In today's digital age, organizations rely heavily on digital assets to drive their marketing efforts, streamline operations, and enhance customer engagement. Digital Asset Management (DAM) programs have therefore become indispensable tools for organizing, storing, and distributing these valuable digital resources. Essentially, DAM programs allow organizations to efficiently manage all the content they use to achieve their goals for growth.
Since the volume of content increases every day, optimizing DAM resource allocation has become more challenging. With limited budgets, time, and personnel, it’s difficult for organizations to know what initiatives to prioritize and which to let sit on the back burner.
In this article, we’ll explore strategies for prioritizing digital assets and the projects associated with them. This approach helps organizations optimize their investment in DAM, achieve maximum returns, allocate proper attention to critical assets, and foster the program’s growth.
The Growing Challenge of DAM Resource Allocation
Review your organization’s high-level goals for the next one to three years. How many of them directly involve producing and managing new content? In today’s world, many brands often prioritize the creation of new, relevant, and engaging digital assets without realizing it.
As organizations generate an increasing number of assets to achieve their goals, it becomes more challenging to give every group of assets the proper amount of attention. While new initiatives are vital, it’s also necessary to maintain the program that already exists. When moving to a new DAM platform, it’s important to determine what the most valuable assets are, move them over first, and then decide which users should be in the first onboarding group.
In most organizations, experienced, DAM-specific personnel are limited or nonexistent. This means that teams have to be strategic in allocating time and money to achieve DAM-related tasks and projects along with their other responsibilities.
The Power of Asset Prioritization
Asset prioritization is the process of categorizing digital assets based on their importance, usage frequency, and strategic value to the organization. By assigning priorities, organizations can optimize their DAM resource allocation in several ways:
1. Streamlined Workflow Efficiency
Prioritization allows organizations to focus their resources on managing and maintaining their most valuable assets. This ensures that high-priority assets and the workflows related to them receive regular attention, remain relevant and streamlined and that the needs of the teams using them are addressed. As a result, teams using priority assets consistently save time and effort. This increased efficiency enables them to focus on leveraging valuable assets to achieve their goals.
2. Enhanced User Experience
DAM programs, like any system or program, need consistent care to stay healthy. The team assigned to manage and govern the program, its workflows, platforms, and assets, should consistently be executing projects that push the user experience of the system to the next level. Projects related to improving the way priority assets move throughout the DAM program should be prioritized and invested in, especially if they relate to the front-end user experience of finding and putting assets to use.
Best Practices for Asset Prioritization
Align Priorities with Strategic Goals
Because so many high-level, big-picture goals are closely connected to digital content these days, it’s easy to draw a direct line between the strategic goals of an organization and the priority assets and workflows to focus on from a DAM perspective. Aligning your DAM strategy with a broader organizational strategy makes sense from an efficiency perspective, and also makes it easier for you to secure additional resources to achieve DAM-related goals.
Identify the Tasks and Assets Necessary to “Keep the Lights on”
An organization’s strategic goals aren’t its only priority, however. Think of an organization that produces packaged goods and sells them online. The foundation of its business is maintaining and improving the management of its product imagery within the DAM system and the workflows and integrations that distribute them across the organization. Even if the organization wants to expand its marketing efforts in the coming years, it must always allocate resources to maintain what already exists in its DAM program.
Minimize Risk and Maximize Return
Some of your organization’s most important assets may not fit neatly into either of the first two categories outlined above. One of the simplest ways to identify priority assets outside of those listed above is to determine what groups of assets generate the most value for your organization and which pose the greatest threat to it if handled improperly.
Recognize the Value of Assets that Aren’t Priority
When assigning priority to anything, it’s always tempting to completely disregard anything not labeled as “most important.” While sometimes it’s necessary to place certain initiatives on the back burner, it doesn’t mean those initiatives, or the assets related to them, lack value. In a perfect world, every organization would have the resources necessary to address every need and execute every project. Allow yourself to dream a bit about what “non-priority” initiatives you’d love to see done and continue to advocate for them.
Conclusion
In an increasingly digital world, managing and optimizing digital assets is critical for business success. Asset prioritization is a powerful tool that enables organizations to make the most of their DAM systems. By focusing on high-priority assets, organizations can streamline workflows, enhance the user experience, and mitigate risks.
If you need help keeping the lights on, executing specific projects, or simply prioritizing the assets in your DAM system, contact Stacks today! Our expert team can help you implement asset prioritization strategies and provide top-notch DAM services tailored to your specific needs. Don't let valuable assets go unnoticed; prioritize them with Stacks and watch your digital ecosystem thrive!
