Table of Contents
- What Is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Solution?
- How to Choose a Digital Asset Management (DAM) System?
- Top 10 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Solutions
What Is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Solution?
DAM software allows organizations to centralize their digital assets in one place, which acts as a SSOT when it comes to storing, organizing, and sharing digital assets with internal and external stakeholders. The emergence of DAM software has made it easy for organizations to manage rich media content such as images, audio, and videos, along with traditional documents such as spreadsheets, word documents, slide decks, and PDFs.
DAM software applications offer features such as comprehensive search capabilities, strict access control rights, version control, collaboration, and powerful integration options that help you automate the digital asset management workflow.
Organizations that implement a DAM software platform see improved collaborations, stave off content redundancy, boost productivity and process efficiency, and save costs by organizing the digital assets in a single place.
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How to Choose a Digital Asset Management (DAM) System?
Picking a DAM software platform that works for you is a pivotal decision as it will centralize your digital assets in a single repository. The DAM solution will be primarily used by marketers, salespeople, designers, photographers, social media managers, etc. to store and retrieve digital assets. It can be daunting to pick the right DAM vendor considering the enormous number of options available within the DAM market.
Here is a five-step process to help you choose the DAM application that will work best for your organization:
Step 1: Audit Your Current Digital Assets
Start by evaluating the digital assets currently used within the organization. The purpose is to delete redundant and obsolete assets and repurpose useful assets. Also, knowing the commonly used content formats would help you when you are shortlisting DAM alternatives.
Step 2: Assess Your Requirements
Begin by evaluating your current workflow. Take stock of the key stakeholders (internal and external) in the DAM process, potential bottlenecks, analyze where you currently store the digital assets, access rights, and the details of the content audit.
Discuss possible use cases of the DAM solution with key stakeholders on how it can benefit their respective departments. While getting executive buy-in, emphasize the impact of the DAM solution on productivity, efficiency, cost savings, and on streamlining the brand image.
Step 3: Evaluate Your Alternatives
While shortlisting DAM alternatives, gauge them on pricing, scalability, integrations, and security aspects. Make sure the options meet your requirements and use cases. Along with this, check their implementation duration, platform independence, ease of use, training, and licensing (per user pricing) options.
Step 4: Shortlist the Solutions
When you’re shortlisting the solutions, it helps to consult an expert who can help you pick the right DAM platform. You also need to invest time in taking customized demos from shortlisted vendors to see how their solutions can fit in your current workflow. Get key users involved in the discussion to avoid buyer’s remorse at a later stage. Finally, sign-up for a free trial of the shortlisted platforms to test their usability.
Step 5: Implement the Solution
After the trial, once you’ve zeroed down on the ideal platform, it’s time to implement it on a full-scale. Before implementation, you need to set a schedule and deadlines, assign roles to users, and train them on the system. You may need to resolve the initial hesitation toward adopting this change by showing the value in the product, which may be tactical for the ground-level users, whereas strategic for managers and other senior-level users.
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Top 10 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Solutions
Now that we know the groundwork you need to prepare before selecting a DAM solution, let’s look at the top ten DAM software solutions for 2020.
1. Canto
With an experience of over 25 years, Canto is known to be a simple yet effective DAM software in the industry. Canto is trusted widely by marketers to manage brand assets. NASA Ames Research Center, Harvard University, Mitsubishi Electric Cooling & Heating, and Ralph Lauren Corporation use Canto.
Canto’s asset organization feature allows you to add keywords, tags, and smart tags to label digital assets according to themes, products, campaigns, templates, etc. Its Smart Albums feature automatically segregates assets into six folders, viz., images, videos, audio, documents, presentations, and other formats. Canto uses Amazon’s Rekognition (Facial recognition) technology to find images of a person you’re looking for within 10 seconds.
You can set up workflows in the tool, assign tasks to users along with due dates. Canto can be integrated with 20+ tools and allows you to share assets directly to social media and file storage sites.
