Global marketing is a challenge, regardless of the size of the company. In order to communicate with your customers and prospect you have to have the right content, in the right format, where the customer or prospect wants to consume it. The “right content” means that the pictures, text, videos, audio, messaging and more are appropriate for each region, geography, demographic or culture, and device. In regulated industries, like pharmaceutical and medical devices, it also has to comply with various regulations. Even within a country such as here in the US, how do you make sure that you’re marketing snow shovels in winter in New England while you’re marketing swimsuits and golf clubs in Florida and Arizona?
Having the right content for the right region is one challenge. Having the processes in place to assure that you’ve got the content in the first place, and you’re using it correctly where it’s needed, and can review and approve it, is another challenge. So much of marketing is communicating with images, graphics, video etc. but often we don’t know, or can’t find or feel we have to create or re-create this content for each project. In many organizations this marketing content is not under management. It’s strewn about various people’s laptop hard drives and email systems. Think for yourself, can you find what you need when you need it? In one place? And in the format that you need? And further, how do you conduct your review and approval processes — by email and perhaps PDF? Are you sure you have the right, most current version of the file? How do you know? Are your processes efficient or time consuming? Could they be streamlined — making sure that everyone who needs to be involved, IS involved, regardless of where they are in the world, and is working on the right version of the file, and that some tool is monitoring that process so you don’t have to? Most global or regional marketing review processes involve many people, often across time zones and typically one person is tasked with “herding the cats” across regions, making sure the review, approval, revision process continues and stays on track.
A third challenge is the broadening set of devices and “channels” on which or from which your audience wishes to consume the content. How do you maintain brand consistency, not only across regions, but across devices, web sites, print, and broadcast/cable/web video? What tools do you have in place to help you manage the consistency of your communication, images, brand, logos across your distribution channels — your regional sales teams, partners, circulars/flyers/inserts/corporate web site/and in-store promotions, or affiliated or branded web sites?
These 3 challenges are where Digital Asset Management (DAM) can really help and provide great value. Companies like Ford Motor Company, who want to launch a consistent global campaign for a new car in 122 countries simultaneously are turning to DAM to provide the collaborative and file management infrastructure to enable their global teams to communicate, share media, and drive not only brand consistency, but streamline collaborative global review & approval processes leading to faster time-to-market in 122 markets.
A DAM provides a common repository for rapidly locating files, and for automating content format changes into common Web, print, video and other intermediate or dynamic formats — saving the team time and reducing resourcing and cost on repetitive format conversion services. As well DAM systems can assist with review/approval cycles by supporting these file- or “asset-centric” workflows. It can allow teams to efficiently collaborate and work on the right version of a file in the right sequence across regions, eliminating file version confusion (a great and common point of pain), and some DAMs can monitor the full process, keeping status and notifying people about the task at hand.
Internet brands and advertising agencies which advertise across a variety of media — web sites with different requirements for ad sizes, ad formats (e.g., still vs. animated), or demographic/psycho graphics and perhaps even print (yes, still, it’s not dead yet) — are turning to DAM to facilitate the management and distribution of the related brand files and media. It provides value to them in the form of greater reuse of content across sites as well as managing and limiting content over-use. It can enable automated “embargo” and “expiration” workflows — releasing and distributing the right files to people in specific regions at the right time. Or when working with rights-managed assets, it aids them in identifying, notifying and restricting access to rights-managed images and other material which may expire and need to be pulled before substantial financial penalties are incurred or outdated communication occurs.
Retail stores, chains, and franchises which need to manage overall brand consistency but with significant regional differences and often have the challenge of maintaining consistency across web, print and in-store advertising and promotions, are finding that DAM provides a backbone infrastructure for enabling these complex, interrelated content creation and delivery processes.
DAM provides a tool or in some cases a platform for marketing teams to much more easily collaborate on content, to find what they need in one place (or identify accurately that they don’t have it and it must be created as new), to identify those pieces that need to be changed regionally — and change only those so as to reduce the cost and time of getting to market more quickly. It enables a degree of marketing agility, which can result in not only lower costs, but faster market entry, and more adaptive responses — especially when it can get tied into traditional email marketing systems, and up and coming, high value, automated “web-to-print” collateral creation tools that enable self-service, template-based localization of advertising and promotions. These kinds of tools work well with DAM systems to enable marketers to integrate the right images and video into targeted promotions while allowing for regional differences.
If your marketing team hasn’t yet considered DAM, perhaps it’s time. As marketing operations become increasingly complex and the demand to have the content, brand and product information available consistently across regions in a timely manner, digital asset management can provide significant value and help to global marketing teams.