At Aprimo, whether in our blogs or in talking directly with customers, we underscore how digital asset management, or DAM, offers organizations a single source of truth for all their customer-experience assets. Images, photos, videos, 3D files, audio, and editorial content — your DAM system has the power to hold them all.
But a DAM platform is more than just a storage facility where those assets sit. It’s an interactive solution that enables you to create a true hub for all your customer-experience content.
Using metadata and taxonomy is the key to making your tool of choice a content hub, not just a parking lot for content. But what are these functionalities? And why are they essential to keeping your DAM business in order? We like to think of taxonomy and metadata as a restaurant menu. The taxonomy can be represented as menu categories, and the metadata can be thought of as dish descriptions.
Taxonomy: Like Menu Categories for Your Content
When you run a search on the general term “taxonomy,” the first results describe the classification of organisms in biological studies. However, a restaurant menu is the perfect example for introducing taxonomy in a simpler and easily understandable form that most people interact with regularly.
Most menus categorize offerings as beverages, appetizers, salads, specials, entrees, and desserts. These categories are the restaurant’s taxonomy.
This taxonomy helps diners more easily find the content they are looking for and understand how that content can be used. For example, categorizing an item as an appetizer helps patrons understand that it might come in a smaller portion that wouldn’t be enough for a main course. Alternatively, an item under the salads section will automatically be contextualized as a healthier option for diners to consider than those under the desserts section.
Applying Taxonomy to DAM
Similarly for assets in a DAM solution, you use taxonomy to create categories that sort each piece of content into various groupings. You could assign content to categories such as:
- Brand: If you’re managing multiple brands under one umbrella — or work at an agency that creates content for many different clients — label each asset by the brand it’s associated with to promote greater asset organization and findability.
- Campaign: Name each specific marketing campaign and tag each digital asset — such as photos and videos, documents with written content, and more — with the campaign name for easier project management.
- Product: Manage visual and written content related to specific products more efficiently with groupings based on product name.
- Department: Help departments that need to access, edit, reference, and distribute assets — such as marketing, sales, and support — to find exactly what they need in the moment by grouping the assets each team most often uses together.
- Published Content: Sort pieces by which are currently published, approved for publishing, out of date, or not yet published or approved for public consumption so employees know where assets are currently used, how they’re allowed to be used, and which assets they’re not allowed to use.
- Content Type: Separate different types of assets — such as photos, videos, audio, documents, presentations, and more — to further narrow down searches within your platform for digital asset management.
Having such a hierarchical structure for your content helps DAM administrators and other users better understand how and when each piece of content can or should be used so that it’s easier to organize, browse, and find their desired assets.
Finding the Best Solution for Digital Asset Management Taxonomy
Every DAM solution out there uses taxonomy to help with these functions. How can you distinguish what’s best-in-class versus what’s standard fare? Look for things like:
- Support for multiple taxonomies, including local taxonomies and business unit-specific taxonomies
- The ability for a single piece of content to live in multiple taxonomies
- On-the-fly taxonomies, so changes can be made to taxonomy without deploying the entire taxonomy
- Localized taxonomies
- Professional services or partners with extensive experience in helping organizations create and deploy usable taxonomy structures
Metadata Describes the Ingredients of Each Asset
In the restaurant example, metadata is the description of each dish. They could be simple descriptions, such as what’s included in a western omelet or what side item comes with the filet. But metadata also could include deeper information such as how the salmon was prepared, where it was farmed, or whether it’s topped with anything.
Metadata helps patrons more easily browse, search, and find what they’d like to eat from the entire menu and understand exactly what they’re getting. And in a DAM, it helps users more easily browse, search, and find the exact content they need.
Metadata in Digital Asset Management Explained
When you use DAM software, metadata is the background information that explains what’s contained in each asset. This includes information such as the file name and size, who owns or uploaded each asset, version history, and written descriptions of visual content.
In a DAM platform, the most commonly used metadata types include:
- Keyword Metadata: Words or phrases associated with a piece of content that are commonly searched terms.
- Descriptive Metadata: A longer text description of the asset that displays once users click the asset for details.
- Business Metadata: Terms specific to a business, such as whether the asset shows or describes one of their products, or is part of a specific marketing campaign.
To illustrate a common use case for metadata, let’s say you’re looking to reuse a video you ran on social media about your new product line, but can’t remember exactly where it lives. You would use the DAM search bar to find the video, then read the metadata tags to understand exactly what’s in the video before downloading it. When using a system’s search functionalities in situations like the one in this example, more accurate results rely on more detailed metadata.
Metadata for DAM: Best-in-Class Capabilities
Every DAM tool has metadata capabilities. What separates the best digital asset management solutions in metadata from the average DAM software? Look for things like:
- Localized metadata to manage information specific to different regions, languages, or channels in which assets are frequently used
- Artificial intelligence to auto-tag assets with image recognition, speech-to-text transcription, and optical character recognition
- Metadata templates that apply the same metadata to multiple assets with just a couple of clicks, making the asset uploading more efficient
These capabilities ensure that the content you invested so much time in isn’t going to waste and can be easily found and reused across the business. That ability to keep assets up-to-date, organized, and enriched will ultimately lead to richer on-brand customer experiences.
Excel in Asset Organization With Aprimo DAM
When companies work with Aprimo, our solution’s intelligent asset management capabilities enhance asset organization and findability. This saves our customers and their employees time and effort when it comes to finding, editing, using, and distributing the digital assets they need daily.
You don’t have to take our word for it. Our innovative AI- and ML-powered search, automation, and versioning features have been recognized by Forrester’s 2024 Wave Report for their excellence.
If you want to see for yourself how Aprimo fuels better digital asset management taxonomy and metadata, book a demo with our experts today. If you have any questions, contact us.
FAQs on Digital Asset Management Taxonomy and Metadata
What is digital asset management taxonomy?
Like the different categories on a restaurant menu for beverages — such as wine, beer, cocktails, or non-alcoholic — taxonomy in digital asset management tools sorts assets into several different groupings. This includes categorizing photos, videos, documents, audio, and presentations by file type, brand, or product name. You can even organize them by specific marketing campaigns and their relevant department.
What is digital asset management metadata?
Metadata in digital asset management platforms describes each file in detail, similar to how a restaurant menu lists ingredients for each dish. Metadata details can include a summary of the actual written or visual content contained in the file and any background information about how and when the asset was created or changed.
What organizational features does the best software in digital asset management have?
Extensive capabilities in both DAM metadata and taxonomy help businesses better organize and easily find assets within their database. For example, consider metadata features such as automatic asset tagging, optical character recognition to process text included in visuals, localization for global brands, and templates to apply the same information to multiple assets. These make the applying metadata more efficient and make sure the information captured is helpful for telling users and the DAM tool itself exactly what each asset contains.
When looking at a specific DAM software’s taxonomy capabilities, see if multiple taxonomies are supported. In this way, you can categorize an asset by its content type, the department that uses it, the brand or product line that the content relates to, and more, all in one step. This exceeds the capabilities of hierarchical folder-based file organization, which only allows you to one linear method for placing assets in relevant groups and subgroups.