Editorial
The Gist
- Digital asset efficiency. DAM enhances CX by centralizing and automating asset management, accelerating personalized customer experiences.
- AI-driven creation. Generative AI in DAM revolutionizes asset creation, enabling rapid, personalized content tailored to consumer preferences.
- Multi-channel engagement. DAM combined with customer data analytics offers personalized storytelling across multiple channels, boosting engagement.
DAM Accelerates Personalization Capabilities
It’s no secret that today’s consumers expect good customer experiences. And personalization is at the core of positive CX. Though powered by multi-channel marketing platforms, digital asset management (DAM) can accelerate the ability for brands to meet these high demands for personalized experiences.
Let’s explore.
Related Article: Why Personalized Experiences Need a DAM at the Core
Digital Asset Management Fundamentals
Digital asset management is as much a set of software capabilities as it is a company mindset of keeping branded images, graphics, videos and other media files (digital assets) centrally organized, accessible and secure.
The fundamentals of DAM include developing a thoughtful taxonomy to tag assets with metadata and defining access privileges to allow for discovery, protection and asset reuse.
Having a sound digital asset management practice allows consumer-facing organizations to find approved assets quickly, distribute them instantly and remove the question of which version to use.
Related Article: Need to Get Scrappy? Use Your DAM Metadata
Why DAM Benefits CX
Here are four reasons why customer experience professionals should care about the future of DAM. And it starts with the power of automation.
- Automation speeds up asset creation
- Generative AI scales asset creation faster than ever with text-to-image innovators like Open AI DALL·E 3, Adobe Firefly and Canva Magic Design. Sure, you’ll still need a human touch to refine the output, but buckle up, generative AI is changing the pace of asset creation.
- Automation makes it faster to publish product images with different backdrops, colors and settings, which can better match consumer preferences.
- Automation also can transform videos and images into various sizes, including sizing up photos without losing detail. Within clicks you can have assets ready for all channels to reach consumers where they are.
- Automation simplifies workflows
- Tag assets automatically with image recognition and keyword suggestions. For example, Amazon Rekognition can analyze millions of images, streaming and stored videos within seconds, and augment human review tasks with AI.
- Final assets get ready for publishing faster than ever thanks to accelerated photo and video editing techniques and automated workflows. Having an organized DAM system from which to share the final assets puts creative content instantly into the hands of regional divisions, third-party sellers and global commerce teams.
- A DAM practice with automated approval workflows provides guardrails to reinforce brand consistency at scale.
- Scaling asset creation opens multi-channel campaign options
- More visual assets means more opportunities to tell visual stories and connect people to your brand.
- And yet, the key to personalizing visual storytelling lies within your customer data.
- Enterprise platforms such as those from Insider, Adobe, Salesforce and other vendors let you micro-segment your audiences based on interests, behaviors, propensities, past purchases and more. They provide advanced multi-channel personalization capabilities. And combined with DAM it's a powerful combination.
- “A major use case of DAM is asset reusability. You don’t want to do a new photo shoot if you already have existing assets,” stated Ian Matzen, senior brand asset manager at ICP. “As we head into deeper levels of personalization, there will be more opportunity to find value in your existing asset library. For example if a company has an old advertisement that works on a certain group of people around the holidays, you can reuse it for that group at that time of year.”
- What you learn about your customers will increasingly influence the type of images you’ll want to drop in their inboxes.
- For your mobile purchasers, show product images with cell phones in the shot.
- Seasonal holiday-only shoppers? Show gift-giving imagery.
- And even for anonymous site visitors, you can personalize their experience in real-time according to the pages they’re visiting and other in-session behaviors.
- Asset metrics provide a feedback loop
- Leverage asset metrics to see how assets perform. Learn about your top downloads, how and where they are being used.
- Look to your DAM analytics to validate creative trends and see what's working well now and for who.
Many companies catalog brand images, videos and other media files into a DAM, but too often this data is siloed away from marketing campaigns. Moving forward, leaders can improve customer experience by getting campaign teams talking with asset managers.
Embracing the Future: DAM as the Keystone of Enhanced CX
For the segments you plan to test in 2024 — channels, behaviors, purchase propensity, purchase history, color preferences, lifestyle interests — whatever it is, campaign managers and customer experience professionals will unlock more visual storytelling options and conversion capabilities by pulling from their DAM system.
And if you don’t yet have a central digital asset management program in place, it’s never too late to start. You’ll want an experienced leader to take you through the process of workshopping all the downstream needs. And automation will get you up and running quickly once the plan is constructed.
Just as machine learning requires better source data labeling to accurately train in-house models, so too will new customer experiences demand better owned-assets labeling to surface highly valuable brand assets, and the DAM is the best place to get that work done.
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