Choosing a digital asset management (DAM) system is more than finding a solution to store your files. A DAM system is essential to unlocking the full potential of your brand’s content, necessary for keeping up with today’s fast-paced digital landscape that requires engaging content experiences. A strong DAM system serves as a system of record for organizing, discovering, managing, and distributing digital assets across departments, markets, and channels. But with so many platforms out there, knowing how to choose a digital asset management system isn’t always clear-cut.
In this blog, we'll take a look at the world of DAM and cover the top DAM features to improve your workflow, so you can choose the right provider for your organization. This way, you can find a DAM solution that delivers real strategic value, from speeding up time to market to protecting brand consistency and enabling smarter content decisions at scale.
Key takeaways
- A digital asset management system is an essential business solution for storing, discovering, managing, and distributing digital assets across platforms.
- When choosing a digital asset management solution, organizations need to select a platform that can scale with their business and support growing content demands.
- AI capabilities like agentic AI and AI-powered search improve content discoverability and improve efficiency to drive greater content ROI.
- Search for DAM systems with strong security and compliance standards, along with integration capabilities that connect your DAM to your broader martech stack.
What is a digital asset management system?
Digital asset management (DAM) software helps busy marketers store, discover, manage, and distribute digital assets and marketing collateral quickly and efficiently while safeguarding brand consistency. The best DAM systems allow companies to go to market faster, promote product launches more effectively, create engaging digital experiences, and distribute them seamlessly across all customer touchpoints.
Today’s DAM systems have evolved from standalone solutions for sharing and storing files to strategic tools sitting at the heart of a connected digital ecosystem, comprising martech and e-commerce infrastructure. As a result, users can now deliver content across a network of integrated platforms while ensuring brand consistency every step of the way.
From marketing directors seeking a solution that simplifies content operations across global marketing teams to DAM admins struggling with growing volumes of assets or inconsistent taxonomy, Bynder’s industry-leading, AI-powered, enterprise-grade DAM platform is an essential solution. With Bynder, everyone from functional managers to marketing managers and those on GTM teams can conquer the complexity and chaos of proliferating content.
How to choose a DAM system
Knowing how to choose a DAM platform requires carefully assessing your business needs and the various DAM features that can optimize workflows, ensure brand consistency, and promote better asset discoverability. Here’s how to choose a digital asset management system and the essential factors to consider:
1. Identify your organization’s needs
When choosing a digital asset management system, begin by evaluating your business’s specific needs. During this crucial first step, work with key stakeholders within your organization to identify the broader needs of all future DAM users. This can include marketing managers, CMOs, DAM admins, and go-to-market strategists. Together, you can identify pain points teams across the organization are facing, such as teams spending too much time searching through disorganized folders or not having a secure media sharing solution to maintain compliance.
It’s also important to consider the volume and type of assets your organization works with most, including images, videos, PDFs, documents, and creative source files. Your DAM platform should support all of the file types you work with. Collaboration tools are another essential need, ensuring both internal and external teams can work together without bottlenecks slowing down the creative process. Whether you’re constantly losing assets, spending too much time uploading and downloading files, or hitting storage limits, your DAM solution should satisfy these needs to add greater value to your content.
2. Evaluate key features
With your needs identified, you can then explore the various key features of potential DAM systems to ensure they meet your requirements. Core DAM features needed for optimizing workflows include:
- User-friendly interface: An intuitive user experience is vital to the success of any DAM platform. Bydner’s DAM platform is easy to navigate, ensuring teams use it consistently and correctly to keep content organized, discoverable, and compliant. High adoption is the best ROI guarantee, as it turns what could be shelfware into a daily tool that supports productivity across departments.
- Artificial intelligence capabilities: AI is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s an essential tool for driving critical business value. Leading DAM providers like Bynder will have AI Agents, which automate complex content workflows and deliver personalized experiences at scale. As the first AI-powered DAM to introduce agentic AI, customers can customize their AI Agents to generate, transform, and govern content in ways that were previously impossible, ensuring content is more compliant, personalized, and faster to market.
- Custom metadata and taxonomy: Your chosen DAM should let you organize assets in a way that fits your business, making content easier to find, manage, and use across teams. A custom-built taxonomy provides a structured framework that organizes assets by category, usage, campaign, product line, or any other logic that aligns with your workflows. The underlying taxonomy in your DAM drives consistent asset organization, cross-team alignment, and scalable content reuse.
- Permissions and role-based access: Security and compliance should always be top of mind, especially when managing digital assets. Your DAM should have robust safeguards in place, such as role-based access and user permissions, to ensure the right people have the right level of access to maintain brand integrity.
- Version history and asset tracking: With versioning capabilities, users can always stay on top of changes and avoid duplicate work, ensuring the most up-to-date assets are always being worked on.
