Excerpt from Gartner.com
With the expanding volume and velocity of content, real-time personalization, and global distribution, digital marketing leaders are investigating digital asset management solutions to increase collaboration and facilitate modular content operations.
Digital marketing leaders struggle to scale and manage their growing content operations and asset production. At every touchpoint in a customer journey, brands must deliver relevant content. The wide-ranging examples include digital images, ad copy, FAQs, technical specifications and answers from a call center by chat or telephone. All content represents the brand and must be consistent and correct to benefit the audience.
As the types of content and personalization used in marketing and communications increase and digital marketers prioritize the delivery of consistent messaging in real time, their need to manage content at scale is critical. But the reality can be more complex than the aspiration.
Today’s digital marketing leaders dedicate significant resources to creating, organizing and managing photos, videos, graphics, copy and other marketing content to meet demand. With increased investment in content comes the necessity for dedicating even more technology resources to meet modern content marketing needs.
How Digital Asset Management Capabilities Aid the Content Life Cycle
In the past, creative or video production roles were the primary users of DAM systems. Today, DAM solutions support more than just marketing and creatives; they’re also used by production, operational and administrative roles across the business—inside and outside an organization. This is a critical distinction for teams working with agencies, freelancers or other partners.
Digital assets aren’t limited to images and video. DAMs handle any content stored, rendered and managed digitally — including text, design files, podcasts, product information, etc. If used to their full capability, DAMs serve as the self-service content system of record, facilitate collaboration and empower omnichannel solutions for modern marketing teams.
According to the 2023 Gartner Multichannel Marketing Survey, nearly two-thirds of organizations that manage 11 or more channels expect to continue altering their channel strategy and mix into 2023.2. This includes keeping their channel mix the same but changing their priorities with each channel (33%) and further increasing the number of channels they use (26%).
With an increasing need for content across channels, organization and search functionality become imperative since adding more channels will also strain resources. If collaboration is the goal, a DAM solution can serve every part of the organization, including sales, HR, technology, manufacturing, e-commerce, legal, finance, call and service centers, third-party suppliers, agencies, distributors, and others.
Most stand-alone DAM platforms can support the end-to-end marketing content life cycle. They are the hub enabling content delivery to various execution systems as needed.
Yet, achieving the vision of a single “hub” is easier said than done. In the 2022 Gartner Marketing and Communications Technology Survey, survey respondents claimed to use 2.5 DAM vendors on average.3 The reasons why can vary.
Content operations work typically spans multiple overlapping technologies. It is common for content operations to include integrations between DAM and various marketing, data and enterprise platform systems. The resulting overlap of functionalities can make it more complex to select a single solution, resulting in teams using various tools with DAM capabilities. Other teams may use multiple DAMs because of legacy contracts across functions. Or, their scope is complex with multiple teams, brands and geographies, making multiple DAMs a more streamlined approach.
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