Before you can leverage the full potential of a digital asset management (DAM) system, you need to establish the right metadata strategy for your business.
If you don’t define a robust metadata strategy, your assets will quickly become disorderly and managing and organising your assets will become problematic. This will lead to wasted time searching through assets and the bigger your repository gets, the harder it is to bring it back under control.
Choosing the right metadata strategy will ensure seamless operation of your DAM system, with a clear structure and fast retrieval of your assets. It will provide streamlined workflows and can boost productivity, so it’s worth investing the initial time to get your strategy set up to achieve the optimal performance from DAM.
The metadata within a DAM system refers to information that is assigned to digital assets, allowing them to be categorised correctly and easily retrieved. This information can include:
There is no single best metadata strategy to suit all businesses, as different industries and work processes have unique requirements. For example, a digital marketing agency would have different requirements to a healthcare organisation.
These steps will help you to choose the right metadata strategy for your business:
The first step to developing an efficient and effective metadata strategy is to review your existing assets to establish the types of assets you need to manage. Categorise them into asset types such as videos, PDFs, images, spreadsheets and audio files. Consider which users need to access assets and which assets need to be quickly retrieved on a regular basis.
Your asset audit should have given you a clearer idea of your user priorities and now you will be able to create a more granular level of information labels that will enhance searchability. Consider which information is most important in optimising your metadata for search.
The most common metadata includes file name, description, date and asset type but you may need more information to be incorporated into the metadata schema. For example, your compliance department might need to be able to check when assets were approved.
Create hierarchy categories and subcategories to organise your assets into intuitive locations. As an example, if you wanted to create a category for brand materials, you could create subcategories such as logos, brand guidelines and branded templates. If you have a large asset library, it is best practice to create more levels within your taxonomy hierarchy.
The integration of AI could simplify your asset management through automated categorisation and auto tagging for improved searchability. AI can help ensure a consistent application of metadata.
While automation will support the adoption of your metadata strategy, it is vital that the end users are competent in using the system. You should create clear guidelines for maintaining your metadata strategy and provide comprehensive training for users.
At iBase, we offer full training on our DAM systems, and we can help you create a robust metadata strategy to suit your business needs. Get in touch with our team for a one-to-one demo.
