What Are Digital Assets?

What are digital assets? This may initially seem straightforward, but do you understand digital assets and how they function within your organization? If you find the terminology around digital assets confusing, don't despair. This guide explains it all simply.

Learning how to identify and manage your digital assets will help you to maximize their value and potential. So read on to discover the various types of digital assets, what makes them crucial to your success, and how best to manage them.

What Are Digital Assets?

What are digital assets, and what can you do with them? The basic definition of an asset is something that provides value. Your physical assets are items with economic value that can be seen and touched. So, digital assets are resources that are created, stored, shared, or distributed digitally.

And these assets are just as valuable to your business, if not more so. As the world becomes increasingly digitized, companies across industries are realizing their digital assets' true worth and potential. There are countless types of digital assets, each performing essential and often multiple tasks.

Types of Digital Assets

A digital asset file can be a text document, a spreadsheet, an audio recording, a video clip, or a still image. But it can also be a graph, vector art, an infographic, a GIF, a technical illustration, or a company logo.

Every digital file that your business uses is a type of digital asset. Your branding and marketing divisions, particularly, will leverage multiple types of digital assets daily. Yet every department of your organization uses digital assets whenever any digital file is accessed and used.

Why Are Digital Assets Important?

Digital assets are constantly present throughout your organization, but why are they important to your business's success? Let's examine the unique benefits of the different digital asset types.

Establish Ownership and Authority

Digital assets associated with your intellectual property and trademarks, such as product names, signal your ownership of those products. Meanwhile, your brand name further establishes your company's authority in all digital communications about your brand.

Represent Your Business and Brand

Your logo, slogan, or catchphrase are examples of the digital assets representing your brand to the consumer. They build brand awareness and increase recognition. Ensuring consistency with such assets, your brand is always accurately represented in branding and marketing campaigns.

Create an Online Presence

Digital media and social media assets help you to create and maintain an online presence and build brand equity. They extend your brand's reach and widen your potential customer base through blog posts, informational articles, product images, marketing videos, and more.

Foster Brand Recognition and Loyalty

It's not enough to have digital assets representing your brand if consumers don't associate them with you. When your digital assets align with your brand identity, consumers recognize them as part of your brand. This fosters brand loyalty, which is essential to any business's success. It's also why consistency is crucial.

Build Connections With Your Customer Base

Do you want to build deeper connections with your customer base? Don't worry—your digital assets are doing this for you. The brand story you tell through images, videos, and other media helps to build and strengthen these connections.

Engage New Target Audiences

Maybe you need to engage a new target audience. Your digital assets can do this, too. Every new marketing campaign and online advertisement leverages digital assets to achieve this vital goal.

Creating Order Out of Digital Assets

You can classify, organize, and manage your digital assets in various ways, each building on the other to create order.

Digital Asset Taxonomy

Taxonomy is well-known in the physical and biological world, where it is used to classify the animal kingdom into species or the plant kingdom into genera. However, taxonomy is also applicable to the digital world.

Taxonomy is the scientific term for defining, classifying, and grouping things based on their similarities or differences with other things. It categorizes and names things according to their identifiable criteria.

Digital asset taxonomy describes a system of classifying and organizing digital assets. It categorizes them with names, descriptions, and labels into types and groups them with similar digital assets. This makes searching for, locating, and accessing assets easier when needed.

The Role of Metadata

Metadata is simply defined as data about data. It provides context for these other data, helping you sort and identify your various data into categories. Examples of these metadata include the title of a book, the geolocation of a digital photograph, or the publishing date and time of a blog post.

But there are many types of metadata, and everything from a spreadsheet or Word document to an image or video has it. The metadata describes the attributes of the data content to better classify and categorize it within your digital asset taxonomy.

Digital Asset Management

Digital asset management (DAM) is built upon the foundation of digital asset taxonomy. It uses the framework your digital taxonomy provides to structure your digital assets sensibly.

This makes it easier for users to locate, edit, or share the files they need quickly or add new digital assets to the growing collection. DAM is not merely about naming, grouping, and storing digital files. It goes beyond this, allowing you to maximize the value of all your digital assets.

This brings us to the next step in digital asset management — DAM tools. Managing your digital assets is much easier with a DAM tool. And the one you choose can have far-reaching implications for your business.

Managing Your Digital Assets With a DAM Tool

The right DAM tool will take your digital asset management processes to the next level. It lets you do more than just store and classify files. It enables you to optimize each file and maximize its potential, through collaboration, editing, enhancement, and review.

The Razuna platform does all this and more. It offers the software and tools you need to realize your unique digital taxonomy and manage your all-important digital assets. So you can safely and securely store, organize, optimize, share, and distribute all classes of digital assets.

How does it do all of this? It all comes down to the following benefits of DAM tools.

Benefits of DAM Tools

Digital asset management is built upon the principles of digital taxonomy, and DAM tools make it all easier. So, how do these DAM tools maximize your digital assets, help you reach your business goals, and ensure your organization's success?

Better Organization

DAM tools like folders, sub-folders, and collections organize your digital assets into appropriate groups. They group your files of similar type or with a similar purpose together. Folder names, file names and descriptions, and customizable fields containing all relevant metadata make organization a breeze.

Enhanced Searchability

Search filters and AI-powered search tools identify the relevant metadata, and any file can be located in seconds. This means your teams can save valuable time and effort, getting more done faster.

Tighter Security

Admin control and enhanced folder permission settings ensure your digital assets remain uncompromised. This restricts access and viewing and stops unauthorized activities before they can occur. Audit trails inform you who accesses which files and what they do with them.

More Consistency

DAM tools help maintain brand integrity by ensuring that only approved and up-to-date assets are used. This includes logos, fonts, images, and videos, and it ensures that all marketing materials follow the brand guidelines.

Having a single, centralized repository for all digital assets also means that everyone in the organization can access the same files. This eliminates the risk of different departments or individuals using outdated or incorrect versions of assets.

Easier Collaboration

Most digital assets are subject to constant collaboration, particularly for branding, marketing, and advertising purposes. DAM tools allow teams to assign sharing links to files, edit and review files, attach annotations, and distribute them to your online platforms.

Guaranteed Scalability

Scalability is the key to reaching your business goals, such as expansion. DAM tools facilitate scalability through centralized, cloud-based file storage, integrations with other platforms and tools, and easy file update processes.

Conclusion

Digital assets are the digital files that make your organization and brand what they are. They establish your authority, represent your brand, create an online presence, build awareness, foster recognition and loyalty, and boost engagement.

Digital taxonomy and digital asset management make sense from your growing collection of documents, media files, graphics, and more. When you use the right DAM software and tools like Razuna, you both simplify and enhance your entire brand asset management process.

Get the DAM tools to maximize your brand's hardworking digital assets. Register an account with Razuna to get started today!