Complete Guide to Digital Asset Management Workflows

Types of Digital Asset Management Workflows

There are many types of digital asset management workflows that you might need to create or manage if you’re overseeing projects with a significant number of assets. These might include:

• Asset-based workflows: An asset-based workflow focuses on the lifecycle of individual files. For example, a product image might go through stages like creation, review, approval, and publishing. All of these steps are tracked in a single workflow that focuses on the individual asset being created.
• Project-based workflows: Project-based workflows manage multiple related assets together, often tied to a campaign or launch. Think of a seasonal marketing campaign with hundreds of images, ad formats, and videos moving through review and approval. If something changes in one of the assets (a piece of copy, the color of someone’s hat, etc.), the change is pulled through globally to all of the assets. You might see this type of workflow used in pharma advertising for safety information or drug indications.
• Collaborative workflows: These workflows are all about teamwork and might involve real-time edits by multiple stakeholders. Creative teams, agencies, freelancers, and their clients can collaborate on video edits, design files, or pitch decks within a shared DAM platform or during a live editing session. DAM platforms can help make asynchronous collaboration more feasible.
• Approval workflows: Approval workflows dictate who reviews and signs off on assets before they go live. This helps maintain brand consistency and compliance, which is especially important in regulated industries like healthcare, insurance, or nutrition. Even in less regulated industries, approval workflows help make sure assets comply with brand guidelines.
• Transactional workflows: Use transactional workflows when systems or departments exchange assets. For example, when a photographer uploads event images to your digital asset management tool, they might automatically be routed to the editor.
• Archival workflows: These workflows focus on retiring and storing old or overused content. You'll tag assets with the relevant meta descriptions, categorize them, and store them for legal, compliance, or future reuse.

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Key Components of Digital Asset Management Workflows

The key components of your DAM workflow may vary based on the type of workflow you’re creating or managing. These components might include:

• Media library: The media library is a centralized hub for all your digital assets. It’s where you upload, organize, and access your content, ideally with visual previews and powerful search functionality. A sophisticated media library can house and organize different types of digital assets and handle a variety of file types. You should be able to set permissions for team members based on their role and the assets that are approved for their use.
• Metadata: Think of metadata as labels for the assets. This goes beyond titles or file names and might include tags, file descriptions, the date the asset was created, and the date the asset should be sunset. Metadata can help you optimize your media library and make it easier to find, organize, sort, and reuse the digital assets you already have.
• Approval: The Approval process steps define who needs to review and approve each asset. This helps avoid the dreaded “final_final_v4” final_final_v4_REVISED” file naming chaos and keeps brand standards intact.
• Distribution: Distribution ensures that finalized assets are delivered to the right people or platforms, whether that’s a CMS, social media scheduler, or partner portal. It also might look like setting permissions so that the right people on your team are able to use the assets when they need them.
• Security: Security components might include access controls, permissions, and setting up audit trails. They make sure the right people have access to protect your digital assets and prevent misuse or data breaches. You also might be responsible for managing digital assets for clients or customers and making sure each customer only has access to their assets and not those of other customers, or worse, competitors.
• Maintenance: Maintenance is an ongoing part of a good digital asset management workflow. This might include regularly scheduled file cleanup, metadata updates, and permissions audits. Without this regular maintenance, your DAM software can become very messy and significantly less useful over time.
• Digital asset management software: Digital asset management software brings all of the other components and process steps together and can help streamline your digital asset management processes. Many of the newer tools are cloud-based, and some are even AI-powered. This helps you better find assets and automate your workflows.

Digital Asset Management Lifecycle

Here’s what your digital asset management lifecycle might look like:

• Planning: Define what assets need to be created, for whom, by when, and how they will be used.
• Creation: This may include asset designs as well as any content creation (think alt text, image captions, and ad copy).
• Ingestion: Upload assets to the DAM system and tag them with relevant metadata. The approval process may take place before or after this step, depending on how your organization likes to do approvals or how many approvals are needed.
• Storage: Organize digital files in a central location and add them to smaller libraries or folders for easy access. The system may use auto-tagging to add metadata, like the date of upload or the name of the person who uploaded it, for more search capabilities.
• Transformation: Assets may be resized, reformatted, or adapted for different file formats or distribution channels.
• Distribution: Finalized assets are shared internally or published externally.
• Governance: Assign and enforce permissions, licenses, and compliance rules.
• Archiving: Move older assets to long-term storage or archives.

