You’re a marketer working to promote and sell products in a busy online market. You’re competing with other businesses to capture your audience’s attention and drive sales.
That’s where your digital assets come in.
These are the digital files, visuals, documents and other resources your marketing team uses to build brand awareness, attract new customers, and generate sales. With the right types of digital assets, you can improve visibility, boost engagement, and grow revenue.
In this guide, we’ll explain what a digital asset is and why they’re integral to your brand. We’ll look at the most valuable asset types for ecommerce marketing, and show you how a digital asset management system can help you store, organise, and share them — so you can use them again and again.
What is a digital asset? (with examples)
A digital asset is any piece of content that exists in a digital form, is created and stored by your business, and holds value. These assets are essential for marketing purposes, building brand consistency, and driving revenue.
They’re also created and shared in a range of digital formats — from images (JPG, PNG, WEBP) and videos (MP4, MOV) to documents (PDF, DOCX), design files (SVG, PSD), and audio files (MP3, WAV).
Here are the main types of digital assets you’ll work with 👇
[fs-toc-omit] Marketing assets
These help you attract customers, promote products, and run campaigns across channels.
- Visual assets – product and lifestyle photos, infographics, ad graphics (JPG, PNG, WEBP)
- Video content – product demos, short-form social videos, explainer videos (MP4, MOV)
- Audio files – podcasts, voiceovers, webinar recordings (MP3, WAV)
- Social media content – posts, carousels, GIFs, stories (often optimised for specific social media platforms)
- Documents and resources – ad templates, campaign briefs, marketing copy (PDF, DOCX, PPTX)
[fs-toc-omit] Brand assets
These keep your brand consistency strong across every channel.
- Logos – and all their variations for different digital formats (SVG, PNG, EPS)
- Colour palettes and brand fonts – used across digital and print materials
- Brand guidelines – often stored as PDF or other digital files
- Illustrations, icons, and branded design elements – essential for visual identity
[fs-toc-omit] Website assets
These support your online store, product listings, and customer experience.
- Hero images and homepage banners – to highlight key campaigns
- Product photos and 360° visuals – to showcase products from every angle
- Video demos and how-to clips – embedded on product or landing pages
- Stock images – used across blogs and landing pages
- Downloadable documents – such as catalogues and product sheets (PDF)
These digital asset examples are used across multiple marketing channels and shared between teams. Because they come in so many different digital formats, they need to be properly organised, stored, and managed.
A digital asset management system (DAM) like Dash brings everything together in one secure storage space, making it easy for your team to find, share, and use assets whenever they need them.
Why digital assets matter for ecommerce brands
Digital assets are some of the most valuable resources your business owns. Like physical stock or equipment, these assets hold real value because they help your brand grow, generate revenue, and build stronger customer relationships.
Here’s why they’re so important:
- They directly impact sales: High-quality product images, videos, and graphics can boost click-through rates, conversions, and repeat purchases.
- They build and protect your brand: Consistent use of your logos, colour palettes, and brand elements builds trust and recognition. Without proper management, off-brand digital assets can slip through and harm your credibility.
- They’re reusable and scalable: One piece of content can be stored, repurposed, and redeployed across social media platforms, campaigns, and other channels. In other words: it delivers value long after its first use.
Managing your digital assets properly gives your brand a real edge. With a solid system for storing, organising and sharing files, you’ll save time, keep everything consistent, and make it easier to get better results from every campaign.
How to get your digital assets ready for use
Creating digital assets is only part of the job. To get the most out of them and ensure they’re suitable across all your different channels, they need to be properly prepared, formatted, and organised.
Here’s how to make sure your assets are ready to go 👇
[fs-toc-omit] 1. Audit what you already have
Start by reviewing your existing digital files, wherever they’re currently living. Remove duplicates, archive outdated versions, and make sure usage rights and licences are up to date. This gives you a clean, accurate library to build from and ensures only valuable assets remain.
[fs-toc-omit] 2. Add metadata and tags
Metadata is the extra information you attach to a digital asset to describe what it is and how it should be used. Think of it as the behind-the-scenes detail that makes your files searchable and easier to manage. This might include the product name, campaign, season, file type, usage rights, or even notes on where an asset has been used before.
If you’re storing files in tools like Google Drive or Dropbox, you’re mostly limited to folder names and filenames — which can make searching time-consuming and inconsistent. A digital asset management system goes much further. In Dash, you can add structured metadata fields and tags to every asset, then use AI-powered search to find them quickly using keywords or natural language (e.g. “red mug on kitchen counter”).
With rich metadata in place, anyone on your marketing team can find the right asset in seconds — without digging through folders, guessing filenames, or relying on memory.
[fs-toc-omit] 3. Optimise for different platforms
Every social media platform and ecommerce site has its own requirements for image dimensions, aspect ratios, and file types. What looks great on your website might get cropped awkwardly on Instagram, and a video formatted for YouTube might not display properly in a Facebook ad.
Preparing platform-specific versions of your digital assets ahead of time ensures they’ll display correctly and perform their best wherever you use them. For example:
- Square images (1:1) work best for Instagram feeds.
- Vertical formats (9:16) are ideal for Stories, Reels, and TikTok.
