A digital asset management solution is a significant investment, and also requires a lot of internal time and resources to set up. But when you get it right it offers huge benefits to your organization, far beyond the value of that initial investment.
Implementing a new DAM system can be a complex process, so we’ve put together a six-step checklist to help ensure a smooth rollout in your organization. This checklist guides you through evaluating vendors, implementation, driving adoption, and ongoing maintenance to ensure your chosen DAM provides maximum value long-term.
Six-step digital asset management checklist:
- Define your goals and requirements
- Audit your existing assets and workflows
- Select a DAM
- Design your implementation blueprint
- Train, launch, and drive adoption
- Govern, audit, measure, and optimize
Step 1: Define your goals and requirements
Before you start demoing vendors, work out what a successful DAM implementation will actually look like for your team. Build a solid business case by defining some clear goals, such as speeding up campaign delivery, improving cross-company brand consistency, and increasing asset reuse, and agree on some simple metrics you will use to track progress towards these goals.
Then, focus on how a DAM will actually get used in your organization. Sketch out the day-to-day scenarios where a DAM will change work: who searches for files, who approves publications or changes, who republishes. That clarity will help you identify the features and functionality that are most important, so you’re not sucked in by vendor demos and end up with a tool that doesn’t meet your needs.
Finally, you need to get stakeholder buy-in and alignment for this investment. Get creative, marketing, IT, and legal in the same room, and work out what’s a must-have and what you can live without. Identify areas where file access or reuse cause friction in the business — for example, where slow approvals delay campaign launches, where versioning breaks, where usage rights are unclear and cause legal headaches, and which file types you can’t live without. This upfront alignment can help shorten RFP cycles and save some lengthy discussions later in the acquisition and implementation process.
Step 1 checklist:
- Define top-level goals
- Document key use cases
- Identify must-have vs. nice-to-have features
- Outline essential integrations
- Align key stakeholders from across the business
Step 2: Audit your existing assets and workflows
Before you start comparing vendors, take a look at the content ecosystem you already have. First, run a content audit of all your existing brand assets. Look for:
- Where digital files live — cloud drives, shared servers, creative tools, personal drives
- Asset owners
- Duplicate or near-duplicate files
- Usage license types, restrictions, and expiration dates
- When assets were last used or modified.
Auditing your existing assets often reveals duplicate files, outdated content, and hidden collections that would clutter your new DAM on day one. Identifying them now means you can plan and prioritize your DAM migration to leave duplicate, outdated, or unneeded files behind, giving you a clean starting point.
Then, map your processes and workflows, including the full lifecycle of your assets. Document the end-to-end lifecycle for each asset type, covering creation, reviews and feedback, approval, publication, updating, expiration, and removal. Capture exceptions from this process, such as ad hoc approvals or verbal signoffs that cause friction or result in costly rework.
These audits give you the information you need to plan a clean and efficient migration and rollout. Documenting these details helps you design smarter metadata, permission groups, and governance in your future DAM. You’ll spot which teams need granular access, where version control must tighten, and what descriptive tags support better search. This upfront work shrinks migration effort because you can match asset and file structures to real behaviors. It also helps vendors estimate migration scope more accurately, which saves budget and time.
Step 2 checklist:
- Audit existing brand assets
- Document asset creation processes and workflows
- Use insights from audits to identify metadata, user permission, and governance needs
Step 3: Select a DAM
Now it’s time to start comparing DAM providers and actually choose a platform. Many companies do this simply by comparing feature sets and choosing a platform that meets their current needs. But forward-thinking companies compare DAMs differently, moving beyond feature comparisons and focusing on governance, scalability, and adoption readiness — ensuring they choose a platform that will grow with their business, and let them get started with quickly.
Step 3 checklist
We’ll cover these in more detail, but here’s a brief overview of what to look for when comparing DAM platforms:
- Governance automation
- Multi-brand scalability
- Deep native integrations
- Easy user adoption
- Enterprise-grade security and compliance
Governance automation
Basic DAMs focus more on asset storage than the ongoing management and governance of those assets. They rely on manual policing — ad-hoc asset tagging, email approvals, and constant oversight. This quickly leads to inconsistent metadata and duplicate files, making it hard to realize any of the anticipated benefits of implementing a DAM system.
Instead, choose governance-first DAM software that enforces structure automatically so teams don’t have to rely on manual policing. They use access controls, approval workflows, and audit logs to enforce consistency automatically, even as more markets and stakeholders join the platform. For example, Frontify lets marketing teams in 20+ markets collaborate on shared campaigns while maintaining localized asset controls, so local teams can adapt content without breaking global compliance.
