Marketing operations have evolved significantly over the past decade. The ubiquity of social media, the popularity of digital content, and the expansion of marketing channels have created a saturated and competitive digital marketplace. As a result, businesses are increasingly improving their ability to develop and deliver compelling content to bolster their online presence.
Recent research has revealed that almost half of surveyed B2C brands increased their investment in content marketing in 2022 and almost three quarters of respondents spent a significant amount of their marketing budget on content.
As more companies use content marketing tools to deliver content online, digital asset management (DAM) solutions become essential to ensure that marketing content is effective across multiple delivery channels. However, the increased popularity of these solutions has also created a saturated marketplace that can be difficult for marketing teams to navigate. Here are some things that businesses should keep an eye out for when choosing a DAM solution that suits their needs.
What every effective DAM solution should have
A comprehensive asset system of record
Content marketing is a long-term engagement for many businesses and marketing teams need a comprehensive record of their past, present, and planned future marketing material. Effective DAM solutions must have the ability to store and display these materials in a way that provides marketing leaders with a bird’s eye view of their content operations strategy.
Modular Content powers personalized experiences at scale
Content marketing materials are designed to engage customers in a variety of ways. To stand out from the competition, it is important that businesses develop content that can help them deliver their message in a unique and impactful way. Effective DAM solutions must have the ability to support strategies like modular content – also known as content atomization – where content of varying sizes that can be tagged and stored via artificial intelligence for maximum findability and repurposed for future content pieces for use in any content channel.
Modular content allows you to adopt a non-linear approach to content, which not only makes how you create your content more efficient, but also enables how you repurpose your best content across channels that does not detract from the design and original intent of the content piece.
Reimagining content creation this way isn’t only a budget saver. It also provides teams an efficient means of scaling content and takes very little to get started. What teams need is a strong digital asset management solution that is more than just a parking lot for assets.
Check out the Quick Start Guide to Modular Content to learn more.
Extensive metadata to drive automation, rights, personalization, and SEO
Digital content has taken the marketing world by storm and marketing teams realize that content marketing is more than simply publishing content in a way that is consistent with the platform on which that content will be delivered.
Marketing teams must also understand how to make the most of the mechanics that enable the delivery and organization of digital content. This is why it is critical for effective marketing content to be tagged with the appropriate metadata to enable automated search engine optimization (SEO) and personalization.
Content renditions and transformations to optimize across marketing channels
B2C brands tend to have a much broader audience compared to B2B companies. This means that B2C brands must engage with their customers on a variety of platforms and use a range of content types to effectively reach their target audiences.
A recent industry survey found video content, blog posts, success stories, and case studies to be highly effective forms of content marketing. Effective DAM solutions must be able to manage the content delivered in each of these forms. These solutions should also empower marketing teams to collect and transform existing marketing materials for delivery on alternative channels when appropriate.
Workflows to orchestrate governance and automation
Marketing teams, like all other operational teams, must find ways to maintain high levels of efficiency and effectiveness. As businesses attempt to automate and govern important but repetitive operational processes with the use of digital technologies, marketing activities need to keep pace with other operational teams.
Modern and effective DAM solutions can help marketing leaders ensure high levels of governance by automating reporting processes and improving efficiency by offloading repetitive and low-value tasks to automated systems.
Fully optimized content delivery network to boost performance, engagement, and SEO
DAM solutions deliver value to marketing teams beyond simple storage and monitoring features. A fully integrated service should also have a native content delivery network that allows marketing teams to deliver newly developed content to multiple channels from a single location. This helps marketing teams consolidate marketing operations and improve performance by optimizing SEO processes during content delivery.
With Aprimo’s Public Links capabilities, content marketing teams can create a single source of truth for content with the creation of a configurable, public URL link to be created for DAM assets that can then be immediately used in customer-facing digital experiences.
This allows your teams to automatically syndicate, update, and expire assets in digital channels and instantly access your branded assets while working in your CMS, marketing automation, PIM, and email solutions. Additionally, you are able to maintain brand consistency in every channel by ensuring you’re always using the most up-to-date versions of your content.
Learn more about Public Links here.
Content insights and engagement across channels and audiences
A perceived drawback of marketing activities is that they are difficult to evaluate using relevant and insightful metrics. However, once marketing teams are able to identify the purpose content pieces are designed to serve, they can develop a clear and measurable set of performance metrics that can help quantify the success of each marketing campaign.
It is important that DAM solutions facilitate this by providing access to these statistics across different campaigns, regardless of the channel that is being evaluated or the target audience for that particular channel. Consolidating these metrics across channels also helps marketing teams adjust the marketing material or redirect resources based on the performance of each individual content piece.
