Over the years, Nina Brakel-Schutt, director of creative and brand strategy, Widen (an enterprise digital asset managementOpens a new window solutions provider), has managed a team of graphic designers, video producers, and creative technologists. While collaborating across five to six teams, Brakel-Schutt realized that “consistency†in brand messaging and visual expression breeds believability and trust for consumers. She brings this learning to our discussion on how digital asset management solutions can create and deliver assetsOpens a new window that offer consistent and compelling brand messages across the screens.
In this edition of MarTalk Buzz, Brakel-Schutt addresses how a DAM solution contributes to a brand’s bottom line. She talks about what marketers need to know before investing in the right solution, why crafting effective content marketing and publishing strategies for the customer is a must today, and how enterprises can eliminate redundant data entry, and introduce self-serve access to product information.
Key takeaways on building the bottom-line with DAM solutions:
- Establish a programmatic method for creating, centralizing, sharing, and repurposing of brand assets.
- DAM solutions, like most organization-wide systems, often require change managementOpens a new window to help realize the potential of the investment.
- DAM solutions that offer integrations with tools like AI tagging, photo production, and product information keep all of your content centralized and leverage the data across all systems, which helps you make better decisions, faster, and go to market just as fast.
Here’s the edited transcript from our exclusive interview with Nina Brakel-Schutt:
1. What is the major driver for the adoption of digital asset management (DAM) solutions? What are the top 3 best practices that marketers need to follow to create and deliver assets that offer consistent and compelling brand messages across the screens?
One major driver of DAM adoption is the need for greater productivity and efficiency in an organization’s marketing operations. Streamlining marketing workflows with DAM makes it exponentially easier to ingest huge numbers of assets and get them in the hands of multiple stakeholder groups anywhere in the world, on demand.
3 best practices all marketers can embrace to deliver a consistent and compelling brand are:
- Know who you are as an organization and what do you stand for and be true to that always. Ask what unique value do you offer? And, why is any of that meaningful to your audiences? Then create a message and visual platform based on who you are ensuring it serves as a launchpad for all your brand communications and experiences.
- Establish corporate brand guidelines. You can start small with usage guidelines for your logo, fonts, colors, and image style, but go deeper when possible to include examples of your brand in action at the corporate and sub brand levels. Then promote your guidelines, so everyone who needs them can find and use them. This is where a DAM system comes in handy.
- Establish a programmatic method for creating, centralizing, sharing, and repurposing of brand assets. Analyze your brand asset performance regularly (clicks, shares, downloads, likes) and continue to create more of the assets that perform well and reinforce your organization’s unique value.
2. In what ways digital asset management (DAM) solutions help build a brand’s bottom line? What are the top 3 elements of DAM solutions that marketers need to know before investing in the right solution?
A DAM solution contributes to a brand’s bottom line by saving time and resources (fewer hours spent searching for brand assets, uploading assets, and sharing from a central source of truth), protecting assets from accidental loss or deletion, preventing usage fees from rights violations, infusing brand consistency across marketing and sales, and ensuring that the correct versions of assets are always used in your digital channels.
When looking for a DAM solution, it’s important to find one that’s the right fit for your business, brand, and culture. DAM solutions, like most organization-wide systems, often require change management to help realize the potential of the investment. You may also have IT limitations within your organization, so understand if you want an on-premise solution, a cloud-based solution, or one that is a hybrid of both.
Last, but not least, you need to understand your internal business requirements and goals to invest in a solution that will yield results. Does a solution provide the security criteria, AI tools, breadth of applications, and service support you need? These are all important considerations that will make or break your investment in DAM.
Learn More: Managing Digital Assets Successfully: Four Essential StepsOpens a new window
3. Cloud-based DAM democratizes digital media management and delivery across an enterprise. In what ways, can marketers eliminate redundant data entry, introduce self-serve access to product information, and speed up distribution?
The short answer is good metadata practices, integrations, and a dedicated DAM admin. Features like bulk metadata entry, controlled vocabulary, metadata lists and dropdowns, asset upload profiles, and user roles and permissions allow people to self-serve assets when they need them, only seeing and accessing what they need to see, download, or share. A good DAM admin can do simple things like control the release dates of groups of campaign assets to certain user roles, expire assets when rights are no longer valid, and keep the DAM system clean and organized like a well-oiled machine.
DAM solutions that offer integrations with tools like AI tagging, photo production, and product information keep all of your content centralized and leverage the data across all systems, which helps you make better decisions, faster, and go to market just as fast.
Public-facing portals are also a great way to quickly share custom groups of assets in beautifully branded environments, with sales teams, dealers, agents, the media, or other stakeholders who just need a subset of your brand-approved assets.
4. When it comes to purchase decision of consumers, which two factors make a tremendous impact on it? How can cloud-based DAM solutions manage that information and provide an edge to e-commerce brands in the market?
DAM solutions create relevance by providing content creators the intelligence to know what marketers and sellers are using based on what they are downloading and sharing from the mast digital asset repository. Moreover, it provides designers, marketers, and ecommerce managers the insight to know what imagery is resonating most with buyers based on views of the photos, videos, and documents that are embedded across multiple online platforms, including websites, ecommerce pages, email, and landing pages. These insights help marketers continue to create and deliver the content that is in highest demand. DAM solutions also allow marketers to control the circulation of branded content that is out of date or out of demand.
DAM solutions support brand consistency by helping all marketers, sellers, supporters, and conveyors of the brand experience use the highest quality, most recent, brand-approved content provided by the central source of truth. Consistency across customer touchpoints over time creates believability, and believability creates trust between a brand and its consumers.
