Digital media is like gold for any organization. It often takes a long time to build a repository of these assets and when you have them, you can use them to enhance audience engagement and brand consistency.
There’s just a minor challenge, though, which is having an unstructured digital media library can result in hours of productive time being wasted. Not to mention causing challenges in team collaboration.
If you want to avoid these common errors and time losses, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, you’ll find out more about what a digital library is, why you need to create a structured one, and how to go about doing so in an efficient way. Let’s begin.
What Is a Digital Media Library and What Are the Benefits?
A digital media library is a cloud- or server-based storage repository for all your digital assets.
These may include website pictures, social media content, ads and online marketing materials, billboards and public promotional materials, sales pitches, presentations, product photos, staff directories, team bios, etc.
Because they can build up quite quickly, you need to keep them organized and easily accessible.
Apart from saving you and your cross-departmental teams time, the benefits of a digital media library are enormous. Here are some to consider:
- Quick and easy sourcing of the right resources, saving time
- Reduces risks of errors such as uploading incorrect images, leading to embarrassing online gaffes
- Boosts team collaboration and productivity as well as collaboration with external stakeholders
- Control access permissions and usage
- Delivers flawless digital experiences
How to Organize Your Digital Media Library in 7 Easy Steps
With so many good reasons to create and organize your digital media library, you’ll want to know how to go about doing so. Below are a few easy steps to follow, ensuring you adhere to industry best practices for greater success.
- Understand the needs of your team
If you are the person responsible for organizing your company’s digital media library, you need a clear starting point. This means identifying the type of media that your team uses, whether it’s images, video, or audio files.
Once you’ve got a clear idea of what asset types you’re dealing with, it’s time to sit down and have a serious discussion with your team. Make sure you understand what each team member in your department needs digital assets for, how they typically access them, and what challenges they’re facing. Aim to establish what workflows and collaboration habits they have.
If you work with cross-departmental team members, you should do the same thing and gain feedback from them regarding their organizational preferences.
Now that the discussions are out of the way and you have a clearer idea of where, how, when, by whom, and for what purpose your digital assets are used, you need to bring all of them together in one place. This is the starting point of your digital asset audit.
- Audit your current asset repository
Once you’ve brought the digital assets together, you need to work on removing any unnecessary duplicates or low-quality assets so that you save space and avoid confusion.
Digital assets that you should not keep include, for example, images that are irrelevant and that no longer work for your visual brand. Others worth removing from your repository include outdated visuals from completed ads or branding campaigns. This is especially important if you are planning a rebranding strategy where old digital assets are no longer relevant. You’ll also need to use a logo maker and other design tools to create fresh visuals that align with your new branding direction.
But that’s just half of the equation.
The other half involves compressing your images for different purposes and platforms. Do this by adjusting size, resolution, format, quality, or other criteria to suit you and your teams’ needs, whether for print, social media, the web, or anywhere else.
The good news is that by compressing your images, you’ll not only save space but improve performance.
- Choose the right tools and platforms
Next up, it’s time to do some digging and in-depth research into the right collaboration apps and tools and digital media library platforms because this is what everyone you work with will use. You have options such as cloud-based solutions or digital asset management (DAM) systems to choose from.
You should compare not only pricing but features and scalability, especially as your asset library grows. Your software needs to grow with it. What’s also important at this stage is to select a tool that integrates with your existing software and which promotes ease of use.
The last thing you want is to spend a large amount on software that is confusing for your team and not user-friendly.
As for key features you need to consider, here are a few worth mentioning:
- Storage: It’s not just the number of gigabytes in storage that you get. The tool should also store and give you access to multiple file formats. All this while enabling you to sync with various media sources, such as cloud storage servers
- Organization and management: A few examples of organization and management functionalities that you will most probably need include bulk uploading and downloading, version control, and image editing. Other, more advanced features may include folder categorization with tagging, access control, analytics related to usage, policies related to your archive, auto notifications, and more.
- Search and retrieval: Whether you use artificial intelligence—AI tools or not, you also need to be able to carry out fast searches that include semantic, visual, and natural language.
- Secure file sharing: As much as your digital assets are considered organizational “gold”, they also need to be protected from unauthorized access. For this purpose, look for tools that offer multi-factor authentication, and role-based access management, in addition to regulatory compliance. You need to be sure that they are safe to use when you share links with external stakeholders. Furthermore, rights management tools should be able to protect your copyrighted assets.
- Establish a clear organizational structure
When talking about an organizational structure, we don’t mean the hierarchy of your teams and management. We mean the way in which your digital assets are structured and organized. In other words, we are talking about a taxonomy for easier, faster, and more efficient asset searches.
Ideally, after you did your content audit and chose a tool or platform for storing and retrieving these assets, you’ll want to create folders, subfolders, and categories. No-code automation tools can be particularly helpful here, automating the sorting and categorization of assets based on metadata or predefined rules. This ensures consistency and saves time across your teams.
You can start organizing a specific group of digital assets by naming them. And for this purpose, you can do so by date, location, asset type, use cases (e.g. for your website, ads, social media, presentations and reports, etc.), projects, authors, size, theme, camera settings, copyright information, and much more.
The importance of using a standardized naming convention to ensure easy search and retrieval is essential. This is where using metadata and tagging come into play. Worth noting is that managing your metadata is not only about keywords or some tags on a digital asset.
Other searchable criteria can include dates, owner’s name, locations, usage rights, versions, sizes, etc. In some cases, and depending on your tool, your metadata will automatically embed this information in your files. However, in some cases you’ll need to do manual input.
Either way, a best practice here is to always ensure you use consistent terminology so that everyone with access is clear about how to upload or retrieve an asset.
- Create access protocols and permissions
Giving free rein and access to your digital asset library is a recipe for disaster. That’s why it is important to control who can access and edit different assets. You’ll need to set up user roles and permissions within your digital library so that you maintain security while promoting collaboration.
- Implement version control and file management
In a collaborative environment, implementing version control is critical.
You need to establish clear guidelines for tracking changes and maintaining file integrity.
For this, you’ll want to archive old files and declutter duplicate assets that arise as a result of continued efforts.
- Train your team and promote best practices
After all your efforts thus far, you can’t be the oracle of all digital asset knowledge in your organization. This is where an effective onboarding email sequence can play a crucial role, ensuring that your team is informed about the new organizational tools and processes from the very start. You’ll also need to train them for effective use of your digital assets library.
You need to inform your team about the new organizational tools and processes and train them for effective use of your digital assets library. A few methods for ongoing education and support include both workshops and the creation of easy-to-navigate guides.
You should also establish best practices for contributing to and maintaining the media library, such as scheduling regular backups and who is responsible for this task and when.
Conclusion
The benefits of an organized digital media library are undeniable.
Yet, reaching that point can involve a lot of work.
With the seven steps and best practices outlined here, you’re well on your way to enhancing team collaboration through efficient digital media asset management.
