How Much Does a Digital Asset Management Cost?

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a necessity that today’s modern companies must consider. After all, with the heightened reliance by consumers on computers, tablets, and smartphones, brands have to keep up with and utilize their digital assets optimally to appeal to their target audience. While some businesses are trying to avoid the forward-thinking digital arena, smart brands are embracing the changes and learning to be more digitally forward-thinking in their marketing. That is made possible in large part by investing in a Digital Asset Management solution. 

What Is The Value of Digital Asset Management?

The value of Digital Asset Management (DAM) cannot be overstated, especially as it relates to marketing initiatives. There are countless benefits of DAM that add to its value. These include it being a centralized location for businesses to manage their digital assets, as well as the fact that DAMs make it easier to find the asset you are looking for at any given time. 

When a DAM is connected to a digital experience platform (DXP), it provides your team with automatic update capabilities. This means when your team updates a digital asset stored in the DAM, the change is immediately reflected in any connected digital experience, such as your website or online product catalog. This feature saves your team valuable time and resources that would otherwise be used to make manual updates across all digital touchpoints. 

DAMs or Digital Asset Management platforms also permit you to create brand portals that allow you to share a curated selection of digital assets with other users, like channel partners and agencies. DAMs take into account that every interaction with customers matters. Consequently, effective management of digital assets is important to maintaining a consistent brand identity and improving marketing efforts immensely. 

Is Dropbox a Digital Asset Manager?

In short, no, Dropbox isn’t a Digital Asset Manager or DAM. However, Dropbox does provide a type of digital asset storage. In addition, it does not feature other common functions offered by the best DAMS including tagging, or automatic updating when altering a file in one location. Therefore, though Dropbox does offer some value, it is not a true DAM. 

Dropbox is more accurately described as a cloud-based file storage service. Consequently, since it does have to do with file storage, it is sometimes wrongly labeled a digital asset management solution. Dropbox does not currently offer or feature capabilities that are commonly found in a specialized DAM solution. 

How Do I Choose a Digital Asset Management System?

There are many Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions available, it’s important to first consider the following questions and your subsequent answers to determine the best DAM solution or Digital Asset Management company for your businesses. Answer the following questions to start heading in the right direction: 

• What is the primary problem or problems you are trying to solve with a DAM solution?

• What other systems do you need to integrate a new DAM with?

• How will the digital assets be used?

• Where will digital assets be used?

• How many digital assets do you have and what types?

• How will you structure your digital assets in terms of taxonomy?

In reality, to find the right DAM solution, you have to think outside of the DAM box and look for more than just a DAM tool and instead embrace an entire Product Experience Management (PXM) system. It’s helpful to look for the following capabilities in any PXM you are considering: 

• Product Information Management (PIM): This element of an overall PXM system will help you organize product data based on similarities, attributes, and characteristics. 

• Digital Experience Platform (DXP): This aspect of a digital management system will help you get products to market quicker, and enhance experiences via a mobile app or website. 

• Digital Asset Management (DAM): Having a type of DAM is important for any comprehensive system. After all, DAMs will help marketers as they leverage, distribute, and manage content seamlessly. 

Incidentally, Lumavate is the only PXM that contains a DAM that meets all the criteria and includes all the elements outlined above. 

How Much Does a Digital Asset Management Cost?

The specific price for any Digital Assets Management (DAM) solution or digital asset management pricing will obviously vary for each business based on the type of solution you select for your brand and the functionality level you need. Pricing is also immensely impacted by determining if you want an on-premise solution or one that is a cloud-based solution. Generally, DAM solutions range in cost between $1,000 to $250K annually.

Lumavate is a full Product Experience Management (PXM) solution that includes a built-in Digital Asset Management (DAM) as well as Product Information Management (PIM) functionality. Lumavate also features a text messaging aspect, a form builder solution, and is usually priced 75 percent less than other competitive solutions. Lumavate also publicly shares its pricing on its website, making it clear what you can expect to pay for this comprehensive solution. 

Best DAM Systems

As mentioned above, there are several DAMs, and conducting a DAM pricing comparison is imperative to finding the best DAM vendors as part of low-cost Digital Asset Management. The following are a few of the most noteworthy DAM solutions, featuring digital asset management tools and what they can bring to the table for your brand: 

• Bynder: This digital asset management platform is not a cost-effective solution. In addition, it requires tech help if they want to offer the right kind of digital product experiences, which is disappointing. 

• Brandfolder: When considering Brandfolder pricing, it’s helpful to note that the search functionality is not as intuitive as many brands prefer. Brandfolder is really more of a basic DAM, meaning it doesn’t also offer innovative product experiences as part of its solution. 

• Canto: This is a DAM solution that features metadata management, integrations, customizable branding, and AI-powered tagging, and simplifies the organization of various types of digital assets. It simply isn’t as all-encompassing a solution offering all the needed elements for a complete digital asset management system. 

• Lumavate: As the standout by far on this list of notable DAM solutions or digital asset management companies available today, Lumavate offers a DAM that helps you store images, videos, documents, and more and then easily be able to use these digital assets to create product experiences. Lumavate’s DAM also helps you share digital assets and changes to resources across agencies, with channel partners, or among team members.

Your Next Step

Determining the cost of a DAM solution should be considered in a broader overall scope. After all, what you really need as a brand in today’s digital age is Product Experience Management (PXM) with a type of Digital Asset Management offered as part of that solution. Lumavate checks all the boxes, along with being the most cost-effective solution on the market today, making it an obvious next step for your brand and the best low-cost digital asset management solution.