Learn More: What to Expect of Digital Asset Management in the near FutureOpens a new window
5. Widen recentlyOpens a new window title=”Opens a new window” target=”_blank” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”> launchedOpens a new window a product information management (PIM) solution. Can you tell us more about how brands can assemble and distribute marketing copy, specs, and assets with the Widen Collective ®?
Widen’s PIM solution helps marketers prepare for product launches and product marketing campaigns by making it easy to collect and share digital assets and product information about the products they represent in one central source of truth.
Entries is the Widen Collective application integrated into the DAM+PIM platform used to manage your product content and channel distribution. Product marketers import product specs from an upstream source-of-truth ERP or PLM system. Then, enrich this data with marketing copy, related digital assets, usage restrictions, and pricing info. Then, distribute this product content to downstream channels such as an e-commerce site, digital marketplaces, or a print catalog.
Serving as the conduit between product management and ecommerce teams, Widen Paths is the business process management (BPM) engine used to notify copywriters and other creatives when new products require marketing copy enrichment.
Altogether, the Widen Collective helps facilitate the flow of content from creation to distribution.
6. What lessons can digital native brands learn from the changes in customers’ content and visual design preferences in 2020 and post COVID-19 era?
Digital native brands tend to iterate and move quickly, they may not always meet the consumer desire for authentic experiences. I think we’re seeing a shift toward more appreciation for beautiful design that feels genuine across marketing communications, in our homes, in our daily lives, and the places where we spend time. A greater sense of connection through our digital experiences. Great social media experiences create followings that do not necessarily have a dollar value, but garner engagement for the long-term. That equates to money over time in the form of purchases, referrals, recommendations, or positive reviews and feedback.
COVID-19 is only spurring the need for greater authenticity in our digital experiences. While forcing people to slow down and appreciate the small things, the COVID environment is also challenging Det Norske Veritas (DNVs) to innovate incrementally instead of at 200 miles an hour. DNVs will see greater success by building off the content and design preferences people already had going into the pandemic, rather than trying to serve them radically new ways to engage. Change is always hard for people, but it will be particularly difficult after the economy opens again and invites consumers back. So, the less change DNVs present to consumers in their content and design, the better. Give people experiences that feel familiar but are enhanced. Do not try to come at them with completely new and different technologies or innovations.
7. What are your top 3 tips for brands on crafting effective content marketing and publishing strategies for the customer?
- Repurpose and reuse your big rock content to get the most mileage from it, rather than spending time always creating net new content. Leverage your content across social, email, websites, and more, but serve it up as appetizers (social teaser), meals (web pages and guides), and dessert (dynamic content as the icing on the cake).
- Set goals for your marketing content, so you know if it’s successful and whether or not to do more or less of the same in the future.
- Don’t follow a one-size-fits-all philosophy for your content. People expect personalized experiences and that means content that’s tailored to their moment, their preference for content consumption (whitepaper, video, webinar, blog post) and their stage in the customer journey (awareness, consideration, decision).
Learn More: The Marketing-IT Disconnect over DAM and How to Overcome itOpens a new window
8. What does 2020 have in store for the DAM industry?
The DAM technology landscape will continue to converge with a myriad of other technology platform that rely on some form of content repository to power experiences. This consolidation is already happening with DAM and product information management (PIM), marketing resource management (MRM), project management, content marketing, web content management (WCM), customer relationship management (CRM), sales enablement, social media management, marketing automation, digital marketing hubs, and more.
There will continue to be many choices for DAM software – both stand-alone and blended solutions. We’ll see mergers between independent and larger software platforms. And there will be more new vendors to enter the market with a focus on specific problems for specific industries.
The future of DAM is integrated, automated, end-to-end content lifecycle management from creation to experience. With cloud technology, modern DAM solutions deploy quickly and scale easily. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps users uncover the “dark data†in their repositories. Automated workflows allow teams to drive efficiencies and gain visibility into the creation and distribution process. And rich data and analytics empower businesses to become insights-driven organizations.
Core capabilities
These are the capabilities that will make that possible:
- Integrated ecosystems – DAM software is the source of truth for all branded and visual content. It should be treated as the single repository that is the connection point to other platforms for work management, customer data, and customer experience. Most content users and consumers will get the assets they need from a DAM system without logging in.
- Automated workflows – From notifications to status changes to file transformations, DAM technology will facilitate collaboration across teams without friction and get the right asset for the job, regardless of the filetype or channel.
- End-to-end content lifecycle management – From the genesis of an idea to the destination of the customer experience, DAMs systems will facilitate the flow of content across all major phases of creation, management, distribution, analysis, archiving, and end-of-life. Smart DAM platforms continue to extend upstream and downstream through a rich ecosystem of connections to the points of creation, collaboration, dissemination, and consumption.
9. What does this mean to customers?
The future DAM powers a personalized consumer experience by managing atomized content assets at the most basic levels. DAM will extend beyond visual assets and documents into written content for campaigns, product catalogs, and digital marketplaces. With all content in a central source, personalized experiences can be programmatically delivered across all channels and customer touchpoints.
About Nina Brakel-SchuttOpens a new window :
Nina leads creative and brand strategy at Widen. Before joining Widen in 2012, she spent over 20 years on the agency side in Chicago helping small and large organizations communicate their brands.
About WidenOpens a new window :
Established in 1948, Widen builds high-performing software that empowers organizations to create impactful, measurable, and consistent brand experiences. Its platform spans brand management, marketing resource management, and product information management solutions and has enabled over one million marketers, content creators, and technologists at over 660 global brands to better connect with audiences.
About MarTalk Buzz:
MarTalk Buzz is an interview series where marketing leaders and marketing technology companies that are making a difference, connect with us and share their stories. Join us as we talk to them about their product journeys, insights on the categories they serve, what works for them, and some bonus pro-tips.
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