Moving into your new home is not the end of your journey. Now you get to live in it! That means furnishing, landscaping, adding more space, renovating, and making memories. Your kids grow up there, play in the yard, and do their homework at the kitchen table.
Now that you have a fully-furnished DAM platform with the features and workflows you need to execute your day-to-day, you get to live in it, too. Your end-users can find and use what they need in a matter of seconds, not hours. Your content creators can use and reference existing materials to improve on their new designs more efficiently, and you can deliver that content to potential customers more quickly.
Below, our team lays out five steps to take once your DAM platform is up and running to grow the program around it and continue to improve your digital asset management efforts.
Next Steps to Grow Your DAM Program
1. Onboard
Obviously, you'll need to onboard certain DAM power users throughout the migration process to ensure the process runs smoothly. Likely, however, you'll have plenty of other users to begin onboarding in the months and weeks afterwards. Adoption is the number one most important thing to build among you users of the DAM program. To ensure that your users are bought in, plan precisely to have training materials developed and sessions planned, troubleshooting techniques documented, and help desk services are set up.
2. Integrate & Automate
As you roll out workflows and see how they run, you may notice places where processes slow down or hit roadblocks. These are often opportunities for integration and/or automation. To develop these integrations, you'll first need to pay attention to your end-user's feedback. Once opportunities are identified, scope what kinds of integrations are available through your platform vendors and their partners, develop the right solution, and test that the updated processes work.
3. Clean & Archive
It's always best to try and get rid of out-of-date or off-brand content before you migrate assets into the new DAM platform. Sometimes this is difficult to do, however, and more content becomes obsolete every week, month, and year. As this happens, ensure that you have a process in place to move these assets out of the current library and place them in their own archive. This will allow assets to remain searchable but will not clutter the current library.
4. Analyze
One way to ensure that your DAM program will slowly lose its efficiency and effectiveness is to ignore metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). On the other hand, building out KPIs, dashboards, and other metrics to regularly display the health of the DAM program allow your team to govern and manage the DAM program far more effectively. Doing this, you can more quickly identify issues and resolve them.
5. Expand
Often, DAM programs start small and grow over time. You may have only heard of DAM's application in the marketing or creative setting, but it impacts and can benefit sales, finance, HR, and plenty of other teams. Due to this, the gradual expansion of the DAM program to other teams and departments is an important piece of every organization's DAM roadmap. Scope out how many users and assets will need to be added, how long it will take, and how it will impact your current workflows and standards.