The pricing for Canto starts at $30000 per year with a 14-day free trial. However, we’d recommend you get in touch with the company to get a customized quote.
If you are looking for an on-premise DAM instead of a SaaS one, you can go for Cumulus, Canto’s on-premise/hybrid DAM.
2. Widen Collective
Trusted by organizations such as YMCA, Citizen, Autodesk, and Zippo, Widen Collective is a DAM software platform geared primarily towards mid-to-large organizations. Along with a DAM platform, Widen Collective also consists of brand management, video management, and creative management solutions.
Widen Collective enables you to customize metadata and keywords and set up a smart workflow to simplify the asset import process. You can highlight frequently used assets using spotlight searches and collections. Its powerful search feature lets you search text from documents. Using Widen’s distribution features, you can embed content on your digital properties, share links, and integrate the platform with applications such as HootSuite, WordPress, Salesforce, and Slack.
The enterprise-level security lets you manage user rights effectively, add digital watermarks, and audit user activities. Its insights feature provides a detailed analysis of the performance of the digital assets across shares, searches, embeds, views, and downloads.
Widen’s pricing plans start at $24,900 per year exclusive of one-time implementation charges.
3. Brandfolder
Brandfolder helps marketers and creative professionals manage, share, and track the performance of their digital assets. Suitable for mid-to-large organizations, some of its clients include Slack, Lyft, and Mastercard. It has solutions for agencies, retail, technology, sports, and food and beverage industries.
Brandfolder’s white-label DAM enables you to customize it according to your brand guidelines and lets you share vanity URLs of your assets to improve the brand experience. Its search feature offers AI-powered image recognition, in-document text search, auto-tagging, pinned searches, and automatic metadata extraction. The power tools are capable of identifying duplicate assets, bulk asset editing, and bulk move and merge.
You can resize files, convert them into different formats, and use advanced video editing features. Using the access control feature, you can set publish and expiration dates for assets, and assign admins to approve documents.
The DAM software integrates with applications such as HubSpot, Adobe Creative Suite, Google Analytics, Jira, Microsoft Office, and Salesforce. Brandfolder offers two-tiered plans, and you can obtain a custom quote by getting in touch with them.
4. Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager offers a suite of products that help marketing teams streamline their marketing operations. The product is aimed toward financial services, tech, media and entertainment, retail, and other industries. Organizations such as Telegraph, SAS, Silicon Labs, and Lenovo prefer using Adobe Experience Manager. Adobe’s DAM promises to speed up the creative process, right from asset creation to campaign delivery, and to help you deliver better customer experiences.
Adobe Experience Manager addresses the key asset management challenges, such as the inability to scale the asset management process, version control problems, and access rights issues. The DAM platform offers a shared storage repository so that collaborators, reviewers, and external stakeholders can access assets easily. The permission control feature keeps admins updated on who is accessing the files. Automated workflows make it easy for users to plan, review, approve, and publish digital assets.
You need to contact Adobe’s sales team to understand how it can fit your requirements and get a quote.
5. Bynder
Bynder enables marketers to manage brand, campaign, and product assets and acts as an SSOT for all users. The DAM is used by the likes of Spotify, Puma, Canon, Bridgestone, and Lacoste.
Bynder’s creative workflow centralizes and optimizes the communication between the stakeholders involved in the creative process. Members can leave comments or annotate the assets to provide feedback and compare multiple versions of a file to clear potential confusion. You can add web-based brand guidelines to ensure that consistent colors, fonts, logo, and brand assets are used across the organization. You can set up brand templates for digital and print content so that users can create brand assets productively driven by consistency. Bynder integrates with a range of applications, including Magento, Adobe Experience Manager, Drupal, Google Analytics, Slack, and Akamai.
While Bynder offers a free trial, to get a quote, you need to sign-up for an introductory 15-minute call to scout your requirements, followed by a demo, and then receive a proposal.
