How to Use Metadata to Find and Distribute Digital Assets
Picture the following scenario:
You want to showcase your product to every potential customer. But unfortunately - you can’t physically be everywhere at once.
This is where having a strong digital presence comes into play.
And it's not just important, it's crucial in today's digital world.
The key to making your business stand out online is by using high-quality visuals like images and videos, and that's where visual content marketing strategy comes in. By incorporating engaging graphics and videos, you can attract and retain customers like never before.
But to do this effectively, you need a streamlined content management system that can handle your growing enterprise.
So, what's the solution to managing your visual content seamlessly - and solving your worst content management challenges?
You need a process and a technology that allows you to attach metadata to all of your images and digital assets.
By embedding this metadata into every single piece of visual content you use to create your collection of marketing material, you create an optimized process for content creation, management, and distribution.
In other words, every element of your marketing content must be infused with metadata in order for your visual content marketing strategy to be a success.
And, while the process of enriching your visual assets with metadata assets may seem like an extra, time-consuming step, there’s a secret to making it as simple as can be.
Metadata tagging is made easy – often automated – through a (DAM) technology platform, which is designed to store digital assets only after they have been properly associated with keywords and other metadata fields.
What is metadata and why is it important for your images?
Metadata is data about digital images.
And the whole point of assigning metadata fields and values to your images (and all brand assets) is to make them findable and manageable – regardless of the amount of content your enterprise produces, and no matter how big your organization gets.
Metadata allows digital marketers to label and describe digital assets so that they are simple to decipher and use.
After all, what is the point of creating digital assets if they end up getting lost, buried, or if they become unwieldy and unusable?
THE THREE TYPES OF METADATA
As you scale your content creation, metadata is a must. And, when managing your digital assets, there are three types of metadata – descriptive, administrative, and technical.
Let’s take a closer look at each one.
Descriptive metadata
As you begin to learn about metadata, descriptive metadata is probably what will come to mind.
Descriptive metadata are the keywords and fields that allow users to search and filter through whatever system you use to store your digital assets.
Descriptive metadata fields include:
File type (for example, a picture is tagged as a ‘photograph’ – versus as a video or a graphic)
Colors
Descriptive keywords
Associated brand
Associated campaign
This type of metadata is important because this is what allows for the quick and effective search for the exact images you need.
Being able to search and filter your assets through keywords and these data fields allow you to find the exact image you are looking for so that you can quickly and efficiently update and/or deliver it exactly where it needs to go – all on time.
Administrative metadata
This is the metadata that ensures proper usage of every digital asset. It helps brands manage the entire lifecycle of digital assets and photographs.
Examples include:
The owner of the asset
Date approved
Region for use
Channel for use
Administrative metadata gives enterprises a way to ensure that the images they use always meet compliance requirements. For instance, if there is no approval date associated with an image, then users know without a doubt that it cannot be used.
These fields are also important because they are the building blocks for automated workflows.
For example, a digital asset management platform can establish workflows for the automatic publication of certain images on a website – with actions only being triggered by certain metadata fields.
technical metadata
Technical metadata is all about the technical elements of the image. These fields and values include file type, dimensions, resolution, and so on.
This type of metadata guarantees that images are always used in the correct way, and that the right, most up-to-date versions of images are published in the right place.
Another reason why technical metadata is important is because different websites and other digital channels require different photo resolutions or video streaming qualities.
Being able to instantly decipher the “measurements” of your visual content is crucial to optimizing it for the channel through which it is being delivered.
DAM TAXONOMY: HOW METADATA TIES IN
Digital asset management taxonomy involves the process of organizing and categorizing all your digital files, such as images and videos, by using practical and systematic metadata fields and folders.
The aim is to make it easy for you to locate your files quickly and efficiently.
By implementing this system, you are essentially classifying and categorizing all your valuable assets into a coherent and well-organized structure. This ensures that you can easily access and utilize your digital assets whenever you need them the most.
So what are the benefits of spending time setting the right metadata and building your digital asset taxonomy?
Enhancing the filtering, searchability, and discoverability of your digital assets, including those that users may not be aware of. This makes it easier to find the exact asset you need, saving you valuable time and effort.
Providing flexibility by allowing you to use categories or metadata, or even a combination of both, to classify your digital assets. This customization allows you to create a taxonomy that fits your specific needs and preferences.
Facilitating a seamless transition from folder structures to categorization, making it easier for users to navigate and access your digital assets.
Overall, creating a well-organized DAM taxonomy has numerous benefits for businesses of all sizes, helping them to better manage, utilize, and leverage their digital assets.
Managing your visual marketing strategy at scale – with metadata
Metadata – in all three forms – is crucial to managing your visual content at scale.
In a nutshell: you need the descriptive metadata to efficiently search and find the image you need, the administrative metadata to manage the entire lifecycle of every digital asset, and the technical metadata to organize the many different versions of all your content.
Okay, so, how do you get the metadata glued to all your images?
By using a digital asset management (DAM) solution that you can set up a metadata structure – in other words, your enterprise’s taxonomy.
Your DAM platform stores all your digital assets, along with its associated metadata fields and values. This way, when you search for a particular file, the keyword you punch into the search bar or the field you click for filtering will only bring up images that are also tagged with those specified attributes.
Or, as you set up automated workflows between your DAM solution and other marketing technology platforms, the workflows will only involve images that are embedded with specified metadata.
Metadata rules digital asset management.
And a robust digital asset management (DAM) system is essential to ensure your organization's visual marketing materials are always available. It enables easy management and control of digital assets, future-proofing your digital marketing team.
DAM metadata ensures fast and efficient searchability and filtering, enabling the right visual content to be delivered internally and externally, regardless of enterprise growth.
Streamlining your DAM system increases productivity and operational efficiency, delivering appropriate visuals to the right audience at the right time, ultimately driving both engagement and conversions.
The greater business implications of managing visual content through metadata
By organizing visual marketing content with metadata, an enterprise optimizes every step of the sales cycle – from inbound lead generation all the way through deal closure and nurturing buyer relationships.
How?
First of all, in order to create visually compelling content that attracts leads to a company’s digital real estate – namely, the corporate website – marketing teams need to be able to find the right images (and in their correct, compliant versions).
To maximize the time they have for content creation, content creators must waste no time searching for what they need.
Then, in order to make the most of all your visually-driven content, you must have a way to quickly distribute it to all the right audiences.
Therein lies the DAM, which allows users to build out workflows once so that finalized assets always go exactly where they need to go – published on all correct channels for public consumption.
Then, once marketing teams have nurtured leads with enough visually compelling content, sales teams come in.
And still, they need their own stimulating content to support their part of the sales cycle – for example, image- and video-based presentation material.
It will be the very same metadata that marketing teams rely on that will enable sellers to find and get this sales enabling material.
When you hear that a DAM platform makes sales cycles shorter and more efficient, understand that it is metadata that is behind the magic.
The bottom line is, by attaching metadata to all of your enterprise’s images and videos, the more opportunities your marketing teams will have to create what they need to bring in potential deals, and the more time and resources your sales teams will have to turn them into actual deals.
In return, the more time and resources your sales teams will have to turn them into actual deals.
As your revenue and/or your salesforce grows, rest assured you have a scalable process for enterprise-wide visual content management.
It’s not so much magic, really. It’s metadata.
Want to learn more about choosing the right DAM system, and how to get all the right metadata attached to every single piece of content you have?
