Editorial
According to industry experts, marketing technology (martech) is the second most vital determinant of brand success, right after marketing and customer analytics. However, this value is only realized if companies adopt and properly use these tools. Gartner estimates that most companies utilize only about 60% of the capabilities in their martech stack. This represents a huge untapped opportunity.
This article series is focused on how to assess and improve an organization’s brand management. Thus far we’ve covered three of the five interconnected elements: strategy, people and process. Now we’ll explore how technology — specifically martech — can be used to positively impact the brand management process.
Use 100% of Your Martech Investment
Brands run more efficiently when their organization’s tech capabilities are used consistently and at capacity. One of the most important martech solutions is a digital asset management (DAM) platform. It has immense potential to add sophistication to your brand management ... if its functionality is fully leveraged.
DAM technology is the primary means for creating, managing, publishing and analyzing brand assets, including video, photography, documents, audio files, and much more. However, many organizations with a DAM platform only utilize about half of its capabilities. Maturing an investment in DAM can in turn mature brand stewardship.
Companies with only a rudimentary understanding of their DAM platform use it simply as a basic image library. They consider it an afterthought, not much more than a place to store files. It’s important to take additional steps, starting with the creation of metadata, to organize the collection and improve workflows by allowing designers and content creators to quickly locate the assets they need. Over time this maximizes the value of these files by ensuring they aren’t lost or underutilized.
As an organization’s technology usage improves they will take advantage of DAM features like version control, which aggregates and tracks each version of a file from a consistent location. They will also likely integrate their DAM platform with other martech tools to automate workflows and increase work productivity.
Next steps in maturing use of a DAM investment include creating curated portals for personalized content delivery, and using embed codes to facilitate asset deployment across the web. At the highest levels, organizations deploy their DAM capabilities throughout the enterprise and make use of analytics to inform decision-making.
Related Articles: Confessions of a Martech Tool Underachiever
Know How DAM and the Broader Martech Solutions Connect
Mapping how a DAM platform can interface with other martech solutions is a valuable developmental exercise. Take time to chart how your DAM investment can feed data to other content technologies like web content management and work management platforms. By understanding the relationships between DAM and various solutions on the information side (such as product information management, enterprise resource planning, product lifecycle management), as well as the execution side (including ad networks, web content management, email service providers), you’ll learn how to use all of your martech capabilities more effectively. Further, because these integrations position the DAM system within your martech stack as the central source of truth, they will support brand consistency across touchpoints and channels.
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Another valuable way to use technology to enhance your brand management is through DAM content analytics. These tools allow you to better understand who is accessing your content — and when, where and how it’s being used.
With analytics you can track individual assets by downloads, views, shares and retention. You can check videos to see when viewership drops off, in order to adjust content for maximum engagement. You can also see how assets are performing across different websites, and how they contribute to both traffic and purchase decisions.
Administrators have a number of uses for analytics. They can gain insight into global content performance including ROI statistics, and monitor a site’s vital signs — such as total assets, storage, uploads, downloads and shares — by reviewing site metrics.
Finally, analytics tools reveal how and where people search in your DAM site by tracking user geography down to the neighborhood level, anywhere in the world. Administrators can see which search terms are most popular, then use these insights to better manage content metadata.
When used effectively, technology can identify top performing assets, improve workflows, maximize asset ROI and help create a more positive, consistent brand perception. In the last installment in this series we’ll look at how measuring and reporting on the impact of brand management efforts will help sustain your long-term brand success.
Related Article: Why Digital Asset Management Is Now Officially Martech
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