- Reporting and analytics: When adopting a DAM platform, knowing how assets perform and who’s using them allows you to understand what’s working and what’s not. Bynder Analytics provides essential insights to optimize workflows, create high-performing content experiences, and boost ROI.
- Content upload and download: Getting content into and out of your DAM should be easy. Bynder’s Bulk/Mass File Uploader and Multiple Files Download allow you to upload or download a batch of files rather than having to work one-by-one, saving time on DAM administrative tasks by grouping actions across multiple assets. And, with External Uploader, you can deliver files into the platform without giving access to the DAM to safeguard your DAM when receiving 3rd party files.
- Integrations: Your DAM sits at the heart of your martech stack, meaning it should have robust integration capabilities to create a connected ecosystem of all the essential tools your team uses, such as PIM, CRM, CMS, and product management systems. Bynder’s Marketplace offers comprehensive capabilities, including pre-built components, RESTful API, SDKs, and an established partner network, for seamless content creation and distribution.
3. Analyze search capabilities
As a growing enterprise, you likely have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of assets living within your DAM. Without the right search capabilities, it can be easy for valuable assets to go missing and become underutilized. When choosing a digital asset management system, AI-powered search capabilities are a must.
As discovered in the State of DAM Report, 41% of organizations have either fully integrated AI or are in the process of implementing it within their DAM systems. Additionally, 41% of businesses highlight ROI stemming from improved search accuracy and asset discovery. Bynder is leading the charge with AI-powered search capabilities, including:
- Face Recognition: This solution uses facial recognition search to identify, tag, and find images of specific people in your DAM
- Natural Language Search (NLS): With NLS, you can search for an image you need using simple, everyday language with support for simple queries in additional languages.
- Similarity Search: With our image similarity search solution, you can find visually similar assets instantly to reduce time spent scrolling or browsing for the right image to match the vibe and tone of a campaign.
- Search by Image: Using an image or a URL, you can quickly check if the same or a similar image already exists in your DAM to save time, effort, and budget on recreating or repurchasing images
- Text-in-Image Search: Thanks to Text-in-Image Search, you can easily search for images based on the text within the image to improve content discoverability, whether it’s a specific product label or a logo.
- Speech-to-Text: Quickly translate speech from a video or audio file into searchable text, enhancing the discoverability and accessibility of your content.
4. Consider scalability
Your DAM system should be scalable as your business grows. Whether you’re launching new products, expanding into new markets, or ramping up campaigns, your DAM provider needs to grow with you and handle more users and complex workflows. A scalable DAM also future-proofs your investment. Rather than switching platforms every few years, a scalable DAM adapts to changes in your tech stack, business structure, and marketing strategy, helping teams stay productive and consistent across channels and regions.
Bynder’s DAM with composable architecture is built on enterprise-grade, scalable SaaS infrastructure that offers flexible configurability for even the most demanding digital asset management needs. With the largest marketplace of pre-built APIs and SDKs, developers can quickly plug in new capabilities, automate tasks, and create custom user experiences, while marketers and creatives benefit from a more connected content ecosystem.
5. Look for integration capabilities
Your DAM system should sit at the heart of your martech stack, integrating with key systems such as PIM, CMS, CRM, DXP, and project management platforms to deliver exceptional content experiences. For example, if you need to provide product images from your DAM platform to the corresponding product page on your website or e-commerce site, ensure your solution integrates with your CMS or e-commerce platform.
Bynder creates a connected ecosystem of digital products where you can easily combine integrated tools such as PIM and CMS systems with content creation tools, so you can deliver on-brand, high-quality content to specific channels faster than ever.
CTA: Explore integrations
6. Assess security and compliance
A key step in choosing a DAM is ensuring the platform has robust security and compliance standards in place, including encryption and data protection measures, user authentication, and adherence to industry standards such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. With safeguards like encryption for data at rest and in transit and strict user authentication protocols, you can protect your assets from unauthorized access and misuse that can lead to legal and financial consequences.
Additionally, the rise of AI brings a new landscape of potential compliance risks. The State of DAM Report highlights this concern, with 9 in 10 respondents viewing human oversight as essential for ensuring personalization and compliance while safeguarding brand identity. Bynder’s DAM platform is AI-powered and human-approved, with robust approval processes in place, so humans always remain in the driver’s seat.
7. Ensure easy onboarding and customer support
An intuitive onboarding process is essential when adopting a new DAM system. While competitors may claim Bynder comes with a learning curve and a time-consuming implementation process, all Bynder customers receive full support from a dedicated onboarding manager to ensure easy adoption. Organizations will begin their DAM journey with Bynder through a detailed kick-off meeting before implementation, which will outline expectations, establish a project plan timeline, and ensure alignment with business needs.
From there, teams will participate in several deep-dive sessions to gain a deeper understanding of Bynder’s various solutions that can meet their business needs. Paired with comprehensive training sessions for users and stakeholders, users will understand how to maintain their Bynder portal and become fully autonomous.