6. IntelligenceBank
IntelligenceBank’s enterprise DAM and brand portal software allow marketing teams to manage projects through workflows and approvals with calendar and kanban (a scheduling method). The DAM is used by brands like KFC, Jetstar, ANZ, and Hertz.
IntelligenceBank’s advanced search, filters, and metadata features help you locate files faster. Its AI-driven keyword tagger recognizes images upon upload and assigns tags automatically. You can set up notifications to get notified whenever newer versions of files are uploaded. The video and image manipulation features let you edit and convert images and files on the go. You can track the performance of assets on websites and other digital properties whenever you share their public links.
The pricing for IntelligenceBank ranges between $5000-10,000 per year and goes above that for enterprise requirements. You can request a quote according to your needs.
7. Image Relay
Image Relay’s DAM caters to requirements of right from startups to giant corporations and is used by entities such as Middlebury College, Seiko, and Citrix.
Image Relay lets you create custom metadata templates for different files according to their format, campaign, or product that boost the searchability of your assets. You can create a list of high-value words, i.e., controlled vocabulary, to bring control across the asset nomenclature.
Using version control, you can view a previous version of an asset and revert to it if required. Single sourcing ensures that if you make changes to a file that is kept in different folders, the changes are reflected across its remaining instances. If you’re looking to add users in bulk, you can do so by uploading an Excel sheet.
The DAM is platform-independent, and its pricing starts at $99 per month and goes up to $750 per month. Organizations that need a comprehensive feature set can get in touch for a customized proposal.
8. Cloudinary
Cloudinary’s dynamic DAM helps organizations eliminate content silos by providing organizations and their external stakeholders a centralized location to store and retrieve digital assets. Nintendo, StubHub, Trivago, Gymshark, and Swiggy are some of its top clients.
Marketers can automate workflows for activities like metadata management, AI-based tagging, publishing, and responsive delivery across devices. Cloudinary enables you to embed digital assets from the repository on your website, mobile app, social media, or email just by performing a simple copy+paste operation.
Cloudinary can be integrated with Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, WordPress, and Zapier, among other add-on integrations. It also offers a comprehensive tool stack consisting of tools for video and image manipulation.
You can start with its free plan subscribe to the premium plans as you scale. Get in touch with Cloudinary for advanced features, custom configurations, and more sophisticated features.
9. CoSchedule Asset Organizer
CoSchedule’s Asset Organizer is an effective platform for marketing teams to manage everything in a centralized repository. Users can apply a uniform file organization structure to make it easy to store and find content. You can add labels, tags, and other taxonomies to organize files productively.
The built-in version control feature allows users to update existing resources and track their changes. You can replace outdated content with their revised versions and provide access to relevant stakeholders and internal teams using custom share links.
Their basic plan ranges between $50-200 per month, which also includes the standard features from CoSchedule’s Marketing Calendar product. Get in touch with their sales team to get a customized quotation.
10. Wedia
Wedia’s DAM is suitable for mid-to-large scale organizations, and some of its clients include Decathlon, Total, L’Oréal Paris, and Dassault Systèmes.
Its centralized asset library enables organizations to store and use content easily, along with their access rights, version control, and traceability. Besides the indexing capabilities and advanced search feature, Wedia uses machine learning to assign automated keywords to newly uploaded assets.
Wedia also offers standalone products for creative project and content management, distributed marketing management, and digital experience management.
The annual pricing for Wedia’s DAM starts at $7000. You can sign-up for a demo to know more about the product and get pricing accordingly.
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Closing Thoughts
Integrating a DAM platform in your martech stack will not only bring uniformity to your content production process but also skyrocket overall productivity by reducing asset duplication and ensuring that the right assets are used when creating content.
We believe the guidelines laid out in the article will help you define your requirements accurately, and you can evaluate the ten DAM vendors against the requirements to choose the one that fits.
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