Overcome 5 Content Marketing Challenges with Digital Asset Management Best Practices July 2014
What you ll find in this ebook: 01 02 03 04 05 Content Marketing Challenges Maximize the value of producing marketing collateral Avoid duplicate versions Keep track of digital content across all channels Capitalize on realtime content marketing opportunities Improve your website performance Digital Asset Management Best Practices Use DAM to create content once, reuse many times Avoid errors by controlling content versions Stay in the know when it comes to your digital content Tool up for Agile Marketing Speed Web page load times with image resizing and video streaming But first, a little background...
New digital marketing channels open up daily. New outlets = new business opportunities On the one hand, this represents a great opportunity for today s businesses. Marketing teams are no longer confined to traditional, expensive advertising outlets like TV, radio, newspapers and magazine ads to get their message in front of the people they care about. Businesses can create online communities, be their own publishers (think blogs, webinars, podcasts), connect and promote their wares across a myriad of social media channels and often be very effective at reaching their specific target segment more successfully at a fraction of the cost and time. What is Content Marketing? Content Marketing refers to the practice of creating compelling, consistent content in order to attract supporters and new customers. More outlets = more challenges And yet, on the other hand, having access to so many emerging digital channels presents new challenges for Marketers. With a multitude of outlets, digital content and media files now must be made available in different file formats, on-the-fly, and often in response to live events that cannot be fully planned; all while maintaining a uniform customer experience. Consider the 83,000 retweets received by Arby s restaurant for its smart 2014 tweet to Grammy winner Pharrell.
A quick look at how Web Content Management and Digital Asset Management play nice together Today, most organizations rely on Content Management Systems to publish all that content and run their website platforms a far more sustainable, efficient business practice than the custom programmed websites of yesteryear. Although most companies use CMS systems to power websites today, the idea of centrally managing valuable media files outside of the CMS remains a novel concept. The combination of a Content Management System (CMS) and a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system provides more efficient processes in the creation and publication of content for websites, blogs, social media channels and other online portals. What s more, when digital assets are stored in a DAM system, offline distribution channels and non-web teams have seamless access to branded content as well. What is a Digital Asset? An asset is directly translated as property. Digital assets refer to all electronic files created and acquired by an organization that have intrinsic value to that organization. Some examples of digital assets include: photos, produced videos, logos, product brochures, customer testimonials, signage, digital ads, graphic designs, presentations and much more. Many businesses are unaware of DAM. Others are unclear where DAM starts and other application media libraries begin. And still others are unsure exactly what digital asset management can do for their business. Allow us to tell you. 4 2014 Canto
Conquer 5 Content Marketing Challenges and Get Work Done Faster
01 Challenge 1 Maximize the value of producing marketing collateral
01 Consumers are demanding more visual content. In response, businesses are producing more content as well. To gain economies of scale, businesses must get as much use out of their digital asset investments as possible. Does this sound familiar? Let s say you have a new product that needs to be added to your website. Your product marketing team works with your creative folks to send final, approved content to your web administrators. Your Web admin uploads all of the product images, description, a short demo video, and pricing details into the Web Content Management System (CMS). Your distribution partner network also needs access to those same product resources, so your creatives place them on a shared file service in the cloud. Your creative team also produces PDF collateral for your field sales that gets placed on your SharePoint site. And your field team needs to create signage and other printed materials. Without a centralized, active digital asset management methodology, you can see how your final, approved marketing collateral can quickly proliferate throughout the organization. 7 2014 Canto
01 Digital asset inefficiencies cost time and money. Marketers know all too well, what often happens is that elaborate digital files get produced for the website. And then the print team tries to chase down original source files, many times without success and settling for recreating the files in a print-ready format. This inefficiency not only costs time due to duplicate work effort, but also increases the risk of making a mistake with so many variations of an approved file floating around the organization. 8 2014 Canto
DAM Best Practice 1: Use DAM to create content once, reuse many times With a centralized Digital Asset Management system in place and integrated with your CMS your website is just one destination that accesses all of your approved, branded media files.