Governance-first DAM platforms assign roles, control publication rights, apply lifecycle rules, and record every change so compliance and brand standards stick without constant manual oversight. This reduces compliance risks, as well as the risk of off-brand assets slipping through, freeing your team from endless review cycles while keeping assets discoverable and usable across teams
Multi-brand scalability
The best DAMs will scale with your organization as it grows. That doesn’t simply mean adding more people or more assets; rather, it means adding multiple brands or managing localized assets for different regions.
When comparing DAM vendors, ask each of them about platform scalability:
- Can the system support multiple brands or product lines within one portal?
- Can you roll out localized libraries for global regions without duplication or loss of brand rules and standards?
- Can IT teams easily manage, update, or revoke user permissions at scale?
The Frontify DAM is built with scalability in mind, supporting a multi-brand architecture. You can set up separate DAM libraries for each brand and dedicated portals for each sub-brand or business unit. This makes it easy to organize assets while still providing a single source of truth for all your brand resources.
Deep native integrations
Integrations make or break DAM adoption because teams won’t change their habits unless the platform fits naturally into their daily tools. Look for native connections to marketing automation platforms, creative tools, content management systems, and project management apps — the systems your teams already live in. These integrations should let users search, pull, edit, and publish assets without hopping between windows.
Frontify’s open API and native app ecosystem embed the DAM directly into creative workflows, from design to distribution. Designers can grab approved assets inside their creative tools, marketers can publish directly to CMS or marketing automation platforms, and product teams can sync visuals wherever they need them. This turns the DAM into an invisible enabler rather than another system people feel forced to use.
Easy user adoption
A DAM that people actually use is much more valuable than a DAM with an endless feature list that only a handful of team members know how to use. Frontify’s intuitive interface means companies often require only minimal training, and drives adoption across creative, marketing, and regional teams. For example, Uber has more than 20,000 team members using the Frontify platform globally — about 12% of the company creates, manages, and shares assets through the Frontify DAM and platform.
Ask vendors if you can run pilot testing with non-technical users from outside your brand or marketing team, as they will give you a good understanding of how easy the DAM is to use for those people less familiar with your brand. Additionally, provide vendors with some of your real brand assets, complete with metadata, so you can assess how effective their search functionality is.
Enterprise-grade security and compliance
The right DAM protects your assets and your brand reputation with enterprise-grade security and compliance features. A security breach or mismanaged user permission can expose licensed content, confidential creative, or customer data — and that risk scales as more teams rely on the system.
When comparing DAM platforms, look for the following, essential security features:
- SOC 2 compliance: Verifies that the DAM follows strict security, availability, and confidentiality controls.
- Data encryption in transit and at rest: Protects assets whether they’re being uploaded, downloaded, or stored.
- Role-based permissions: Ensures each user only accesses what they need, reducing exposure and accidental misuse.
- Full audit trails for asset history: Tracks every action — uploads, edits, approvals — so governance and investigations are simple and transparent.
Compare some of the most popular DAM platforms: Read our DAM comparison guide
Step 4: Design your implementation blueprint
Build a clear blueprint to translate your initial goals into a structured, phased rollout plan. Break down your implementation plan into distinct tasks, timelines, and accountable owners. You want to get the balance right between controlling the initial access and setup, and ensuring teams can actually use the platform from day one.
- Build a cross-functional team
- Create a phased rollout
- Structure DAM taxonomy, standards, and permissions
Build a cross-functional team
Assemble a team that spans the people who will run, use, and maintain your DAM. Assign clear roles like system admin, governance lead, content creators, and approvers, and spell out the responsibilities for each role. This ensures each team member understands their role, including the workflows they own and approvals they manage.
Give the governance lead authority to approve policy changes so key decisions don’t get stuck in endless discussion loops. Clear ownership speeds up approvals, reduces rework, and keeps implementation-related tasks moving forward.
Create a phased rollout
A phased rollout reduces risk by letting you uncover hidden friction and refine policies, training, and integrations based on real user data and feedback. Start small with a pilot group of users that represent different use cases, such as global marketing, local markets, and product teams. Use this group to validate your workflows and system configuration.
Track simple success metrics like upload accuracy, asset retrieval speed, and adoption rate. Collect feedback from these initial users to refine processes, tweak workflows, adjust permission rules, and fix training gaps before rolling your DAM out to more departments or the wider organization.
Structure DAM taxonomy, standards, and permissions
Now, you want to define the actual structure of your DAM. Design folder hierarchies, such as Project → Campaign month/year → Market. Define metadata standards to help keep assets organized, and role-based access rules so creators can upload, approvers can publish, and viewers can only download what they need.
A clear taxonomy ensures that asset search and reuse are intuitive, while permissions maintain brand control across teams. Frontify’s modular setup, with separate spaces for guidelines, assets, and templates, supports gradual, thoughtful expansion. Teams can start using new parts of the platform at their own pace without disrupting ongoing campaigns.
