Is your DAM able to adapt to your requirements?

26th November 2024

An increasing number of organisations are realising that a Digital Asset Management system is the difference between developing an exceptional brand with consistent messaging, and an organisation with a dysfunctional and chaotic approach to their marketing.

That’s why the DAM market has seen such rapid growth in recent years, with organisations across every sector recognising the need for a single source of truth for all their marketing, sales and brand assets—and there’s no shortage of DAM vendors vying for a piece of the pie.

While the major DAM systems are similar in terms of the features and functionality they offer, the same can’t be said for their customers. No two are the same, and you can’t necessarily rely on a cookie-cutter DAM to suit your specific requirements—this is why flexibility in a Digital Asset Management platform is so important.

READ MORE: The Digital Asset Management Comparison Checklist

Key features of an adaptable DAM

There are a number features you need to look for when evaluating your first (or brand new) DAM system, but three of the most important are:

1. Cloud storage scalability
2. Permissions, filters and approval workflows
3. Integration with existing tools
4. Customisation options

Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.

Straightforward cloud storage scalability

One of the advantages of cloud storage is how easy it is to scale up as and when required. Unlike hosting your own servers on-site that requires a significant amount of time and financial investment to increase storage space, cloud storage—in theory, at least—offers much more flexibility.

With ResourceSpace, you’ll benefit from a DAM that can easily scale with you, and at the pace that suits you, whether that’s 500GB, 1TB, 5TB, 10TB or more.

Your digital asset library will be changing all of the time, so you need to choose a DAM vendor that’s happy to scale your cloud storage up as and when you need it, and by the amount you actually need—not strict preset packages.

Permissions, filters and approval workflows

Digital Asset Management platforms aren’t just basic file storage; they’re designed to manage complex asset workflows and granular user permissions. 

Your DAM should be able to accommodate these kinds of complex requirements, including determining how assets are uploaded and which are accessible to specific users without impacting performance.

ResourceSpace allows for exactly this sort of setup, and determines which users can see and edit content depending on those permissions. This is all easily configurable and then works seamlessly in the background making sure only the right people have access to the right content. 

Integration with existing tools

A DAM is more than just a repository for digital assets—it’s the single source of truth that joins up all of your marketing and sales activity, and as a result it should connect with all of your organisation’s most important tools.

Without integrations a DAM becomes siloed, with users having to download content to reupload it to other apps. This results in assets being stored on hard drives or cloud storage solutions, with the DAM manager losing control over what versions are being used and where.

For example, a marketing manager might download the latest version of the company logo from the DAM so they can include it in a piece of marketing collateral, using Adobe Photoshop to add it to an image. The next time they do a similar task, the logo is already downloaded to their hard drive, so they don’t need to redownload it from the DAM. But what if the logo has been tweaked in the meantime? The old version of the logo is going to start appearing in new marketing and sales collateral.

However, if the DAM integrated with Photoshop, the marketing manager wouldn’t have to download the logo at all—they could simply load up Photoshop and access the latest version of the logo within the platform itself as it’s pulled directly from the DAM.

Customisation options

When a Digital Asset Management system is used to its full potential, it should be at the heart of everything your organisation does. Team members across multiple departments will be accessing it, and spending a lot of time doing so. With this in mind, ensuring the DAM itself is on-brand can be valuable.

Branding is all about communicating company values and messaging, and this extends to the systems you use too. As an example, ResourceSpace allows you to customise fonts, texts and backgrounds within the system to align with your organisation's brand.

Implementing branding across your DAM isn’t the only customisations you should be looking for, as the layout of your dashboard and how you organise assets is also important. ResourceSpace has a flexible design and is fully customisable, allowing you to tailor the user interface to suit your needs and preferences.

The risk of using an inflexible DAM

The biggest impact of an inflexible DAM is user experience and, as a result, user adoption.

A DAM is one of the most important investments a company can make, and it can have a hugely positive impact across the entire organisation when implemented correctly. However, if it’s not set up to work for you, securing buy-in and ensuring proper use is an uphill struggle.

A second issue is that a DAM will force you to change how your organisation operates if it can’t be adapted. This only increases the time it takes to get DAM processes up-and-running effectively, and it will also have a negative impact on user and stakeholder buy-in.

To find out more about how ResourceSpace can adapt to your organisation, rather than the other way around, why not book a free 30-minute demo of the platform below? Alternatively, launch one of our pre-built DAM templates and see for yourself how the system can be tailored to different use cases.