One way in which modern DAMs can support this is by providing a more robust view of content performance that goes beyond vanity metrics and the elusive, time-consuming ROI. Establishing the ROI on your content operations is important. It tells you a lot about effective process and campaign management, risk mitigation, can add efficiencies, and provide a holistic understanding on campaign monetization. But all of that is retrospective. Adding a content return on effort, or ROE, metric can provide quick insights on your individual assets so your team can make better, data-based strategic decisions while a campaign is in-flight, and clearly understand which content pieces see results.
Learn more about how you can implement ROE into your content marketing analytics.
What approaches can content marketing teams take to DAM in 2023
While there are multiple approaches to selecting the best digital asset management solution, today it really boils down to two distinct models: The bundled platform, or monolithic, approach to a digital experience platform (DXP) vs the composable, best-of-breed approach that allows you the flexibility to choose the right tools for your business.
Bundled platform (monolithic) approach
The monolithic platform approach remains popular for B2C brands looking for a single vendor relationship, a unified interface across the platform, and training and adoption benefits. While this system allows business with ?one throat to choke? and a slew of additional services and offerings, the monolithic approach presents a number of challenges:
- Limited flexibility and integration capabilities beyond the platform
- Higher licensing costs, greater tech debt, paying for everything whether it’s used or not
- The platform is not actually built on a unified architecture – this often happens through acquisitions where the DAM is built on a different code base, using different content models, user accounts, and asset storage.
Further, this approach offers very basic integration between your content management system (CMS) and DAM that any vendor can replicate. The question with this unified stack is: are you really getting a single, seamless solution?
Sure, this approach allows marketing teams to work with a single vendor and consolidate negotiations?but this often means that not all offerings are optimized to the various channels that marketing teams wish to utilize.
Best of breed (composable) approach
The other approach that content marketing teams can take to DAM is the best-of-breed approach. This approach empowers businesses to work with multiple vendors and build a unique and customized stack of services and offerings that are designed to meet the specific needs of individual marketing teams. While this approach can add additional management overhead, it ensures that the resulting DAM solution is the perfect design for the needs of a business and its marketing team.
And with more organizations leveraging a multi-CMS strategy to speed time to market and getting closer to their customers at their point of need, content marketing teams are looking to expand their use cases and available toolkit beyond the platform approach.
This approach also allows organizations to place the best DAM platform for them at the core of their content operations. Rather than relying on a restricting set of tools that usually only speak with one another, your teams can use and easily swap out tools that provide the agility and flexibility that the modern marketing landscape demands.
Additionally, the best-of-breed approach enables your business to experiment with emerging channels and strategies, many of which require the latest martech that are leaps and bounds beyond the tools available in the bundled platform. The compsable approach provides extendable and open integration, allows you only pay for what you need, as well as ensuring you’re able to hire and retain employees by providing them with the best technology available.
How a composable and CMS-agnostic DAM solution helps B2C brands develop and deliver personalized content at scale
Reach multiple customer demographics with specialized marketing material across content streams
B2C brands usually appeal to a wide variety of customers and each customer segment tends to have unique content consumption habits. Businesses must find a way to deliver specialized and customized content across content streams and platforms to reach their target audiences effectively.
Even businesses that serve a single customer segment must often deliver marketing material across multiple channels due to the varied content consumption habits of the modern consumer. CMS-agnostic DAM software can help businesses reach each of these audiences while still ensuring that content operations are consolidated on a single platform for easy management.
Future-proof content operations by selecting from an evolving list of connectors, partners, and integrations
Even though content operations is becoming popular with B2C marketing teams, a significant percentage of them are still in the early stages of adoption, implementation, and execution. As marketing teams continue to evolve, customer preferences, media consumption habits, and marketing technology will also continue to change.
Businesses must develop a plan to keep pace with these changes and retain the flexibility to change course when needed. Fully customizable DAM solutions allow businesses to maintain this agility by providing marketing teams with an ever-expanding set of connectors, partners, and integrations to help them serve their customers? changing needs.
Download The Forrester Wave?: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience, Q1 2022.
Maintain consistent messaging across marketing channels by fully integrating content operations
Content marketing teams are used to managing content across a wide range of channels and platforms. However, it is critical for the effectiveness of marketing teams that a campaign’s messaging is kept consistent across every single channel?even if the content types are radically different. A consolidated DAM solution provides marketing teams with an overview of all content marketing activity and helps them create and keep track of the messaging used across campaigns, platforms, and channels.
Content marketing has been and will continue to be an integral part of any B2C brand’s marketing activity. As more customers engage with brands online, effectively designed and delivered content allows companies to rise above the clutter and deliver impactful content experiences across marketing channels and audiences. A CMS-agnostic DAM solution enables this delivery by developing a content management stack that can be customized to serve the unique needs of each brand and its marketing team.
To learn more about digital asset management for content marketing, take the self-guided tour, or request a Free DAM Trial.