Excerpt from Gartner thought leadership.
Digital marketing leaders responsible for content marketing and operations should know how to implement a technology ecosystem but face a confusing, overlapping and rapidly changing landscape. Use this research to plan technology that supports agility and personalized customer experiences at scale.
- New generative AI (GenAI)- enabled features enable staff to create assets faster than strategy teams can support, making it harder to understand overlapping capabilities that decrease tech utilization in the stack.
- Content management includes an increasingly complex ecosystem of platforms, workflows and channels with content from text, image and video to 3D, virtual reality and changing customer consumption. These behaviors, driven by GenAI, include natural language and chatbots.
- Digital marketing leaders are expected to increasingly understand the value different technologies provide across product information management (PIM), digital asset management (DAM),content marketing platforms (CMPs) and marketing work management (MWM) and media asset management (MAM).
- Work cross-functionally to coordinate the creation of a shared enterprise perspective on how content moves as data through tools in the content operations ecosystem to facilitate automation and avoid overlapping capabilities.
- Understand the overlap DAMs offer for workflow capabilities and how they differ from full MWM functionality.
- Differentiate the content creation capabilities between CMPs and DAMs to determine a best-fit solution according to the use case.
- Navigate coinciding the roles of PIM and DAM in managing content specifications related to products.
- Learn how vendors facilitate MAM and DAM crossover when considering an integrated DAM/MAM offering.
Introduction
Digital marketing leaders must be able to scale their content capabilities to connect the right content to the correct customer at the appropriate time on any channel and any device. Modern content operations technology is the foundation upon which those capabilities rests.
Organizations that manage 11 or more marketing channels are twice as likely to successfully optimize their multichannel marketing investment compared with those that manage fewer channels.1 Those channels require technology for efficient management.
Content operations are defined as the platforms and processes for marketers to create, manage, distribute and measure content experiences. It’s a set of technologies defined not just by their individual functions but as the sum of parts. Content operators integrate these technologies, refine the process of creating or acquiring assets, modify and approve those assets, and put the tools in the hands of the marketing teams.
These systems need to deliver efficiency, transparency and scale for diverse user groups across an entire organization. GenAI has thrust content operations into the center of the conversation around how to create and deliver the most compelling experiences for customers. In fact, GenAI has led to a renewed focus on assessing the existing tech stack, understanding overlapping capabilities, and identifying where GenAI can support efficiency across the stack, while enhancing automation
Work Cross-Functionally to Coordinate the Creation of a Shared Enterprise Perspective
Vendors in PIM, work management, CMP and other spaces continue to develop basic DAM capabilities to organize and store assets. Likewise, vendors in the DAM space have acquired CMP and MWM capabilities. These overlapping capabilities create confusion for marketers unsure if they need just one or multiple of these products to meet their needs. Despite significant changes in how marketing manages martech, utilization of existing capabilities has decreased from 42% in 2022 to 33% in 2023.2
Even as accelerating overlap and confusion occurs, vendors continue to enhance their own APIs, develop productized integrations with other marketing technologies, and form partnerships with players in adjacent categories like web content management, e-commerce and social marketing management.
GenAI is adding additional complexity. Every vendor has a flavor of GenAI to solve your problems, but not all features and functions will help your team achieve their goals. Productivity improvements are the current focus of most GenAI applications across content operations. It’s not just about making more content, it’s about making content that delivers better customer experiences across channels.
The overlap and new features bring the opportunity to review the content operations stack and eliminate vendors that are no longer necessary. As a flood of AI-first content vendors hits the market and others add capabilities, evaluate how they support bottlenecks and gaps in your current content operations stack. Ask for proven case studies within your industry to ensure the promise meets the reality.
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