- Landscape formats (16:9) are best for YouTube or website hero banners.
Instead of manually resizing everything, a digital asset management system like Dash makes this step simple. You can crop and download assets in preset sizes directly from your DAM, or set up your own custom dimensions for the channels you use most.
This means your assets are always ready to publish — no extra editing required.
👉 Find the full list of recommended social media sizes here
[fs-toc-omit] 4. Control access
Not everyone needs access to every asset. Set up clear permissions so internal teams, agencies, and retail partners only see what’s relevant to them. This helps protect sensitive content and keeps your library organised.
How a DAM helps you manage your digital assets
Once you start creating all these digital assets — from images and videos to brand guidelines and campaign graphics — things can get messy fast. If your files are scattered across Google Drive, Dropbox, email threads, or (worse) someone’s desktop, it’s hard for your marketing team to find what they need, when they need it. That’s wasted time and missed opportunities.
That’s where a digital asset management system (DAM system) like Dash comes in. A DAM software solution gives you one central, secure storage space for every type of digital asset and makes them easy to find, share, and reuse across your business.
Here’s how a DAM can transform the way you work 👇
A single source of truth
All your digital files (from product images and campaign videos to brand documents and audio files) live in one central, organised library.
For example, a DAM like Dash displays everything as large, visual thumbnails, so your team can quickly browse, preview, and find the right digital assets without digging through endless folders.
Because every asset is stored in one place, you’ll always know you’re using the latest, approved version. It means your campaigns are consistent and your brand looks polished everywhere it appears.
Use AI search and tags to find assets fast
If you’re using tools like Google Drive or Dropbox to manage your digital assets, no doubt you’re spending too much time searching through your folders and getting caught up in file names like ‘final_final.v1’ and ‘final_final_FINAL.v1’.
In Dash, AI can scan the content of your digital assets so you can search using natural language instead of exact file names. Combine that with tags for product names, campaign themes, seasons, or usage rights, and you’ll pull up the right assets in seconds.
For example, instead of remembering a file name, you could simply type ‘man wearing yellow tshirt’ and Dash will show you every matching image. It’s quick, accurate, and helps your team spend less time hunting for files and more time creating campaigns.
Keep track of every version automatically
As your team updates assets it’s easy to lose track of which version is the right one to use. A DAM solves that by keeping a record of every update automatically.
In Dash, each new version of an asset is stored alongside the old ones, so you can always see what’s changed and roll back if you need to. It removes the guesswork and stops outdated files from slipping into your campaigns.
Take one of our customers, Beavertown, who uses version control in Dash to manage graphics and illustrations. Lily, the brand, Senior Digital Creative says:
“The thing I love about Dash is when I upload a new version of one of the assets, and then get feedback about something we need to change, I can just upload the new version and it won’t create a duplicate. You can also see what it was before because, a lot of the time, we might decide to go back to a previous version.”
👉 Discover how Beavertown manages their creative workflows using Dash.
Share assets securely with the right people
Not everyone needs access to everything, and giving the wrong people the wrong files can cause confusion or put your content - and your brand - at risk. That’s why access control and permissions are a key part of any digital asset management system.
In Dash, you can decide exactly who can view, download, or share your digital assets. You can have different permission levels for groups of teammates without granting access to your entire media ibrary.
Share assets easily with people outside your team
Your digital assets aren’t just for internal use. Agencies, PR teams, retailers, and media partners often need access too. But sending files over email or sharing random cloud links can quickly become messy and hard to manage.
With Dash, you can share assets in a more controlled and professional way. Create branded retailer portals to showcase curated collections of images, videos, or documents, and give external partners access without requiring them to log in. They can browse, preview, and download what they need, but they won’t be able to edit or delete anything.
Discover how top brands like Mountain Equipment, Brewdog and Haws use portals to level-up their partnerships with their retailers (and ultimately, help them sell more products).
Connect with your ecommerce workflows
Your digital assets are most valuable when they fit seamlessly into the tools and platforms your team already uses. A digital asset management system like Dash integrates with your ecommerce tech stack: from Shopify and other online store platforms to social media schedulers, email marketing tools, and your design software.
That means you can send product images, lifestyle shots, and videos directly into your campaigns without the extra steps of downloading and re-uploading files. Need to update a hero image on your storefront or drop a new product video into an email? You can do it straight from Dash.
Build the single source of truth for your digital assets
Your digital assets are some of the most valuable resources your business owns. They help you promote products, build brand consistency, and grow your ecommerce store — but only if they’re organised, easy to find, and ready to use.
A digital asset management system like Dash brings everything together in one place. It gives your team a single source of truth, makes assets searchable with AI and metadata, keeps versions under control, and lets you share content securely with the right people. It also connects seamlessly with the tools you already use, so your assets can flow directly into campaigns, product pages, and social posts.
Managing your digital assets doesn’t have to be complicated. With Dash, it’s simple, scalable, and designed to help your team work faster and launch campaigns with confidence.
👉 Start your free trial of Dash today and see how easy digital asset management can be.
Amy Burchill is the SEO and Content Manager for Dash. She works with ecommerce experts to create articles for DTC brands wanting to improve their campaigns.
