Nearly every digital experience today centers around persuading audiences to engage with your content and digital brand assets. Marketing teams are responsible for rapidly producing a growing amount of compelling, engaging, and accurate content to support customers and nurture prospects who have the intent to purchase. You could say you are tasked with marketing at the speed of the world, while also maintaining a competitive advantage through the introduction of more and better experiences.
With numerous digital assets and data underpinning your digital experiences across a variety of channels, the challenge is ensuring you can successfully reach your customer at the right time, with the right message. With so many variables, you’re probably struggling to streamline workflows and overcome content chaos, all while maintaining brand consistency. Success lies in taking an innovative approach to the technology you are using.
In this article, I explore how redefining your Martech stack with a digital asset management (DAM) system and digital experience platform (DXP) will ensure marketers like you are better poised to competently deliver the experiences that set your brand apart.
Streamlining digital experience workflows
Digital experience capabilities are highly influenced by the technology a marketer has access to, and complex organizational workflows are one of the main obstacles to producing meaningful content quickly. According to Forrester research, digital marketing and e-commerce decision-makers identified organizational and content silos as the top barrier to delivering a more successful digital experience. As it stands, many teams are working across separate systems that can be difficult to manage or integrate. Moreover, with digital assets scattered across different platforms, hard drives, or cloud storage tools, developing and deploying content can require too much manual intervention — a burden that introduces errors. Likewise, when marketing teams must rely on IT to accomplish critical tasks like spinning up new websites or apps, the entire experience cycle slows down and time that could otherwise be spent innovating is lost. Instead, marketers should look to streamline and automate their workflows supported by DAM and DXP technologies.
DAM is the practice of administering, categorizing, and securing digital media assets.
Using a DAM software solution, teams can centralize and automate their efforts by keeping content organized, searchable, and ready for use.
Moreover, DAM systems include a metadata structure that makes digital assets easy to find, control, access and transform. Metadata is descriptive information generated whenever a digital asset is created, uploaded, downloaded, or modified. Basic metadata can be used to streamline content workflows by setting up no-code, rule-based automation to notify users when new content is available. For example, using metadata to trigger actions such as notifying your social media team when there are new graphics available, or alerting your digital team when an asset they’ve purchased is going to expire. When digital assets are clearly organized, content can be easily used by the whole business — from marketing and sales to partners and vendors. This leads to increased collaboration and productivity and improved digital experiences on every channel.
A digital experience platform (DXP) gives marketers the tools to gather comprehensive, cross-channel data to understand their customers, and then incorporate these learnings into the creation, management, and delivery of content. Whether a customer encounters a brand on a website, app, chatbot, social platform, customer portal, in-store kiosk, digital billboard, wearable, or other — a DXP connects all of these digital touchpoints into a smaller, more-informed ecosystem for marketers to manage.
Overcoming content chaos
Almost every step of the digital customer journey is content-driven — no matter the channel. As a result, you need to connect with your customers across more than just your web properties. A digital experience platform means you can address the entire scope of the customer experience, however, it still needs a highly organized and agile location from which to pull relevant content. That’s where a DAM system comes in. With a DAM component, a user can search and access content without leaving the DXP. This helps teams move faster and ensures that only up-to-date, approved, and on-brand assets make their way into a brand’s digital experience.
By combining a robust library of assets (DAM) with a DXP platform that offers marketing automation tools, content management capabilities (CMS), and access to customer data platform (CDP) — marketers can organize, access, and deliver a far greater amount of content. Moreover, when you add DAM to your DXP, it enables functionalities that empower teams to be self-sufficient and create complex, elegant, content-driven digital experiences that build customer loyalty.
Maintaining brand consistency and governance
All stakeholders involved in creating digital experiences need to follow the same set of rules, but without the right technology and tools, marketers can struggle to maintain brand consistency and governance. Content rights and usage regulations, for example, must be adhered to. Likewise, the use of out-of-date assets should be prevented to preserve brand integrity. With the right DXP in place, organizations are afforded governance controls to keep content on-brand, protect customer privacy, and mitigate risks. Furthermore, with the right DAM system in place, teams can work together to:
- Centralize approved brand assets in one place
- Control which users can access which assets
- Share brand guidelines with creators and partners
- Streamline content review and approval
- Enforce brand guidelines during new content creation
- Curate content and information for sales teams, dealers, partners, and agencies
- Localize brand content for different regions and cultures
- Evolve brand tactics and strategy based on asset analytics
- Extend final creative files and messaging to other everyday tools
Combining a DAM that functions as a central source of truth for digital assets with a DXP, helps you minimize compliance risks and ensures efficient governance of content.
A strong digital experience is contingent on so much that happens behind the scenes. A DXP that has a DAM as its foundation for collaboration, coordination, and control is the solution marketers need. Being able to manage content and marketing workflows with better organization, greater intelligence, increased agility, and improved governance helps fuel personalization and increased engagement. Ultimately, redefining your Martech stack with DAM and DXP will help you deliver better and faster online experiences that meet and exceed the expectations of your customers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jake Athey, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Acquia
Jake Athey is Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Acquia. He joined Widen in 2004 as a marketing intern and served as the company’s VP of Marketing and Customer Experience from 2017 through the acquisition by Acquia in 2021. He led early sales and marketing efforts that were pivotal to Widen’s growth and transformation story. Jake placed Widen on the marketing technology map by building a brand that is now trusted by more than 700 companies and over one million users.
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