Ensuring a successful DAM initiative
Building a digital playground for co-creation and collaboration
One of the biggest challenges faced when determining how your organization will incorporate a digital asset management solution is getting started. The key to success hangs on user engagement at the earliest stage of the process, and a holistic digital strategy that integrates with your organization’s ecosystem.
It may feel like a daunting task to analyze your entire workflow, but understanding how people acquire, create, manage, distribute, and archive assets can help you to plan for the future and explain how the technology will meet the needs of your different users. To plan for a successful DAM adoption, start by looking at your strategy behind digital asset management and build a plan to operationalize each DAM objective.
Set your priorities
Once you have identified your priorities, plan on rolling them out gradually. By working at a steady pace and defining timeline goals, you’re providing your DAM team with an opportunity to work in close collaboration with each user group, build a solution that is scalable for the future, and uncover those who are capable, and willing, to be DAM champions.
Identify your DAM champions
Rather than naming DAM champions who just await instruction, select invested individuals as you go. To the wider business, digital champions are the face of the project from start to finish, and help to collect feedback, assist in testing, and most importantly, plan the training and roll-out for their groups.
Brand your DAM
By creating a customized on-brand DAM portal, everyone using the system will feel more empowered as a brand evangelist and subsequently carry the right messaging and branding throughout all their tasks. The familiar look and feel will also greatly aid adoption because it helps build trust that this is the single source of truth for your brand’s most important digital assets.
Integrate it with your corporate intranet
Your DAM portal will be a much greater asset to your business if everyone in the organization uses it. If you make your brand management accessible via a Single Sign-On (SSO) link from your intranet, employees will be able to log in automatically, securely, and easily. Once users discover how easy the DAM system is to access, they’ll feel encouraged to use it.
Lockdown your metadata
Whether your DAM’s search engine relies on a simple or complex taxonomy, a consistent approach to tagging your assets with metadata will deliver consistent results—guaranteeing that users can depend on the system even if they move teams. To do so, apply a governance framework for metadata application to ensure tagging is consistent and high-quality. Remember, high-quality metadata creates a powerful search experience for your users.
Educate and train
Following training initiatives led by your DAM champions, your system should also serve asan educational center for both existing and new team members. Users should be encouraged to access the portal to discover training materials and helpful documents, while new employees are educated on the brand image and corporate guidelines.
Build momentum
A strong driving force behind a successful implementation is success itself. Using one success to create a positive domino effect will help to secure significant user engagement and adoption—corporate culture typically dictates that people want to engage with programs that are popular and likely to succeed. Start small and create momentum by building on quick wins.
