Digital asset management software: Choosing your best option

So you’re ready to banish the demons of obstructed, inconsistent, as well as wayward digital asset management software once and for all?

You’re ready to dive into the DAM software market and pick out a system that actually lives up to the hype? 

Awesome!

We won’t throw sand in your eyes or pigeonhole you into thinking that all digital asset management platforms are the same. 

No, they’re not.

Some are worth their weight in gold. Others, well, others are pretty crap (sorry to say).

Now you’re thinking: “How will I know that I’m picking only the best digital asset management software and not some mickey-mouse platform?”

Well, there’s only one way to know, and that’s by reading this blog to the very end.

In it, you’ll learn:

• What is digital asset management?
• What do DAM solutions do?
• How Optimizely Content Marketing Platform addresses the topic of digital asset management 
• DAM platform analysis: feature-by-feature breakdown of some of the best DAM solutions out there

Now without further ado, grab a cup of coffee, settle in, as well as enjoy our comprehensive guide on choosing the best DAM platform for your marketing arsenal.

Let’s do this!

What is Digital Asset Management? The Lowdown on the DAM Concept 

Name the one thing that enterprise marketers love more than having full visibility into their digital assets.

That’s right—none.

Before the turn of the millennium, marketers didn’t enjoy this kind of luxury.

Storing, sharing, as well as organizing a company’s digital assets was one hell of a job, and not many fancied it.

But things changed in the early 2000s when digital asset management gained ground both as a technology and a discipline. 

For many marketers, it was the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

Now away from the backstory…

What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

Digital Asset Management is all about the flexibility, control, access, portability, as well as reporting of digital assets between key stakeholders in a typical marketing chain (FYI, digital assets are media files that carry some type of intrinsic, extrinsic, or transactional value).

Simply put, digital asset management is concerned with delivering the right content to the right people, in real-time and on all devices. 

Need further clarity?

Think of DAM as a tool to measure brand management across an enterprise. Picture it as a cheat code that helps marketers achieve brand consistency and workflow automation (pretty awesome, right?).

One more thing, digital assets are more than just the media files. 

To realize the full value of a file, you need to have some extra information about it. In short, you need metadata.

In the context of digital asset management, a media file or piece of digital content only becomes a usable asset when metadata is associated with it. Plain and simple.

Metadata is absolutely critical in the management of digital assets. It also provides crucial information about a piece of digital content by: 

• Making it searchable and accessible
• Defining usage rights
• Providing context
• Displaying an asset’s history of use

This brings us to our next stop in the digital asset management journey: what do DAM systems do?

What Do Digital Asset Management Solutions Do?

Yes, you guessed it: Digital asset management (DAM) solutions keep marketing materials and branded content in a centrally organized, indexed, as well as searchable database.

At their core, these software solutions give marketers a way to store and organize their digital assets (think: presentations, videos, podcasts, PDF files, animations, etc.) in a consistent, uniform manner.

It gets better.

With a DAM platform, you’re empowered to repurpose as well as share your best brand assets—all at the snap of a finger!

What Makes Optimizely Content Marketing Platform the Best Digital Asset Management Software

There’s a lot to say about this one-of-a-kind project management tool. 

But perhaps what stands out most about Optimizely Content Marketing Platform is its digital asset management capabilities.

Unlike other DAM solutions (as we’ll see below), Optimizely Content Marketing Platform is specifically designed to transform how agile teams store, reuse, as well as manage marketing content and creative.

Here are some use cases to illustrate Optimizely Content Marketing Platform’s prowess in the DAM realm:

• Maintain brand governance: Ensure brand consistency by giving all your marketers visibility into what is being produced and the power to quickly leverage approved assets.
• Asset versioning and utilization tracking: Track each and every asset’s history. Or get a bird’s eye view of who’s repurposing content and when. 
• High-level search, foldering, and filtering: Pull together approved assets, reference them, and repurpose them to meet your marketing goals. Or better yet, formulate your content taxonomy to create tags for your assets. Shared foldering is the icing on the cake, as it helps you manage the viewership and accessibility of all assets in your marketing stack. How cool is that?
• Integrated workflows: Make the most of built-in workflows that allow you to manage as well as publish finished assets on the go. Talk about convenience!
• Quash the costly content production cycles: Say goodbye to incremental content production cost and hello to maximizing content and stretching the budget—thanks to an all-powerful global asset library.

