Manufacturing and Branding: You ARE Your Digital Assets
No matter what you make, your buyers are online. They experience your product through images and video and much of their purchasing decision is made before they ever see your product in physical form.
Online marketing is, or will soon be, the main marketing channel for all manufacturers. Whether autos or toasters, this means a much higher volume of content, created faster and delivered to more channels.
Digital asset management intensifies your digital market presence. It speeds your product to the web, mobile devices, or wherever your customers are. It empowers your sales representatives, and drastically improves support for your customers post-sale, all while reducing costs.
Digital asset management allows you to gain control of your digital assets, which are the heart of your brand in the online economy. Some challenges a digital asset management system can help with include:
Fill All Your Brand Communication Channels Cost Effectively
Manufacturing product marketing needs to create massive amounts of rich media content such as images, video and Flash and convert and publish it to many different channels and devices- print, broadcast, online, social media via phones, tablets and computers.
Many of these channels result in duplicate content because you can’t find the images you created for the last channel or device you were marketing to.
Digital asset management creates significant return on investment for most manufacturers simply by reducing wasted, duplicated effort.
Benefit from Transparent Agency Collaboration
You are spending massive amounts of money on advertising campaigns and creative work through external agencies, and can’t find or reuse those images across your many other important brand communication channels.
This is a massive waste of potential and investment.
Digital asset management captures all these expensive digital assets in one place where anyone who needs them can easily find them, check usage rules, and make use of that asset. What would have racked up agency fees to search and distribute assets you’ve already paid for is now done immediately at no extra cost.
Achieve Multi-Channel Global Marketing with Local Autonomy
Most manufacturers struggle with maintaining a global brand. You can easily see that by the presence of different market leaders in different regions of the world.
The solution to this is to design marketing workflows that create the core brand message and assets globally, but then enable local agencies to modify and market to local interests and needs while still maintaining global brand consistency.
This may involve replacing copy on a brochure with the local language, or changing geographical or cultural photos to match the region.
It may involve a multi-agency approach, using small more agile local agencies for regions with tougher competition.
All of these activities are extremely expensive and hard to manage without a collaboration process to manage the marketing collateral and review and approval processes across the global organization.
Digital asset management solves this problem by collecting all assets in a single location, whether created in-house or by one of a dozen agencies spread across the world.
Market Your Products to Purchasing Departments
Purchasers aren’t waiting for you to visit them- they are on your website, and you need to engage them with rich content- images, videos, diagrams and other content that lets them get to know your products as efficiently and powerfully as possible.
DAM collects your assets in one place and allows your to streamline the production and distribution of them to your website and printed materials.
You also can provide a rich set of images to enable your customers’ own merchandising, assortment planning, advertising, flyer and circular creation, and line planning functions.
Cost Effecitve Direct to Consumer Branding
The Internet and social media allow you to reach your end customers directly- something that was previously only possible through expensive print and broadcast advertising.
Whether pre-purchase or post-purchase, you need to publish a rich and complete set of images and videos that cover product evaluation and post-purchase usage.
Leverage The Value of Your Historical Product Information
Historical product information- images, videos, ads and other rich media- have a tremendous value that is only realized if you can find and use that media.
This could be inspiration for new products, revival of old products, better merchandising by developing fewer duplicate products, or monetization of images by selling them to consumers- a good revenue source for entertainment and high-design manufacturers such as automakers.
Without digital asset management, you risk losing your history. And that history has a lot of value.
Increase Revenue from Long-Tail Demand for Historical and Specialized Products
Online sales channels mean that older products have longer lifespans. Products that may sell in decent volume but can’t find shelf space in traditional retail can now be marketed and sold through online retailers.
This means more images, more video- more marketing content to support and sell these long-tail products.
To talk to an expert or request a tour of North Plains' manufacturing solutions, please contact us.
