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Working from home is never an easy feat. Oftentimes, efficiency and maintaining productivity while working from home isn’t always an easy feat as distractions are endless–cue your dogs playing with squeaky toys, your local UPS man dropping off a package, or the latest Netflix show you’ve been dying to binge. And, if you layer on top of that your company’s outdated and inefficient technology and processes, you’re doomed.
In fact, a recent study by Gartner shows that 54% of HR leaders indicated that poor technology and/or infrastructure for remote working is likely one of the biggest barriers to effective remote working. So what can companies do to optimize their workflows as more and more companies are enabling remote work in today’s digital world?
Luckily, there are B2B SaaS cloud-based platforms and other tools for working remote or in the office that already exist to improve productivity and efficiency–from Slack to Zoom to digital asset management platforms, like Brandfolder.
Digital asset management (DAM) platforms exist to help companies organize, manage, distribute, and measure brand assets from a consolidated location. The best parts? Anyone can access the platform from anywhere in the world, whenever they need to. And, a mature DAM platform will have integrations to your other efficiency driving platforms like project management tools, communication platforms, creative and workflow tools, and distribution systems, so your full digital asset lifecycle is seamless.
DAM platforms are a foundational piece of software in the sense that they not only help support your employees efficiency whether they are working remote or from an office, but also future goals when it comes to managing and distributing your brand assets.
Read below to see how digital asset management platforms enable marketing and creative teams to work from home without sacrificing team efficiency, communication, or company goals.
Here are 5 ways digital asset management platforms help improve efficiency with remote employee work.
Central source of truth
Digital asset management platforms (DAMs) act as a central source of truth for your brand assets. They enable all stakeholders–internally and externally–to organize, find, manage, distribute, and measure brand assets in an efficient way–wherever they might be located. While working from home, think about some struggles you might be experiencing while trying to quickly find the assets you need. Having to connect to a painfully slow VPN network, digging through buried sub folders with complicated naming conventions because you can’t get a hold of your teammate, or just aimlessly searching on your messy desktop. And, then think about your confidence in whether or not that asset you just spent minutes on minutes finding is actually the right version.
If you’re still using a VPN, other cloud-storage tools like Google Drive and Dropbox, or aimlessly searching your individual desktops, it’s time for a better solution.
The simple and intuitive navigation structures of DAM platforms help users wherever they are located:
- Easily locate assets, ideally with little to no training
- Avoid re-creating assets that already exist
- Prevent assets from going unused
- Distribute across multiple channels
- Maintain brand consistency
- Identify opportunities for future content usage through a robust insights dashboard
A secure and cloud-based platform
Many digital asset management platforms today are completely secure and cloud-based. Though some offer on-premise solutions or a hybrid, when it comes to working from home or employees who are geographically separated–cloud-based is a must.
With a cloud-based digital asset management platform, there’s no need to worry about slow VPN networks. Instead of clunky to login into and painstakingly slow network connections, a cloud-based DAM is simple, intuitive, and fast for every user.
A mature digital asset management platform will also have implemented multiple levels of security to protect and back up your assets, so brand owners can sleep easily. With storage options from both GCS and AWS, your storage needs will be taken care of on a global scale with additional enterprise-grade security protection plans.
When searching for or reevaluating a digital asset management platform, make sure it has its SOC 2, Type II certification. This means the DAM platform has established processes and practices against security & confidentiality controls that have been validated by an independent third party.
Unlimited guest users and tiered permissioning
When you’re working with digital assets remotely, providing access to the right users at the right time is key. Most digital asset management platforms offer some form of a tiered permissioning structure with owners, admins, collaborators, and guest users. SAML 2.0 and single sign on (SSO) are also critical for ensuring your users are who they say they are when trying to access and use your assets.
With tiered permissioning, administrators of the digital asset management platform can keep permissions at a high level by granting access tiers across your entire DAM ecosystem–or you can fine-tune permission levels by creating a subset of assets for specific users.
At Brandfolder, we always provide the perk of unlimited guest users. That way all of your internal and external stakeholders who need access to your content–but don’t need access to all-encompassing management access–can view, download, and share assets without additional, and oftentimes hidden, fees. And, when you layer on top the intuitive nature of a digital asset management platform, everyone will actually use the tool.
Collaboration and version control
Whether you’re working from an office or virtually at home, collaboration and communication is key to ensuring project and campaign success. Digital asset management platforms create an environment built for collaborating.
When your creative team uses a DAM platform that serves as not only the central source of truth, but a number of other collaboration features, everyone should be on the same page throughout the digital asset lifecycle – from creation to editing to distribution and measuring. Other features that improve collaboration might include comments and annotations on the asset level, checking assets in and out to ensure no one is using pending or expired assets, a version history timeline to ensure the right asset is being utilized, and integrations into many upstream and midstream project management and creative tools like Wrike, Workfront, and GanttPRO, as well as Adobe Creative Cloud and Sketch.
And, like we mentioned, because digital asset management solutions allow you to define role hierarchies and user permissions across all workflows, each user is able to understand his or her role better, propelling them to work on assigned tasks with laser focus.
Distribution capabilities
Internal employees, sales teams, executives, resellers, distributors, media and creative agencies, publishers–they all need access to your content. And, when these stakeholders are spread across many regions and countries remotely, distributing content needs to be efficient and quick for quicker time to market.
Thanks to a digital asset management platform’s self-service nature, users–dependent upon their permissions–can access the content they need and convert to multiple file formats or crop to specific sizes without having to bother the creative or marketing team, eliminating more bottlenecks throughout the day – which means faster time to that marketing campaign being launched or a customized sales deck being built.
Quicker distribution of content to all of your partners means better sales enablement, faster time to market for marketing campaigns and e-commerce sales, and increased ROI for you and your partners – even if you’re not all geographically located together.
By providing your employees and partners a digital asset management platform, you’ll ensure they are equipped with the right platform to organize, manage, collaborate, and distribute assets more effectively and efficiently than ever before.
By establishing best practices and a best-in-class platform like Brandfolder, you will take your work from home processes to the next level. Implementing a DAM platform can empower your teams and users for years to come as your company scales, and help you realize tangible savings in the process.
To learn more about how Brandfolder can make your team and partners’ lives easier, contact us today.
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