The Best Digital Asset Management Solutions for Sports

Find the best digital asset manager for your sports property? What you need to know about DAM software solutions for sports organizations.

Sports fans on mobile device; digital asset manager

Creating a meaningful and inspiring presence online is a basic requirement for effectively branding a sports property and improving brand trust and awareness among fans. With that in mind, utilizing your digital assets to their fullest potential should be one of the key priorities of any sports marketing team.

But, to do this, teams must take a thoughtful and organized approach to how they plan, store and use their assets.

Using a digital asset management platform is a great way to align your creative team and make the most out of the assets your organization has created. 

Keep on reading to learn more about what is digital asset management and the best digital asset manager for sports marketing teams.

Whatever your sports property needs, there is a digital asset management solution that can work for you by managing digital assets.

DAM Software for Sports Organizations

There is specific functionality that is increasingly important to sports organizations: real-time digital asset management. This real-time capability allows teams to collect, organize and make their event assets available to more people and groups as soon as they’re captured. 

There is no need for this functionality on the brand management side. But real-time sharing is critical to provide social media and broadcast teams access to photos and videos seconds after the action happens.

As social media has become a first-choice information source for consumers now, digital teams are thinking beyond basic DAMs. They know they must provide their athletes, partners and internal staff across their organization with up-to-the-minute digital images and videos for social media channels and initiatives. It’s the quickest and surest path to expanded reach and activation for organizations everywhere. 

Consider a real-time DAM or asset distribution platform when comparing digital asset management solutions to support your needs.

camera for digital asset management

The Importance of DAM Software

Using digital asset management software for asset creation, brand management and asset distribution is an important and necessary process for any organization that wants to increase its brand awareness and make more of an impact with its marketing campaigns.

DAMS for Brand Consistency

Brand awareness is important to every organization. Good brands use their brand marks, colors and brand assets consistently. The basic functionality of any DAM will be helpful here.

1. The DAM must allow quick and easy file access

If you’re about to post on social media or need an image of a product for your latest season ticket-holder newsletter campaign, you don’t want to spend hours searching through files and folders.

With digital asset management software, you have all your media assets and creative files stored in one place. This capability makes it easier to distribute digital assets, organize assets and make the most of your content creation processes.

2. A DAM keeps important product images and files safe

Losing important files and images can be a big hindrance to the creative process for anyone in any sports organization. This hold true from your digital staff to your sponsor sales teams and beyond..

By implementing DAM solutions, you can ensure you never have to worry about losing files on Google Drive. Nor will you have to stress about missing the up-to-date version of an important image edited on Adobe Creative Cloud.

3. A DAM enhances collaboration and productivity

A DAM software solution is one of the best collaboration tools that you can introduce to drive asset creation. 

These branded portals offer advanced features to help creative teams in so many ways:

  • Improve workflow automation
  • Integrate with other marketing tools
  • Help with metadata management
  • Assign user permissions
  • And more

That’s why DAM is an effective way to help employees in large or small sports organizations to create, manage and distribute multiple files. 

Man and boy at sports event looking at phone; best DAM software

Other Features Digital Asset Management Tools Should Have

Although every digital asset management software solution is different, there are a few things that you should consider. This is true whether you’re at a sports league, team, event, association, sports competition or even an esports team.  

The basic list of DAM features that sports organizations require include the following:

  1. Centralize the storage of all short-form media assets in the cloud
  2. Single, easy-to-access library for browsing
  3. Full-text search and tag search to easily locate assets
  4. Clear, concise, and customizable category and tag structures 
  5. Virtual galleries – to view assets on mobile phones and tablets without download 
  6. Automated notification when new versions of a file or new files are uploaded
  7. Rights, usage, description and media rights information
  8. Automated sharing directly to mobile phones 
  9. Permissions-based access to assets and/or galleries based on media rights and time delay
  10. Real-time photo and video identification and tagging, for real-time routing and access
Two engineers in broadcast booth; digital asset manager software

The Top 5 Best Digital Asset Management Platforms

Perfecting the management of digital assets has become a huge concern for many sports organizations. This is why the digital asset management industry is booming.

Although there is a huge range of choices for DAM software, it doesn’t mean that every platform will be appropriate for the needs of your team.

Whether you’re looking to improve business intelligence or just need a more accessible location for your digital assets, you have alternatives. Here is a list of the top 5 digital asset management system options.

