Everything You Need to Know About the Digital Asset Lifecycle
As your company grows and matures, so will its library of digital assets. These assets are incredibly important and need to be managed correctly, which can only happen with a firm understanding of the digital asset lifecycle.
In this article, we’ll take a look at what the digital asset lifecycle is and its five stages. Then we’ll show you how a quality DAM service can help you efficiently manage your asset library at almost every stage. Sounds good? Then let’s get started!
What’s the Digital Asset Lifecycle?
To answer the question we first have to address what a digital asset is…
A digital asset is any photo, video, document, logo, or similar digital file that your company uses to market, brand, or otherwise represent itself to the world.
The digital asset lifecycle then is simply the numerous phases that each of your company’s digital assets goes through. These stages are creation, management, distribution, and archival. In the next section, we’ll take an in-depth look at each of these.
The 4 Stages of the Digital Asset Lifecycle
When you understand each of the four stages in the digital asset lifecycle, you’ll be able to better control the digital assets your company owns. Let’s take a look at each stage individually:
Creation
The creation phase is exciting! This is when you and your team get to write new and informative blog posts, shoot value-packed videos, craft eye-catching designs, and create every other kind of business-boosting content.
During this phase, make sure to:
- Understand Your Audience: When you know what your audience likes and dislikes, you can create assets they’ll enjoy.
- Know Your Competition: Take a look at the assets your competitors are publishing and aim to create better versions.
- Optimize Your Assets: Analyze your assets and learn how to create more effective versions in the future and how to use them more successfully.
Management
Once an asset is created, it moves into the management phase of the digital asset lifecycle. This is the stage where administration tasks are handled such as getting content approval, ensuring the right departments have the required access, and figuring out how your company will organize the asset.
It’s easy to overlook the management phase because it’s not as exciting as the creation phase. But it’s very important! If your content isn’t managed correctly, your company won’t experience any benefits from having created it.
We should note that there are tools, such as DAM software, that will help you during the management phase of the digital asset lifecycle. We’ll talk more about DAM later in this post.
Distribution
At this point in the digital asset lifecycle, you’ve created assets and managed them appropriately. Now it’s time to share them with the world! The distribution phase includes sending files directly to media professionals, publishing them on your company’s website or social media channels, and any other avenue your company uses to share its content.
The key to the distribution phase is speed. You and your team need to be able to send assets quickly, which means email is likely not the best way to share files. Instead, we recommend using download links and public-facing galleries to distribute assets.
Archival
Once a file has been created, managed, and distributed it enters the archival phase of the digital asset lifecycle. This stage is also known as the preservation phase and is the final destination for all pieces of content. This is where files are kept until they’re needed again in the future.
We suggest only archiving assets that you don’t anticipate using on a regular basis. That way they don’t clutter up your main media library, but you’ll still have access to them if/when the need arises. After all, you worked hard to create these assets, you don’t want to simply abandon them, do you?
Control Every Stage of the Digital Asset Lifecycle With CleanPix
Great, we’ve covered each of the four stages in the digital asset lifecycle! Now let’s talk about the kind of tool you’ll need to ensure your files make it through each stage in a useable fashion.
Digital asset management software, also known as DAM software, is an important tool that allows companies to easily manage, distribute, and archive their digital assets. Basically, DAMs like CleanPix handle every phase of the digital asset lifecycle after creation.
What’s CleanPix? Think of it as a central location that your team can use to store, organize, relocate, and easily send its files from.
CleanPix has many convenient features including:
- Cloud Accessibility: CleanPix operates in the cloud which means that you’ll be able to access your company files at anytime from any internet capable device.
- Metadata and Tags: CleanPix makes it easy to organize your files via powerful metadata and tagging features. You’ll never lose an asset again!
- Easy Distribution: CleanPix offers two convenient ways to share files: download links, which are exactly what they sound like and public facing galleries, which you can learn about here.
- Top Security: Because CleanPix houses important company assets, we work hard to ensure our security parameters are top notch. Rest assured, your files will be safe inside our system!
If you’re ready to take control of the digital asset lifecycle, we encourage you to give CleanPix a try for 14 days, free of charge! Access our powerful and intuitive software and discover for yourself whether it can help you better manage, distribute, and archive your company’s digital assets.
– Jacob Thomas