The State of Digital Asset Management In 2023 — And Emerging Trends
In this growing digital economy, creating, distributing, and managing an increasing volume of digital content is a pivotal success factor for most businesses. With the ever-increasing demand for content, it becomes important for businesses to not just create new content but to leverage their existing digital assets and manage them effectively. These could be challenging, time-consuming, and expensive without an efficient system in place.
Have you ever wondered who in your organization has the final version of last month's campaign creative? Or sent out the wrong version of the report to an important stakeholder? Well, this happens! Digital asset management software is what you need to avoid these situations.
In this blog, we will explore the current state of DAM solutions in 2023 and the upcoming developments transforming the way businesses manage their digital assets. But before that, for the uninitiated, let us briefly understand what DAM is.
What is a DAM Solution?
Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a software solution that enables the storage, organization, management, distribution, and retrieval of digital assets efficiently. A DAM solution provides a centralized storage location that allows users to search for and access digital assets. It is made possible with tagging, cataloging, and indexing for easy retrieval, which are standout features of a DAM solution. This improves searchability and optimizes the time spent by businesses to manage their digital assets.
Typically, a DAM solution includes tools for editing, versioning, sharing, and collaborating on digital assets, however, features such as control access, permissions, and data analytics are becoming quite prominent.
A DAM solution enhances collaboration, streamlines workflows, reduces costs, and ensures brand consistency, making it an indispensable tool for businesses in various industries.
The Current State and Emerging Trends of DAM
A recent report published by market.us puts the global Digital Asset Management market size at USD 4.3 billion in 2022, and growth is estimated to accelerate at a CAGR of 13.8%, registering an incremental revenue of USD 15.2 billion by 2032.
While the broad push for digitization has been the key factor for growth in demand, factors like transparency, reduction in operational costs, increased efficiency, and increased digital content output have been the key drivers for businesses to adopt DAM solutions.
Several emerging trends are shaping the industry and will drive innovation in the years to come. In this section, we have identified the key functional areas of DAM that will have the most impact over the next five years. Let us examine each a little more closely.
Advanced AI-Powered Automation in DAM
Like most digital solutions today, AI and ML have proven to be critical driving forces behind the success of Digital Asset Management solutions. While the most common usage of AI-ML in DAM solutions includes AI-based auto-tagging of assets and efficient search functions, advanced Digital Asset Management tools also offer powerful features like metadata extraction, face recognition, and object detection, which help enhance searchability. DAM solutions are all about efficiency, and the increasing usage of AI-ML technologies increases the opportunities manifold.
As an example, in a retail business with thousands of products, imagine the number of hours that could be saved by auto-tagging products with relevant metadata and making the same searchable for store managers and customers alike.
Cloud-based DAM
Cloud-based DAM solutions have proven to be a key enabling factor in the remote/hybrid work culture. With cloud-based DAM solutions, businesses can provide access to their content assets and collaborate with teams across the world, irrespective of their location. Real-time collaboration on cloud-based DAM platforms can significantly increase efficiency, cutting down the flurry of emails to a seamless chat-like experience.
In addition, cloud-based solutions also offer the flexibility to scale up or down as required, resulting in significant cost benefits.
With world-class security in place, a cloud-based DAM could be your secure, centralized repository for all digital assets, ensuring the elimination of unauthorized access while guaranteeing effective real-time collaboration.
The Power of Integrations
DAM solutions are extending their core capabilities by integrating with a wide array of third-party solutions. Integrations with diverse software tools such as marketing automation platforms, content management systems, and creative suites can significantly enhance the usability and efficiency of the DAM solution for users.
Furthermore, many DAM solutions work with intermediary connectors like Zapier, making it super easy to connect with any third-party solution. These integrations allow for seamless workflow automation, faster content creation and distribution, and also facilitate efficient collaboration across teams.
As an example, a marketing agency can have their design team upload social media creatives onto their DAM and share them with the client for feedback. And once the client approves it on DAM, a simple automation can push those creatives onto a third-party social media calendaring system like Hootsuite, and the post will be on its way.
Advanced and Smart Search
While dealing with thousands of digital assets, you must be able to find the right asset at the right time without much effort. Compared to general cloud storage solutions, a DAM tool comes provisioned with powerful search functions that enable easy searchability of the assets. With every passing day, DAM solutions are leveraging advanced AI and ML solutions and features like auto-tagging, image, and facial recognition to improve the searchability of assets.
While this might not sound like a lot given the ubiquity of search, imagine trying to find a specific photo from a library of thousands of images. With the advancement in search functionality in DAM tools, media, and retail businesses will significantly reduce the time and cost expended in finding the right assets at the time of need.
Built-in Usage Analytics
You can't improve what you can't measure! True to this thought, DAM solutions are investing extensively in improving built-in analytics. Proving the ROI of content has always been tricky and establishing the ROI of a DAM solution isn't easy either. Built-in analytics in DAM tools help understand content usage, usage patterns, downloads, edits, and user-specific stats, all of which provide measurability of the efficiency that DAM drives and a proxy for the ROI it delivers for the organization. Effective use of DAM analytics can also identify any gaps and optimize asset management strategies and collaboration across departments.
“Maximize content efficiency and collaboration with built-in analytics in your DAM solution.”
While these trends are evident across the digital asset management landscape and are indeed exciting, the real question you need to ask is how digital asset management fits into your business process and the value it will drive for you in terms of increased efficiency and saved time.
The Y-o-Y growth in market size for DAM indicates the growing demand for DAM solutions as more and more industries recognize the value and need for asset management.
Businesses invest enormous time, effort, and money in creating digital assets. Without an efficient digital asset management system, it often leads to squandering precious time and effort in hunting for the right files or having to recreate them. A Digital Asset management tool could be your answer to solve all these challenges, drive efficiency across your workflow and get the most out of your assets.