Step 5: Train, launch, and drive adoption
A DAM only delivers the anticipated benefits if your teams are using it consistently, so focus on strategies that make adoption effortless and rewarding:
- Develop role-based training. Tailor onboarding and training by user type — admins, creators, and casual users — so each group learns what matters to their day-to-day work. Produce short video tutorials, run live Q&As, and publish quick-start guides that users can reference in minutes. Reinforce learning with micro-lessons tied to common tasks like uploading, tagging, sharing assets, and requesting approvals.
- Create internal champions. Identify early adopters to act as regional or team advocates who answer questions and model best practices. Give champions a simple toolkit — slide decks, demo scripts, and FAQs — so they can run peer sessions with confidence. Encourage peer-to-peer sharing of tips, shortcuts, and best practices, and highlight success stories to build momentum.
- Collect feedback and make iterative improvements. Use surveys, quick interviews, and usage analytics data to collect structured feedback after each implementation phase. Use this feedback to refine metadata, tweak workflows, and improve training materials as needed. This will help keep your DAM aligned with real user needs, rather than your initial assumptions.
Step 5 checklist:
- Develop role-based training
- Create internal champions to drive adoption
- Collect feedback and use it to make iterative improvements
Step 6: Govern, audit, measure, and optimize
To get the most value from your DAM long-term, you can’t simply implement it and then leave it alone. It requires continuous, ongoing governance and maintenance to ensure the content stored in your DAM remains accurate, compliant, and valuable.
Step 6 checklist:
- Establish asset ownership and policies
- Run regular audits
- Define performance metrics
- Report and iterate
Establish asset ownership and policies
Assign an owner for each brand library, campaign, or major asset collection so someone is accountable for quality and compliance. Make owners responsible for key processes such as license validation, user governance, and platform training, as well as approving or publishing content. Clear ownership reduces ambiguity and ensures accountability.
Create policies for key processes, to create a shared understanding of how your DAM should be used and managed across teams. Define consistent naming conventions, tagging rules, and expiration policies so assets remain discoverable and usable. Establish lifecycle rules to automatically retire or archive outdated content. Defining these policies up front reduces confusion and makes ongoing DAM upkeep far easier.
Run regular audits
Schedule quarterly audits that check metadata accuracy, user permissions, asset usage patterns, and asset usage against policy. Regular audits help keep your DAM organized and easy to use. They also identify bottlenecks or compliance gaps before they cause bigger problems.
Act on your audit findings: archive or delete unused or outdated assets, consolidate duplicate files, revalidate licenses, and update user permissions as required. You can also use your audit results to adapt workflows or retrain teams if necessary.
Frontify’s DAM provides automated version tracking and audit trails, which simplify this work by showing who changed what and when, so each audit doesn’t turn into hours of detective work.
Frontify helps make these checks faster and more reliable, reducing risk while keeping your asset library clean.
Define performance metrics
To measure the success of your DAM implementation, track both key performance indicators (KPIs) and return on investment. These will show whether the DAM drives value, help you identify where changes are needed, and justify continued investment in the platform. Some example metrics include:
- Time-to-market reduction: how much faster campaigns launch than before implementation
- Asset reuse and localization rate: percent of assets repurposed across markets, rather than recreated from scratch
- Decrease in off-brand asset use: fewer brand violations in campaigns
- User satisfaction scores: use qualitative data from surveys and NPS to track changes in user satisfaction
Additionally, you may need to track other metrics that tie back to the goals you set in step 1.
Report and iterate
Hold quarterly review meetings to share results with key stakeholders and discuss areas for improvement. Track asset downloads, duplicates, engagement, and search success to identify friction points. Frontify’s analytics simplify reporting and make it easy to take a data-driven approach to maintaining and optimizing your DAM.
Use these insights to develop a prioritized backlog: tweak metadata, refine approval flows, adjust user permissions, or improve training. This will help keep the system aligned with evolving team needs.
Frontify is the foundation for long-term DAM success
Frontify brings every principle in this checklist together by turning your DAM into the system that powers brand consistency, governance, and collaboration at scale. As well as providing a place to store and organize your files, it’s also the operating system for your brand, connecting people, processes, and assets so teams move faster with fewer mistakes.
It supports a governance-first approach at every stage, from defining goals and auditing assets to rolling out workflows and maintaining long-term oversight. Because assets, brand guidelines, templates, and collaboration tools live in a single cloud-based platform, governance scales naturally instead of being bolted on later.
Enterprise brands like Uber and Kuehne + Nagel see high global adoption because Frontify feels intuitive for creators, marketers, and agencies alike. As brand operations evolve, Frontify evolves with them, adapting to new workflows, channels, and teams. It’s the DAM built for your future business, designed to grow with you rather than hold you back.
