5 Ways DAMs Can Improve Digital Experience Creation

Digital isn’t just your website anymore — it’s the entire end-to-end experience of your brand online. With the expansion of digital channels into all facets of society, audiences are consuming content at unprecedented levels. Content is the fuel on which all digital strategies rely; it’s incredibly versatile, adding value whether it’s consumed by someone having their first interaction with your brand, or a seasoned customer.

But the necessity to distribute across so many channels comes with its own challenges. Having divergent product and content workspaces makes the administration, organization, and distribution of brand-consistent material complex — especially if there’s an existing ecosystem of technology or a propensity to keep buying new tools within your business. If mishandled, you’ll also miss out on a unified data-driven view of your customers and what their interactions tell you about your product strategy impact.

If you want to provide an engaging journey for your audience to navigate their relationship with your brand, it’s critical to have a centralized place to manage your assets. The processes involved in defining how these assets influence your brand need to be streamlined and when it comes time for distribution, it pays to have a platform that can adopt a data-driven, multi-channel approach.

This challenge can sound daunting, but fear not — a winning formula is beginning to emerge among modern marketing leaders, and this formula is going to be my focus today.

I’m going to discuss combining a set of technologies: digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) software with a Digital Experience Platform (DXP). I’ll take a look at 5 reasons why, by leveraging these solutions in combination, you can adopt a data-driven creation, consolidation, and distribution approach to your product assets; something that’s key to creating engaging customer experiences.

1. Streamline & Integrate Rich-Content Workflows

Back in the day, the content realm consisted of a semi-regular blog post and the collection of web pages that made up your website. These days, product content is a rich, multimedia asset that needs to live across different platforms and channels that are seamlessly interwoven.

Don’t get me wrong — blogs and web pages still have a seat at the table, they’re powerful engagement tools. But they are just one part of an interconnected content & product strategy, more supplementary to your main channels of experience engagement.

Because the enriched nature of assets is increasing, the workflows involved — from the beginning of production all the way to distribution — are becoming more complex. There are certain risks associated with having such intricate processes spread across multiple applications or repositories.

Having a centralized product management space mitigates this risk; it ensures that the processes involved in creating, vetting, and distributing your assets are consistent across your organization and teaches brand values from the ground up.

2. Foster Collaboration with a Creativity-Focused Workspace

DAM and PIM platforms aren’t designed to be just another file system to lose track of. Any modern solution worth its salt will have a host of quality of life features including automated workflow, ML-powered content suggestions, and a full suite of collaboration tools.

By centralizing a single asset repository with a broad-ranging set of features, you can negate confusion within your organization about where to go to retrieve which types of content. You’ll also be able to encourage collaboration and inputs from across the business. Such insights are so important when executing a content strategy because they infuse it with a fact-checked view of your audience and ensure the content being created services internal stakeholders like sales or marketing, just as much as your actual customers.

3. On Brand Consistency for Assets

Consistency isn’t just important when it comes to the content distribution lifecycle. It’s also important from a branding perspective. The content you produce can be as highly polished as you like, but if it clashes with the wider messaging of your brand or positioning of your product, it’ll lead to customer confusion at best, disdain at worst.

To keep an audience engaged, maintaining an authentic through-line is paramount when trying to emphasize your mission.

A centralized asset repository lends itself well to this. You can have a view of the operational output of your syndicated content and product assets, whilst being able to holistically define how they work in tandem with your messaging. This too can be a collaborative process, one that influences the creative ethos and where you position yourself when you go to market.

As Nate Holmes, Product Marketing Manager at Widen — provider of industry-leading combined DAM and PIM solution the Widen Collective®, puts it:

“Centralizing your product information like data, marketing content, and digital assets, allows teams to streamline workflows in order to present a consistent brand identity across digital and physical channels.”

4. Omni-Channel Content Delivery

Having a diverse content library and product asset store is one thing, but to make the most of it you need to deploy across the digital channels which matter most to your audience. The temptation can be to either deliver the content unmodified across every channel or create a new piece asset tailored to each.

Neither of these approaches is optimal. Adopting a brute force approach to channel delivery may be efficient but it dilutes the potency of the content you’ve produced if it doesn’t resonate with a particular channel. On the flip side, creating channel-specific content isn’t very efficient.

The sweet spot here is to tailor your content to a channel without completely recreating it. This is where a centralized repository with the flexibility to distribute across channels really shows its worth. An open API asset manager platform will let you smoothly distribute across channels whilst making the minor modifications necessary to build consistency and brand authenticity with a given audience. At the same time, if you do end up needing to deliver bespoke asset-driven experiences, having a consolidated view of all product factors is invaluable across the same channels.

5. Create a Holistic Customer View with Data-Driven Content

The processes involved in digital asset and product information management are incredibly important, but they’re only half the equation. The compliment to an asset-centric approach to digital is the data that is generated when your audience interacts with it. You can plan and segment until the end of time, but if you don’t have any data-driven insights into whether your strategy resonates with your audience, you’ll never achieve maximum effectiveness.

Having a one-stop-shop for asset analytics is incredibly important if you want to create a holistic view of your customer. You need to understand what’s working and where you need to make modifications. This creates a positive feedback loop in which you’re continuously iterating and improving. It’s one of the best ways to offer engaging consumer experiences from both an operational standpoint, as well as a strategic one — with a better view to define your go-to-market product positioning.

“Uniting the power of Jahia’s DXP with Widen’s combined DAM and PIM platform, the Widen Collective, keeps brand content consistent across all internal and external touchpoints,” says Jamie Liecthy, Partner Manager at Widen. “This integration allows customers to use both systems to the fullest potential in order to meet business goals.”

Learn more about how Jahia and Widen work together to support your content, data, and application operations across digital channels.