Best Practices for Implementing a DAM

Start your journey off strong by implementing a DAM with the most common best practices.

The list of benefits and use cases for a digital asset management (DAM) solution is long and varied. But let’s be very clear about the single, greatest purpose of a digital asset management (DAM) solution: enabling your users to find the exact content they’re looking for in the shortest amount of time.

If you’re just getting started, organizing a DAM so that it becomes a single source of truth for all user types and functions in your organization has some nuance to it that’s worth exploring.

These tips come from our valued partner, EMMsphere, who led a session during Season 2 of Sync! on implementing a DAM.

Start at the End… What are you Really Trying to Achieve When Implementing a DAM?

In the case of a DAM, yes, we’re talking about implementing specific functionality that would drive better customers experiences—but what you’re really designing for is adoption. Your DAM ultimately needs to be:

  • Engaging – It needs to reflect a user’s context
  • Helpful – It needs to be convenient and accessible
  • Instrumental – It needs to add benefits over the alternative

Know your DAM Customer

Your DAM “customer” isn’t your actual customer, but rather your internal users (unless you’re using a brand portal). How your users will be interacting with your DAM is key to understanding how you should sequence implementation and adoption.

An illustration of the usual implementation process, including two “chasms” indicating DAM milestones.

Here’s the key takeaway: your DAM on Day 1 will change over time as you onboard new users. Its sophistication will change and the breadth of use cases for your DAM will change as well.

In order to navigate those changes, pay careful attention to the “chasms” that indicate when your DAM hits new milestones and different key factors for success. Learn more about this in EMMsphere’s recent Aprimo Sync! webcast.

The 4 Pillars of Your Foundation

The ability to predict the success of nearly every technology implementation is determined before you even begin the process. It’s all about the foundation you lay down for your implementation. Without a solid foundation, technology implementations almost always fail.

In the case of a DAM implementation, careful planning and building of these four pillars will highly increase your probability of a successful DAM implementation:

  • Resources: The people, knowledge and skills needed to successfully drive and manage a DAM initiative.
  • Specification: The definition of information needed for asset classification, asset definition and asset administration.
  • Process: The definition of key sequences of activity across the overall asset lifecycle that will be executed with respect to DAM.
  • Security: The capability and data security functions that will be controlled and managed within the DAM system.

Interested in learning more specifics on the four Foundational Pillars? Check out the complete presentation and get access to the Outcome-Driven DAM Maturity model.

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