How digital asset management can work for agencies

Picture the scene. You’re an agency and your client has signed you up for a rebrand project. After months of consultation and endless rounds of feedback, you’re ready to send them all of their new brand assets.

It’s huge! They’re excited! You’re excited! Even I’m excited! And then…

🥴 You send them a WeTransfer link.

🥴 Or you share  a *shudder* Google Drive folder with them.

It’s anticlimactic. And the most heartbreaking thing about it? You and your team have spent all that time and effort creating all those beautiful assets for your customer. And now most of the assets will spend their days in your client’s Drive or Dropbox folder where no-one can find them.

Marketing agencies, designers, Shopify agencies and freelance photographers - if you’re creating visuals for your clients, then listen up. It’s time we introduced you to Dash, your new favourite digital asset management (DAM).

Using our DAM, you’ll be able to:

• Organise, find and share all of your own content
• Create portals for your clients to download all of the work you’re providing them
• Set your customer up with their own digital asset library (and earn commission 🤑)

We’ll cover each one in this article. Let’s get to it, shall we?

Find and use all your agency's digital assets

Before we get to how Dash helps your clients, we’ll go through how our digital asset management platform can directly benefit the work your agency is doing internally.

Put simply, Dash acts as the single source of truth for your company’s creative content. It stores all your images, videos and audio files, and makes them far easier to find than if they were hidden in a Google Drive or Dropbox folder. Once you get hold of the creative you need, use Dash to download it in different formats and size then get it out into the world.

We’ll show you what we mean using (totally made-up) agency Belong as an example. They offer marketing, design and Shopify services to small, ambitious ecommerce businesses.

This is their branded login screen.

And this is what it looks like when you log in.

First off, you’ll see they’ve sorted different types of creative assets into folders. These are the categories they’re using:

• Logos and branding - Including font files and logos in different formats
  
• Client work - This is a family of folders, with a subfolder for each of their clients. These feed into a public portal for each customer (but we’ll get to that later)
  
• Marketing - A folder full of all the ads they’re using to attracting more clients, with custom fields to track performance and approval status
  
• Company photos - Headshots of their team and candid snaps of company outings
  
• Videos - Pretty self-explanatory, these are all the videos they’ve been creating

To find an asset, you can use the search bar at the top. Or you can use Dash’s filter options.

Dash’s filtering lets you sort your assets by the folders they’re in and by the various custom fields you’ve created. Belong have set up lots of custom fields - including one which lets them pull up assets by their performance (see ‘Rating’).

Once you’ve found the creative you’re after, you can download it straight to your desktop. Pick which file formats and size you’d like the asset in. It’s on this screen you’ll see your custom download sizes listed as options, too. This is great for those specs you use regularly and are unique to your company - like your homepage banner image.

If you’re an agency graphic designer, Dash can help you speed up your asset creation process too. You can connect your Dash account to Adobe Creative Suite. When you’re working in your application, you can drop assets from your Dash directly into your designs - and then reupload everything back to Dash when you’re done. No more interrupting the creative process by switching in and out of applications and browser tabs.

Want to see how Dash can help your agency? Take out a free trial in seconds and see what you think. 👇

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Share visual content with your clients

Dash makes it easier for you to share the digital assets you’re creating. It’ll give you an edge over your competitors, who - no doubt - are still sending their clients assets over Drive or Dropbox.
You can select any digital content in your Dash, pick whether you’d like to share by email or URL, and off you go.

But that’s not all. There’s another way - the Dash portal. These are great when you’re regularly sharing large sets of creative assets with an external partner - like your clients!

This is a way of creating a publicly-accessible (but password-protected, if you like) version of your Dash and giving permanent access to folders of your choice. It means the person using your portal can use the filters and search bar to find what they’re looking for and download the assets. And that’s all without them having to login to your actual Dash account.

If you’re working on a big project, or your client has signed you up on a retainer so you know you’ll be sending them assets regularly, a portal can help you out. Let’s go back to our favourite agency Belong, who’ve just signed up Planto as a new client. Planto (also made-up, forgive our flights of fancy) are an ecommerce brand and sell houseplants online. They’ve employed Belong to refresh their branding, reshoot their product photography and do an entire UX audit of their Shopify store and checkout process.

That’s going to involve a lot of assets. And if you don’t have Dash, you’re going to spend a lot of time shuttling different assets back and forth asking for approval. And when everything’s ready to go, you’ll waste time packaging everything into a massive ZIP file to send via WeTransfer.

Rather than going through all that, Belong set up a portal for Planto.

This means the design and marketing team at Planto can visit their portal and download all the assets they need. Portals give whoever’s visiting them access to the search bar and filtering options, so they’re able to sort through and get the content they need easily.

It’s a much easier, more visual way of your customer receiving assets from you. It means they don’t have to download a zip file from a WeTransfer link which then plonks everything straight into their downloads folder.

And from your end, you’re giving your clients the tools they need to find (and use) the assets you’re creating for them. That means they’ll spend less time emailing you asking where their assets are, or if you can resize graphics in different formats.

When the clients you’re working for have their own Dash, you’ll also be able to streamline the content creation process. Let’s say you’re a photography agency and have been contracted by your client to take a load of new product photos. When you’re ready to send over the finished files, you can ask your client to set you up with a login to their account. Then, using Dash’s content approvals, you can upload all your photos to their Dash ready for them to approve (or reject) your work.

Set your customers up with a DAM

With customers like Passenger Clothing, RJ Living and Clevr Blends, Dash is perfect for growing, ambitious brands - just like your clients. It’s the answer to the content chaos they’ve been struggling through when keeping everything in Drive or Dropbox.

So if you really want to make your customer’s day, help set them up with their very own digital asset management solution. Book a demo with the team today to discuss your options.

Ready to start? We can’t wait to work with you!