More content, more problems? If you’re part of the 89% of marketers who are continuing to invest in content development, then consider joining me for Forrester SiriusDecisions Summit 2020 to learn about all things digital asset management (DAM). 

If your company wants to better manage its explosion of content, follow the lead of the many organizations that have turned to DAM. Over the next year, about 25% of marketing decision makers say refreshing aged content and creating derivative assets from existing content are among their top content priorities.[i] Despite these intentions, marketers and content creators still struggle with age-old issues: developing content for the right audiences, keeping their content libraries up to date, and reusing assets. In other words, today’s content processes are wasting employee hours and marketing budgets.

Companies need to think about content differently. Instead of building your content like a brick wall that stands the test of time, think of your content more like a LEGO set. You use building blocks to create sections of a village. Those same blocks can be recombined in new ways to make a race car or space shuttle. By building content this way — with rich, multifaceted metadata — companies can deliver the right experiences to the right customers at the right time.

Today’s digital asset management systems have grown out of static content storage/management and moved upstream to facilitate creation and collaboration and downstream into content delivery. Among other benefits, enterprise DAM can streamline digital experience efforts and:

  • Increase operational efficiency. One of the most common components of a DAM business case is driving efficiency and getting content to market faster. Most DAM vendors offer native workflow capabilities to help streamline content creation, internal and external collaboration, and approvals processes. Tight integrations with commerce platforms, web content management systems, and other marketing tools can decrease delivery time and improve customer experiences.
  • Reduce content recreation costs. We’ve all seen the dreaded “final1.jpg,” “final2.jpg,” and so on. DAMs centralize assets to ensure that users aren’t wasting their time locating assets or unnecessarily recreating content. DAM also has robust version control so that users don’t run into issues like using out–of–date assets. DAMs also enable creators to break down content into smaller pieces that they can combine and reuse.
  • Build the foundation for personalization. Though brands typically know a lot about their customers, they have very little insight into their content. DAMs can enrich content using artificial intelligence for auto-tagging and trainable AI for business-specific tags. This rich content data fuels personalization initiatives by allowing users to reassemble the most relevant content for target audiences.

In my upcoming Summit 2020 presentation, we’ll dive deeper into the business case for an enterprise DAM, vendors serving the space, and convergence and consolidation in the market. I look forward to seeing you there!

[i] Source: Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics® Marketing Survey, 2019