The Good Old Days of Marketing
Marketing back when I first got into it in the early 90s was about creating a shiny dynamic online brochure called a website, making very expensive magazine ads, building spiffy trade show visuals, launching monthly mailers (ones that required stamps not internet connectivity), and following it all up with “cold /warm calls” to nurture a relationship with a customer’s buying journey.
Now believe me there was a little more to it than the generalization above but my point is back then marketing was much simpler. Channels to reach customers centered on referrals or building relationships at trade shows. It is pretty easy to say that marketing and meeting potential buyers has evolved dramatically since then, attracting customers now centers around producing informational content that is search engine optimized (SEO) or meeting customers through online webinars vs onsite shows.
Marketing Today: Where did this VOLUME of Assets Come From?
The amount of content you need to produce to stay relevant in today’s market is staggering. Marketers not only have to be decisive with the message and supporting visual imagery but also cognizant of what media channels (landing pages, social networks, industry networks, blogs, and email) the information will travel on.
What complicates things are the requirements for each channel and managing the variation of the same asset to meet those requirements. Visual imagery needs to be converted to all of file formats and sizing to meet the platform requirement for desktop and mobile.
Repurposing content is critical to survive. Building a visual language of artwork to repurpose across landing pages, blogs, and campaigns can be overwhelming. And today video plays a huge role in marketing content. Video blogs and landing pages with videos get more views than those with just simple text. Video files are huge and the linear editors have steep learning curves.
How Does the DAM Help Manage this Flood of Content?
A Digital Asset Management System that provides a centralized location for all your visual content is as essential today as desktop publishing tools were in the 1990’s when I was in school. A DAM for marketing makes searching and finding the right visual asset and all its variations simpler. Metadata created with files or added later helps increase search ability of files.
With a marketing DAM you can automate the workflow to send your files to the various media channels and keep track for a recorded history or future repurposing. Collaboration efficiencies with a centralized DAM can also help manage the flood of files. Even Video becomes more manageable with a DAM. Creating clips, sending to social media, website or digital campaign all becomes easier with a marketing DAM.
It makes me wonder how can marketers today survive without a DAM?
David Farrell
Marketing & Sales Manager
Email: dfarrell@MerlinOne.com
Phone: 508-723-4729
Web: www.merlinone.com
If you would like to learn more about Digital Asset Management click here or…….
