With omnichannel marketing the goal is to create a unique, consistent, and integrated brand experience that increases revenue. The overall consumer outreach is more holistic so regardless of channel, there is consistency and continuity. If customers move from one channel to another their journey should continue seamlessly.

Optimizing content use is a necessity for successful omnichannel marketing.

With both multi-channel marketing and omni-channel marketing you need to create a content strategy that communicates the same or similar message and design across all channels and devices as well as partner or third-party websites. The content should be consistent and cohesive. Therefore, the reuse or repurposing of content is fundamental to the strategy.

But driving increased reuse of existing content has always been an important way to utilize marketing and advertising funds more efficiently. In the fast-paced market of advertising you are expected to produce more for your brands, with the same or an even smaller budget. How do you maximize your investments and better monetize your content where it can be made available for continued use with minimal or no additional cost? Ideally you want to avoid allocating funds to remedying errors and reworking content and reuse as much as is relevant, so you can apply those same dollars to increasing your brand exposure across channels.

Brand Consistency and Transparency

An effective content strategy also needs to consider and address brand transparency. Global brands are seeking to inject transparency into their media buying and distribution workflows, and CMOs are looking for ways to gain ownership of their data and protect their brands, while continuing to work with outside agencies.

To achieve brand consistency and transparency, ultimately an organization’s content should be shared across the company’s marketing teams and its affiliated agencies; it should be indexed and easily searchable; and finally, it should be presented in a way where a content consumer can know if they are able to reuse or repurpose it and exactly how, when and where. To do this effectively and gain ROI, you must have a robust process for planning, estimating, and licensing content to balance the financial and brand priorities of an organization.

Digital Rights Management Empowering Content Reuse

Omnichannel marketing is fundamentally about driving an improved customer experience but also better maximizing the use of your existing content. As such it is critical that you consider your go-to-market campaign strategy for channels delivered across territories targeted and timeframe boundaries.

But what if you have premium content with unique usage rights that also carry a significant (often financial) penalty for failing to comply with agreements?  Enter digital rights management.

Digital rights management is the management of asset and content rights information against those campaign variables of channels, territories, and timeframes. By automating checks and balances of content across those variables, companies can mitigate copyright infringements while empowering greater content reuse.

Here are some recommendations for applying these concepts from planning to production to post-production.

• Content Selection and Planning to the Greater Vision – As we mentioned earlier, the content strategy and display decision is strategic and directly ties back to your multi-channel and omnichannel goals and objectives. After doing the needed data analysis, fully understanding the buyer’s journey and defining your brand objectives, you will need to create a content strategy that maps accordingly.But this ideally starts at the beginning so that you not only select or produce content to maximize the customer’s experience, but you keep an eye toward to the vision of potential points-of-sale, distribution channels, and target devices, as well as growth across your geographical markets.Additionally, if you can increase the visibility into usage terms for the content that you have already invested in and provide that at-a-glance information in real time, then you can identify where you may need to amend terms. This could be a huge cost savings rather than producing new content from scratch. And if you can gather any trending business intelligence such as how often the content is being used and when, where and how, then you may also be able to negotiate for more favorable terms.

• Invest in solutions for centralization – Digital Asset Management is your solution for centralization and it is important to create a model designed to support the repurposing of content for multi-channel marketing distribution. However, optimize it further to centralize contracts and rights for that content, otherwise you are only solving for half the problem. A consolidation effort allows for easy searchability and sharing. However, you want to ensure that you are not promoting the misuse of content by doing so.By ensuring that rights are centralized and accessible you empower teams to make informed decisions, arm your legal teams to defend the usage, and protect the reputation of your brand and company. Additionally, the knowledge of where there are exceptions is useful knowledge. Your team can amend and extend agreements rather than produce and acquire from scratch.
  During your centralization effort it is important to inventory the type of content that is rights-managed, understand what dictates its rights (such as the one or more associated contracts) and know where that content and their rights are stored so that the proper connections are made.

• Increase Visibility to Stakeholders – Visibility is power. With any effective omni-channel marketing strategy it comes down to providing visibility on many levels and across all stakeholders – marketers, brand managers, creatives, business affairs, agencies.You need to gain business intelligence about the consumer experience to fully understand how it is navigated. You need to gain business intelligence around the content delivery and receptiveness. All of this will help you create the right strategy and make more effective business decisions. You will also be able to negotiate better terms when armed with the right information.Visibility is also critical during the production process, internally and externally. Not just understanding what is available but also understanding the content’s digital rights. By adding visibility during the creative and production process you are injecting transparency and creating greater compliance.Finally, visibility post-production can greatly improve your company’s processes. For instance by reporting on asset and contract expirations you are able to proactively handle impending expirations and negotiate for extensions.

• Carefully Plan your Post Production Strategy – In an omnichannel marketing world, post-production plans are key. You want to be able to track which content is being used by your partners and on your e-commerce and social channels, as well as where and how it is being delivered so that you can ensure compliance with content expirations and consistency with brand messaging and design. Managing and maintaining those exit points should not be overlooked.

In Summary

To optimize content usage in an omnichannel marketing world, you need to prioritize both brand consistency as well as introduce an outside-in view from the buyer’s perspective to create a customer-centric approach. There is a balance here that is required to achieve the ultimate goal of delivering content and messaging across all channels, devices, and territories that provides for a truly integrated experience – and do so without impacting corporate risk of copyright infringement.