Once all needs are met, users will be able to use their Bynder DAM platform to start getting the most value out of their assets. Customers will have access to either their own dedicated Customer Success Manager or a Success Squad, who will provide ongoing support to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Let’s look at how Bouclair made it work. A leader in furniture and home decor, Bouclair had initial hesitations and a looming deadline to find a tailored digital solution that aligned with its existing infrastructure before an expensive license renewal. With no time to spare to prevent the disruption of its e-commerce operations and ability to reach customers, Bouclair turned to Bynder, where a thorough discovery phase was conducted to align Bynder’s advanced capabilities with Bouclair’s unique requirements. The results spoke for themselves. A collaborative approach with Ntara transitioned 85,000 assets to the Bynder platform in just two weeks, ensuring Bouclair’s e-commerce site maintained uninterrupted syndication.
Discover how Bynder transitioned 85,000 assets to Bouclair’s DAM system in just two weeks
8. Review analyst reports and customer testimonials
When choosing the right DAM for your company, you have several tools that can help you navigate the complex world of B2B software. Global market research companies, such as Forrester, Gartner, and G2, regularly publish reports that enable companies to better understand the state of the market in the field of technology.
The Forrester Wave report, for example, is a unique way of comparing vendors—using fully-accessible, transparent criteria to score each industry's top vendors, then displaying them according to the strength of current product offerings, strategy, and market size.
Bynder received the highest scores possible across eight criteria, including usability and user interface, performance, and planned enhancements.
The Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Asset Management report also named Bynder as a Leader, thanks to our ongoing commitment to providing customers with the most powerful and intuitive DAM platform, cutting-edge AI capabilities, and a customer-centric approach. Bynder was also named a leader in the G2 Enterprise Grid® Report.
Download the full report to find out why
The G2 Enterprise Grid® Report for Digital Asset Management ranked Bynder higher than any other DAM in the grid, with the highest customer satisfaction score and showcasing a significant market presence worldwide, further positioning Bynder’s AI-powered DAM as a solution trusted by enterprises globally.
Along with analyst reports like Forrester, G2, and Gartner, testimonials from real-life customers with first-hand experience offer excellent insights into the impact a DAM solution has on their organization. Take LIV Golf, for example. LIV Golf, a global sports league with a 14-tournament schedule, needed a solution to help them create, manage, and distribute tens of thousands of digital assets to modernize and expand the game of golf on an international level. With Bynder’s DAM solution, content delivery times for sponsors dropped from 24 hours to 2 hours, a 94% reduction. With a 99.49% user adoption rate, LIV Golf’s team, with the help of Bynder, was able to process 20,000-30,000 images on tournament days and create over 5,000 assets per quarter/
TÜV SÜD, a trusted partner of choice for safety, security, and sustainability solutions, is another example of a customer success story. With a global workforce of over 28,000 employees, TÜV SÜD’s staff had trouble accessing and distributing content due to its physical server being housed in Germany, hindering collaboration, limiting content ROI, and delaying time-to-market. After transitioning to Bynder’s cloud-based DAM, TÜV SÜD was able to unlock more value from its digital assets, reduce manual admin, and deliver personalized, omnichannel content experiences to its diverse customer base.
Learn how Bynder’s best-in-class DAM platform helped TÜV SÜD adapt to today’s digital-first economy
9. Compare DAM systems
Comparing DAM systems is important because not all platforms offer the same features, capabilities, flexibility, and support. Taking the time to evaluate different options can help you avoid costly limitations down the line. Compare key factors like AI capabilities, pricing, onboarding and training resources, customer support, available features, and integrations. This way, you can find a solution that aligns best with your workflows and team structure.
With so many alternatives to choose from, identifying the right DAM software for you can feel like a challenge. That's why we've put together a digital asset management software comparison guide to help you compare vendors against a number of features. Check out the full guide below to see which DAM solution is right for your business.
10. Request a demo
One of the best ways to see how a DAM platform actually works is to take it for a test drive. By requesting a demo, you’ll be able to explore the interface, test key features, and ask questions based on your team’s real-world needs. A demo also helps to ensure the DAM platform can handle your specific workflows and content types.
Now that you know how to choose a digital asset management platform, book a demo with Bynder today to see how our best-in-class enterprise-grade DAM platform can meet your needs.
Ready to choose your DAM system? Making your DAM decision with confidence
Choosing the right DAM platform is a strategic decision that can shape how efficiently your team discovers, creates, manages, and delivers content. By focusing on key features like AI capabilities, integrations, scalability, and security compliance, while also taking the time to compare vendors and request demos, you’ll set your organization up for success. Start delivering exceptional content experiences across channels to drive better business outcomes like increased leads and conversions while mitigating business risks associated with non-compliant content by booking a demo with Bynder today.
