For decades, a company's value was measured by its buildings, land, machinery, cars, equipment, and other conventional assets. These were the assets everyone knew about, could touch, and could see. But now, in the age of digital business, the equation has changed. These assets are no longer the only assets companies own. Digital assets have emerged, representing strategic tools that help achieve significant growth and success.

These assets include companies' websites, customer databases, and many other assets. These operate around the clock to enhance brand reputation and attract customers.

But does everyone realize the value of these assets? And how can they be managed and tracked effectively? This is what we will learn in this article.

What are digital assets? And why are they important?
The term "digital assets" refers to everything a company owns in electronic form. The importance of these assets lies in their ability to grow and sustain infinitely, and their cost is very low compared to physical assets. These assets work around the clock to enhance your digital presence, attract new customers, and build trust and credibility in your brand. They also give you a sustained competitive advantage when managed and monitored efficiently. They also provide accurate data that helps make strategic decisions, enabling businesses to achieve growth and ensure sustainability.

For example, a single company-owned website can serve thousands of customers simultaneously. Digital assets include:

Website and Domain Name: A website is one of the most important and effective marketing channels for businesses and the digital face of your brand.
Digital Content: This includes everything companies publish, including articles, educational and advertising videos, images, and more. It can be referred to as the language of communication between you and your audience.
Social Media Accounts: These can include Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other accounts. These are also marketing channels that reflect your brand and are a means of communicating with existing customers and attracting new ones.
Customer Databases: These are among the most important digital assets, including names, email addresses, purchase history, and more. The importance of any digital asset containing customer data lies in the comprehensive insights it provides companies that contribute to analyzing customer behavior, personalizing marketing campaigns, and increasing customer loyalty.
Software and applications: These include accounting software, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, mobile applications, and more.
Effective Digital Asset Management and Tracking
Effective asset management and tracking requires several implementation steps, including the following:

Inventory and Classification
First, you should start by creating a comprehensive list of all your company's digital assets. Then, document everything you own by creating a record containing the following information for each asset:

Asset name.
Asset type.
Location (where is it stored?)
Date of creation.
Responsible for managing the asset.
Asset condition (Is it in use? Does it need to be updated? What are its update schedules?)
Central Storage
After inventorying and documenting all your digital assets, you must securely store those assets and their data and make them easily accessible. One of the tools that contribute to achieving this is digital asset management systems. These systems are an ideal solution for storing and organizing digital assets of all kinds, while providing high security standards. These systems also allow you to effectively manage and track your assets, provide tools to search for any data or files you may need, share assets, and determine access rights.

Don't forget to create regular backups of any digital assets you own and store these copies on an external server. This ensures that data is not lost in the event of an emergency.

Establish Usage Policies
To manage digital assets efficiently, you must have clear policies for the use and handling of each asset, as well as for determining who has access to each of the company's digital assets. For example, can everyone access and use the company logo? Or is only a specific number of employees allowed to do so? Or who has permission to edit, add, and archive website content?

Therefore, you must establish clear guidelines and policies for the use of these assets, and establish clear regulations for those who violate these policies. This is to protect your digital assets.

Monitoring and Analysis
Monitoring and analyzing digital assets to obtain results that contribute to improving various processes and tasks requires specialized tools. For example, there are a number of analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, that help determine how audiences interact with your content. Which articles are most engaging? Are videos being watched in full?

The process of monitoring and analyzing assets on a regular basis using specialized tools provides companies with comprehensive insights into the most important digital assets to rely on to improve marketing strategies. For example, if a specific piece of content is most engaging for audiences, this type of content is considered a valuable digital asset that can be used in promotional campaigns to achieve their desired objectives.

Updates and Maintenance
Managing and monitoring digital assets doesn't just involve monitoring assets, setting policies, and assigning responsibility for each asset. It's also important to monitor and ensure that updates and maintenance are carried out on time. This ensures business continuity. For example, websites need to be updated regularly, and customer databases need to be ensured that there is no duplicate data.

Periodic Evaluation
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