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Visual content marketing continues to grow in importance year after year. Video has been the top form of media used within content marketing for two years in a row, according to Hubspot. Further, people watched more than 12 billion minutes of video in 2020.
Whether its increasing sales, driving web traffic or starting social media conversations, visual content and assets are crucial components of a content marketing strategy. But such assets are only useful if they’re properly managed and accessible when needed. Enter Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms. This critical piece of technology was initially conceived as a way for businesses to store, tag, and identify their digital assets — particularly visual content. First-generation DAMs allowed for more efficient use of a company’s digital assets than previous solutions.
However, DAM 2.0 is more than just a place for asset centralization. Modern DAMs have more abilities and functions, which come in handy as customer behavior changes and more and more businesses are increasing their personalization efforts. AI and machine learning have improved DAM’s abilities and capabilities, allowing DAMs to do more than their legacy counterparts ever dreamed of. Such functionality will be critical in the coming years as customer behavior continues to shift and disperse among different channels. With multiple ways to reach customers, businesses need all the help they can get.
Place and Personalize
First and foremost, your DAM needs to be integrated with your current marketing tools. Your content teams are using a wide variety of products and services. DAM plugins like Wedia’s Content Picker allow those teams to access the DAM directly from their tools, such as Microsoft Office Suite or Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps.
How do you personalize experiences for customers without creating loads of new content? Modern DAMs do more than just store and manage assets; they enable your business to dynamically adapt the content you have to deliver personalized customer experiences. Images are powerful in how they pull in customers’ attention. But if the image is wrong for the medium, it can have consequences. Your customers interact with your brand on multiple devices — and each has its own specifications. If the image is the wrong size and doesn’t adapt to the device, you could lose customers. Research suggests that every 100-millisecond delay in website load time can cause up to a 6% drop in sales. To prevent this, you need a DAM with capabilities that include progressive image loading and adaptive video streaming, which adapt the asset format to each device and channel.
At the very least, today’s DAMs need to be able to address the following challenges:
- Adapt to local cultural norms and mores
- Adhere to regulatory compliance
- Integrate session context
- Manage technical constraints
- Respect copyright requirements
Technical constraints go beyond making sure images can dynamically resize to fit the customer’s current device. Of course, assets need to adapt for the device for the smoothest optimal viewing experience, but cultural norms also play a heavy role in marketing.Your DAM should be able to keep up with them and not violate any local laws or international ad standards. Compliance is especially critical for your brand: your visual content marketing strategy needs to adhere to intellectual property, copyright and trademark laws, preserving brand integrity. Understanding session context will only increase in importance as third-party cookies go away and marketers must rely instead on content-aware situations to deliver personalized messages.
Other Global Market Adaptation Considerations
In a 2020 survey of global consumers, Adobe explored the perceived benefits of personalization. They found that customers enjoyed personalizations — and they liked advertising more when the content was relevant to them. Close to half of all respondents (45%) enjoyed getting content that was relevant to their interests, while 37% liked offers and ads that matched their interests.
Personalization is especially critical in a global context, where the visual assets used for one country might not be effective or appropriate for another. A modern DAM should have these adaptation capabilities built in, so assets can be used in the right regions. (Several examples of hyper personalized marketing campaigns can be found here).
DAMs should also include a visual content data visualization tool, along with scoring functionalities for determining the ROI on your visual content. This assists marketers in measuring content marketing effectiveness, provides direction on how best to adapt the content strategy and improves visual content production. Having accessible metrics and a way to identify strong from weaker content benefits marketers and other teams who work with visual assets.
Conclusion
Businesses operate in a world where consumer behavior has shifted tremendously from even a few short years ago. Such an environment demands more functionality from all technology. Thankfully, the functionality of digital asset management solutions has adapted to solve customer experience challenges: consistency, personalization, performance management, dynamic personalization and more.
Learn more at wedia-group.com.
As VP of Sales, North America at Wedia, Michael brings more than 30 years of hands-on marketing operations experience to the table. Michael has helped multiple global companies streamline their brand marketing and operations process through innovative use of technology and structuring, and has been instrumental in enabling clients to gain higher return on their marketing budgets.