Benefits of Digital Asset Management Workflows

Digital asset management workflows can benefit your organization and make your job as a project manager significantly easier. Here are a few benefits of digital asset management:

• Improved brand consistency: Centralized storage and permissions-based controls help make sure only approved, on-brand assets are used. This encourages the use of approved assets and reduces the risk that team members will use unapproved assets. Centralized storage provides a single source of truth and helps smaller marketing teams maintain brand compliance across all their use cases that call for brand assets.
• More collaboration: A digital asset management system and digital asset management workflows let teams work together across departments, time zones, or agencies without duplicated efforts. Everyone has access to the central repository of assets and can collaborate on assets in a more efficient way.
• Better ROI on Content: Reusing existing assets avoids redundant work and maximizes the return on your content investment. If you are hiring contractors or paying salaries to create new assets or marketing materials, you will get a better return on your investment by making revisions or finding new use cases for existing digital assets.

Digital Asset Management Workflow Example

Let’s say you work for a big ecommerce company and your marketing team is launching a new product. 

1. They hire a photographer to take photos of the new product both by itself and with different backgrounds for the initial campaigns.
2. The photographer then uploads the final, edited product shots into your DAM system. The system automatically adds some metadata like the file name, the name of the uploader, the date of the upload, and the type of file, and the photographer adds a short description of each photo.
3. Next, the creative team reviews the photos and marks the ones they want to use for the website and each type of ad campaign they have planned. They submit these to the brand managers using the approval workflow in the DAM system.
4. The brand managers then approve the best ones and have the copywriters take those files and add advertising copy. The ads are sent back to the brand manager for approval.
5. Once approved, the assets are resized and tagged for each ad size and format needed for the campaigns. The final ads are sent off to be trafficked to the different ad platforms.
6. Since your team also wants to promote the new product on social media, you share the digital assets in their final format with your social media managers, who export the final files in optimized formats for Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok, all without back-and-forth emails, lost files, or version control issues.
7. After the launch, any ads or creative with introductory offer copy is then archived, and new ads for ongoing promotion are created and distributed to the relevant team members.

Challenges With Digital Asset Management Workflows

Some of the most common challenges project managers and creative teams may face when setting up digital asset management workflows include:

• Lack of adoption: Teams might resist using new systems if they are overly complicated or the “rules” are unclear or not properly defined. Some people may also find that old habits die hard and prefer to store their own files locally (which is not great for consistency or visibility).
• Inconsistent metadata: Without standardization in the metadata and tagging structure, assets become hard to search for and reuse. This can be part of the adoption challenges we discussed above, but it can also be its own challenge. Resolving this issue may also help with adoption.
• Undefined roles and responsibilities: Delays in feedback or unclear responsibilities can hold up approvals of assets or make it hard for team members to know which assets they can use and when or where they can use them.

Tools For Managing DAM Workflows

Digital asset management platforms are designed to automate and support every step of your workflow. They often include integrations with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, project management software, content management systems, and content delivery networks. 

Here are my picks for the best digital asset management tools:

1. 1. Air — Best for agile, collaborative enterprise teams
2. 2. MediaValet — Best for AI-powered search & collaboration
3. 3. Lingo — Best for unlimited brand kits
4. 4. Stockpress — Best for role-based team collaboration
5. 5. Bynder — Best for enterprise brand consistency
6. 6. Adobe Experience Manager — Best for cloud-native content publishing
7. 7. Scaleflex — Best for being MACH-certified
8. 8. Acquia DAM (Widen) — Best for configuration and customization
9. 9. Pics.io — Best for mid-markets wanting unlimited storage
10. 10. Filecamp — Best for custom branding

Tips for Managing DAM Workflows

Whether you’re new to managing digital asset workflows or struggling with some of the common challenges, I’ve outlined a few tips to help you become a digital asset management pro or level up your skills.

• Define roles and responsibilities clearly. This includes who creates, approves, distributes, and archives assets. This may vary depending on the type of asset or the campaign the assets are being used to support.
• Standardize your metadata and tagging practices from the outset, but remain flexible in case there are opportunities to improve these practices over time.
• Automate repetitive tasks wherever possible to reduce the amount of manual work and the margin for errors.
• Conduct regular audits to clean up and archive any outdated files and review permissions. You should have a process for offboarding team members that includes revoking access to the digital asset management system when they leave your organization or when their project concludes.
• Provide team training and clear documentation to encourage adoption. Reward and recognize those who are using the tool well.

Join For More Digital Asset Management Insights

Want more tips, tricks, or best practices for managing projects that use a lot of digital assets? Join the DPM community for more. You will also find more information about our favorite tools, ready-to-use templates, and insightful articles written by experienced project managers.