01 With digital asset management software all media data is organized. A sophisticated metadata system, and intelligent search and filter functions make the data accessible from anywhere. Employees from any department you d like can use the data stored in your DAM system to locate the right file and repurpose as needed always ensuring access to a centralized master asset. The DAM system governs the complete lifecycle of all digital content from creation and production of all file formats, to distribution and archival. Thus, ensuring that digital assets are used and retained according to their proper useful life. Through the proper re-use of digital assets, each piece of content can live up to its full potential. What is Digital Asset Management? Digital Asset Management is the process of organizing, distributing and archiving digital media files, such as images, videos, PDF documents, presentations and more. Many organizations invest in Digital Asset Management software such as Cumulus and Flight to securely categorize and store digital assets and share them internally and externally. 10 2014 Canto
02 Challenge 2 Avoid duplicate versions
02 Duplicate files are annoying. The great thing about a CMS is that everyday marketers, like you and me, have the power to quickly make updates to your website without having to call in a favor from your web developer. New web content typically includes uploading images into your CMS media library. Unfortunately, this creates duplicates! Why are duplicate media files such a bad thing? When a content piece gets updated (think new product shots, updated partner logo, etc.) the file must be manually produced and placed into the CMS. Doing so increases the risk that old data retained in the CMS could accidentally be used, when in fact it should be retired. Duplicates take up unnecessary disk space. Duplicates also reduce the likelihood of finding the right image quickly, as you end up reviewing multiple versions before deciding which is the right one. Duplicates create confusion - for fear of deleting the wrong file, they live on to confuse others. Where do all your content pieces live? If you re like many companies, you may archive digital content on network drives. 12 2014 Canto
02 Or you may have web content that only lives in the CMS. You end up needing to produce content across multiple channels and in various formats. This results in parallel versions of existing content. Over time, even the people who work with your content every day don t know where the latest version of a digital asset is, nor where each version has been used. Example from Cumulus showing version history; and the ability to make old versions current again. 13 2014 Canto
DAM Best Practice 2: Avoid errors by controlling content versions DAM gives you a central, version-controlled master file. With DAM, you can avoid duplicates by educating your entire organization to always look for the current, master file in the DAM. Mature Digital Asset Management systems let you see a revision history. Cumulus is a DAM that secures files that are being updated with a check-out / check-in process to ensure only one person is working on changes to that master file at a time. With DAM systems, you can avoid duplicates by approving and deploying updated versions. Correct versions can either be accessed directly by employees, or automatically linked to 3rd party systems especially common is integrating your DAM with your CMS to ensure website content is always up to date.
03 Challenge 3 Keep track of digital content across all channels
03 How to keep track of it all? Product images on the website, videos on the blog, photos for social media and PowerPoint slides in the cloud keeping track of it all can get out of control, fast! The flood of media that today s brands are dealing with has enormous risk and difficulty to manage. Do you have rights to all the images you are using? Are you certain the rights have not expired? Do you have old product images on your website from last season? Does your PowerPoint deck include the latest approved slides? With so many variations, how do you know? 16 2014 Canto
DAM Best Practice 3: Stay in the know when it comes to your digital content DAM has you covered. We can look at this a couple of ways. On the one hand, leading Digital Asset Management systems can provide a reference that shows where the digital asset is used. On the other hand, the DAM system exposes only the most recent version of an asset, including its metadata, to auto-populate your CMS and other systems with the right file. For example, as the licensing rights for an image used on several websites is about to expire, the DAM can deliver either a pre-defined alternative or warn the user to replace the image.
04 Challenge 4 Capitalize on realtime content marketing opportunities
04 Timing is critical for success! Good marketing includes not only relevant content, but also well-timed execution. Lengthy workflows with cumbersome approval processes can weigh down creative teams, and leave your business on the fringes when all you want is to be at the front and center of today s fast-paced digital world. 19 2014 Canto
DAM Best Practice 4: Tool up for Agile Marketing When your digital assets are housed centrally in a DAM system, creative teams can have instant access to everything they need. Marketers can easily access digital assets to share across social media channels, post to their Web CMS and to collaborate with external agencies.