Enough about Optimizely Content Marketing Platform, for now (forgive our obvious bias here).

Let’s now look at how it stacks up against the best digital asset management software today.

The Best Digital Management Software: Which Tool Makes the Cut?

As you’d imagine, there are tons and tons of DAM solutions out there. But only a few are truly worth their salt.

Other than Optimizely Content Marketing Platform, these are the closest thing you can get to digital asset management software.

Wrike

Up first is Wrike, a cloud-based project management solution that also doubles up as a DAS platform. This software product helps marketing teams to connect strategy, market planning, execution, as well as results in one platform.

Here are some of Wrike’s functionality templates:

• Time tracking
• Collaborative editing
• Visual timelines
• File sharing
• Organized file management

While Wrike may seem like every marketer’s dream software, its strengths don’t necessarily lie in digital asset management. In fact, it goes against the very concept of DAM.

Why else would it lack integrated workflows or intuitive search and foldering? Why would Wrike lack advanced search, tagging, as well as filtering? 

That’s where Optimizely Content Marketing Platform comes in handy (you know, like Thor’s iconic hammer).

On top of structuring assets, Optimizely Content Marketing Platform acts as the ultimate collaborative hub. It empowers marketers with built-in compliance workflows, allowing them to upload, approve, as well as use content at scale.

2. Bynder

Bynder is another SAAS digital asset management software solution worth a mention.

This DAS solution promises to:

• Extract metadata
• Manage document templates
• Simplify document editing
• Manage email signatures
• Find and clean up duplicate files

We’ll admit, Bynder isn’t half as good as Optimizely Content Marketing Platform’s digital asset management software.

You know why?

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform doesn’t just organize creative digital assets—it leverages advanced filters to help marketers find these assets within seconds. The best part? It allows agile teams to collaborate across themes, product lines, markets, regions, and more. 

3. Box

Up next is Box, a DAM solution that allows teams to work with people inside and outside their organization, connect all of their apps, as well as protect their valuable content.

Some of Box’s key use cases include:

• Working across various file types
• Managing marketing APIs 
• Leveraging metadata
• Controlling content security and permissions

We’ll go right ahead and admit it: Box isn’t worthy of lacing Optimizely Content Marketing Platform’s boots.

What do we mean?

You see, Optimizely Content Marketing Platform does more than just act as a cloud-hosted content management platform. It’s the ultimate DAM solution, purpose-driven for enterprise marketing teams. Marketers can also use it to pull together all of their digital assets for easy discovery and reuse. 

4. Monday

Another system worth a mention is Monday. It’s essentially an online collaboration tool tailored for managers and teams. It helps them to:

• Store as well as manage team’s files
• Keep track of time 
• Eliminate manual work by embracing automation 
• Keep information safe

At first glance, Monday looks like a DAM solution, but Monday is merely a project management tool.

In contrast, Optimizely Content Marketing Platform incorporates all of Monday’s key features and a ton more. This tool also takes the concept of digital asset management to a whole new level.

Beyond maximizing file sharing, Optimizely Content Marketing Platform helps marketers to stay in control of their brand stories as well as deliver consistent content experiences. And in a world where customers are extremely conscious and digital-savvy, brand consistency could catapult you right to the top. Need we say more?

5. Trello

Last but certainly not least is Trello, a project management collaboration tool that is trying to make its name in the DAM world (that’s the point, just trying).

This software solution claims to offer an easy, flexible, and visual way to manage as well as prioritize projects.

Marketers can use Trello to:

• Edit files
• Organize projects visually with labeling, tags, as well as comments
• Stay informed on a project’s progress through activity logs and email notifications
• Manage their work by creating stories for projects as well as issues for individual tasks

Again, like the other software solutions on this list, Trello but it’s not really cut out for digital asset management (allow us to be a bit honest here).

Wondering which DAM solution fills in the missing pizzazz? Look no further than Optimizely Content Marketing Platform!

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform’s digital asset management software provides 360-degree visibility into the lifecycle of every single asset on your shelf. It also cuts through the noise and delivers the one thing marketing teams want the most: customizable workflows.

So…Which is the Best Digital Asset Management Software?

We’ve been mentioning Optimizely Content Marketing Platform a lot because we’re kinda proud of it… OK, more than ‘kinda.’

We knew early on that marketers craved a collaboration-focused DAM solution—one that would act as a one-stop shop for all their digital assets. And we gave them just that.