Greenfly

Greenfly is much more than a DAM and designed specifically for sports leagues, teams and competitions. It’s a real-time digital asset management platform that also automates media collection, organization and distribution for real-time delivery of live event assets.

Greenfly can capture media from any source. These include other DAMs, staff photographers and creators at matches, races and games. All of this digital media inventory is automatically categorized using AI image recognition. It’s automatically organized and then immediately available to the people who need it. These include your social media team, production team, rights-holding broadcasters, athletes, staff and even corporate partners. In this way, you can maximize the reach and value of each digital media asset.

When you use the Greenfly platform, you’ll see benefits including:

  • Access to all your media 24/7
  • Automatic tagging options to reduce and eliminate manual work
  • Shared asset galleries for instant iOS or Android access
  • Immediate asset distribution to individuals or groups of any size

Greenfly is designed to work for sports teams who want to amplify their online visibility with fans and implement better management of assets. 

MediaValet

If you’re a larger team looking for a solution to help manage a large asset library, MediaValet is a good option.

This DAM system helps you to manage brand guidelines, share assets between teams, and distribute assets to a wider audience.

Using a cloud-based interface, your marketing teams can easily upload and download files. This makes them easily accessible for important meetings, sales calls and other marketing projects.

CoSchedule Asset Organizer

CoSchedule is considered one of the best digital asset tools for marketing teams who need to keep on top of a busy marketing calendar and prioritize organization for unlimited users.

This digital asset management DAM software includes the ability to implement cross-department sharing, built-in version controls, and secure file sharing of important marketing material.

Canto

Large organizations often find digital asset management challenging, as they’ll typically have many assets and files to organize.

Canto is a feature-rich software solution that can be integrated with a huge range of software. It’s perfect for adding and organizing files like videos, images, documents and presentations.

Enterprises that have adopted Canto can leverage Greenfly for media distribution and access for dozens or thousands of users.

Brandfolder

Suppose you don’t want to bombard your team with a digital asset management DAM platform that’s complicated to use. Brandfolder could be a good project management solution for you.

It has plenty of features, including ones that integrate with adobe experience manager assets and other enterprise-grade platform solutions. The platform remains simple and accessible to any marketing team.

Editor uploading video to social media; DAM software.

What Does Digital Asset Management Software Do?

Digital asset management software are locally-installed or cloud-based solutions. They can help sports marketing teams store, organize and share digital assets, media files, audio files and other digital content.

By creating one single destination for all your content, your team no longer has to worry about asset sharing across multiple platforms. You can find assets all in one place, and can ensure complete control over version history, modifications and media rights.

The best DAM software comes in a range of shapes and sizes that are designed to fit seamlessly into a team’s existing processes. For example, some may want a place to adopt better project management features to ensure brand consistency. In contrast, some may be more worried about digital rights management for their brand assets.

One important thing to note: Digital asset management systems are great solutions for creative and marketing teams. But many are not useful for sharing digital assets outside of these departments.

Sports fans selfie: digital asset manager

Best Digital Asset Manager FAQ

What Is a DAM Tool?

Digital asset management software is a central location that allows teams of any size to take control of their digital assets and create an online portal to store, manage, and plan content.

They’re designed to be utilized by an entire organization and provide a secure and productive space to collaborate, share, monitor version control and distribute a digital media asset library.

Some DAM tools also can be integrated with things like the Adobe Creative Cloud to help users access editing tools, custom metadata fields and tools to prevent duplicate assets.

What Does a Digital Asset Management System Do?

A digital asset manager is responsible for maintaining the online digital asset management software.

Their role will include acquiring, sharing, organizing and managing any digital files or creative assets that a company requires.

How Do You Choose Digital Asset Management?

Choosing the best DAM software for your company is a crucial decision. It has the potential to either make or break your marketing efforts.

To choose the right digital asset management systems, first take these steps:

  • Understand the value of your assets
  • Identify any current or potential challenges surrounding asset management within your company
  • Speak to staff about the importance of digital asset management and how to tackle process improvement
  • Think about the advanced features that your company needs, like cloud storage and artificial intelligence
  • Take a look at different digital asset management software options and evaluate which is most appropriate for your company’s needs

Improve Your Digital Asset Management With Greenfly

At Greenfly, we’ve worked to create a platform that makes digital marketing and digital media distribution easier and more effective for sports organizations across the globe.

If you’d like to find out how the best digital asset management services can help you skyrocket your marketing efforts, request a demo to learn how we can help you.

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