Modern, Internet-connected DAM software is the best tool for online collaboration since it possesses all these characteristics.

To manage digital assets for brand consistency and amazing user experience, DAM will function more like a content hub. With a DAM, you get:

• All the brand’s authorized media materials are collected in one location, making it a complete brand asset management solution.
• Flexible media content discovery, sharing, and curation platform.
• A centralized platform for master data, media assets, and product information consumption.
• Integration of CRMs, CMSs, and other customer-facing portals.

#2: DAM makes data enrichment & tagging more relevant

All digital projects must focus on data quality and data readiness since they are essential to multi-channel conversion rates. Due to classification, categorization, tagging, and third-party data, there is an increasing demand for intelligent data enrichment. 

Data enrichment and automated asset labeling are made possible by digital asset management to improve operational efficiency, accessibility, and reusability. This is particularly helpful when working on large design projects, or when collaboratively brainstorming for new designs.  With a modern DAM, you get:

• Fast and efficient tagging powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
• Automated asset tagging based on colors, emotions, objects, and even facial recognition. 
• Easier asset repurposing and sharing. 
• Teams can iteratively improve on their output with intelligent suggestions from the DAM system. The intelligent suggestions can be both in terms of creative decision making or related to workflow management. 

‍

#3: Cross-channel content automation

Recently, many firms have realized how critical it is to dramatically expand their digital and internet marketing services to reach customers during lockdown scenarios. This certainly necessitates the use of more and more digital content.

The need to provide content for an increasing number of channels, including websites, online shops, e-commerce marketplaces, and social media platforms, makes issues worse. This multichannel marketing is a challenge that firms are facing more and more. 

Therefore, a prominent digital asset management trend in 2021 will be the use of automation to reduce the effort encountered by marketing experts. By automatically distributing files in the appropriate format for each marketing channel, DAM software plays a big part in this.

#4: Integration with other solutions

An emerging trend is interoperability of DAM systems. The objective here is to realize the smoothest possible exchange of data between the DAM software and several adjacent third-party systems to reduce manual processes and errors. This is sometimes referred to as an “API first” approach. 

For example, good DAM solutions include connectors to a broad range of systems, not just common content management systems, shop systems, or various social media channels. DAMs can integrate with marketing technology solutions to help drive personalized marketing campaigns. DAMs can also integrate with generative AI models, which could allow users to scale their asset creation rapidly based on existing assets. 

They also have interfaces to ERP systems. DAMs can also integrate with popular enterprise solutions like Adobe products, Office solutions, and other types of systems. These interfaces allow DAM systems to seamlessly work with existing IT infrastructure. 

#5: Automation of routine work 

Many companies are facing great pressure to cut costs. COVID-19 has exacerbated this problem. Automating processes can help companies reduce manual work and thereby lower expenditures. Digital asset management software is offering more and more ways to achieve this. One example is the automatic maintenance of metadata based on defined rules. Some solutions also use AI assisted image recognition systems. Based on these results, certain meta-tags can then be set automatically. In the medium term, AI will perform additional work – such as recognizing and categorizing content in audio and video files. 

#6: Rights Management

Companies are increasingly using DAMs to help manage compliance as ethical rules become more prevalent across all industries. DAMs may be used to establish workflows that guarantee all compliance standards are satisfied throughout the life of a project, regardless of whether your business must comply with GDPR for international regulations, HIPAA for healthcare, ADA for accessibility, or any other regulatory body.

A good digital asset management solution will be able to:

• Verify compliance at each stage of the procedure to ensure that no mistakes are overlooked as you move from one job to the next.
• To verify that the right permissions are granted from outside parties, use cloud-based consent and release forms.
• Per compliance and regulatory norms for your business, make sure that any files that are shared and stored include the proper copyright.

#7: Improvements in user experience 

Modern DAM systems are incredibly complicated and are always performing more work of different sorts. These technologies must be simple to use and intuitive for consumers to get the most out of them. Thus, a trend in digital asset management for 2023 is to emphasize user experience. With that in mind, software developers will continue to enhance their current workflows, features, and user interfaces. Users should expect the following because of these efforts:

• Reduction of complexity through interfaces that are tailored to roles or workflows.
• AI-assisted workflows.
• Seamless interaction with other apps and services. 

‍

Wrap Up

For enterprises to effectively manage and use the growing quantity of digital assets, innovative DAM solutions are crucial. Traditional asset management with emails, hard drives or even cloud storage is getting obsolete. They become even more important for brands that need to manage design assets for product development or marketing in a collaborative manner. 

‍