04 Marketing is becoming more Agile. Successful businesses act fast. They create relevant and interesting content to participate in today s interactive digital conversations. Top brands must learn to move at the speed of ideas. Once you have the tools in place, creativity can flow freely, without having to rely on digital content gatekeepers that can slow things down. For example, with a digital asset management system like Cumulus, updated content versions can be automatically delivered across all channels. Integrate Cumulus with your CMS If you integrate your CMS with your DAM system, then you can access and edit the latest and greatest digital asset without leaving the CMS interface. And push new updates faster than ever. Here s an example of saving time by working in a Drupal CMS that let s you browse images stored in a DAM (Cumulus). 21 2014 Canto
05 Challenge 5 Improve your website performance
05 Let s talk page load times. Of course there are countless ways to improve website performance. Let s take a look for a moment specifically at web page load times. Visitors will often leave your website if pages take too long to load. Often images and videos are to blame for long load times. Especially with people visiting websites more on mobile devices while at the same time expecting visually rich experiences. But getting striking imagery and vibrant videos delivered to all devices with the right quality and optimized performance can prove challenging. Videos and images are delivered to all devices with the right quality and optimized performance. 23 2014 Canto
DAM Best Practice 5: Speed web page load times with image resizing and video streaming Optimize images. Image caching is one way to speed up page load times. There are numerous plugins available to help CMS serve up images appropriately. At Canto, we use an Image Factory which converts images from Cumulus into any specified size on-demand, served up via the CMS. The CMS uses Image Factory to display on your website any size image, from full screen to thumbnail and anything in between without having to load various sizes into the CMS.
05 Stream videos Speed up website performance with video streaming as well. When a site does not have to rely on video caching, but rather streams its videos for playback, they offer a better user experience. A few reasons why organizations prefer alternatives to embedding YouTube videos on their websites include: no loss of video rights, no ads, no serving up related videos after playback, and keeping confidential content safe. There are an increasing number of alternative video streaming services on the market that automatically adapts video playback to the device and bandwidth of the visitor. Cumulus Video Cloud At Canto, our Cumulus Video Cloud does exactly this, while letting you organize and tag not only all of your screencasts, product videos, user-generated video content, videography, professionally produced videos and customer interviews but also houses all of your media files in one central DAM system videos, images, layouts, documents and more. 25 2014 Canto
To wrap it up Just as it takes discipline and dedication to create consistent, relevant content, so too, it takes discipline and dedication to enforce good digital asset management habits. 01 02 03 04 05 Get the most out of your marketing materials by using a DAM to create content once and reuse it many times. Avoid unnecessary duplicate file versions by letting the DAM track and control content. Stay in compliance by using a DAM to help you keep image licensing rights in check. Take a step closer to making realtime marketing a reality when all your digital assets are organized and accessible directly from your CMS. Speed page load times with on-the-fly image resizing and video streaming services offered as DAM extensions. 26 2014 Canto
About the Authors Leslie Weller Director of Marketing Canto @leslie_weller Lucas Schnabel Business Development Manager Canto Leslie Weller is the Director of Marketing at Canto. Leslie s long-held strategy is three fold: to help improve the customer experience at every single touch point, to better meet customer expectations and increase brand awareness. Leslie has a solid background of marketing software and technology services for award-winning organizations, including tech giant EMC. Leslie is an active contributor on the Canto blog. Lucas Schnabel builds and manages Canto s partnerships with our growing number of technology vendors, including CoreMedia, FirstSpirit, MovingImage24, and many more. Lucas product marketing background serves our technology partnerships well by helping to build and execute cooperative go-to-market strategies for our joint solutions. 27 2014 Canto
A word about Canto s Digital Asset Management Systems Cumulus Cumulus is the leading Digital Asset Management system for businesses that need to organize, share and publish digital content. Its sophisticated metadata handling and highly configurable nature allow the system to adapt to countless workflows. And can be deployed on-premise or hosted as a Managed cloud service. Cumulus can integrate with a number of business systems, including Web CMS, SharePoint, Marketing Automation, Adobe creative workflows and much more. Cumulus CMS integrations we have today include: CoreMedia, Drupal, WordPress, Typo3, FirstSpirit where you can search the Cumulus digital asset catalog directly from the CMS user interface, saving time and streamlining content marketing workflows. We continue to add to this list. Flight Flight is a simple, one-click digital asset management system that is born in the cloud and lets marketing teams easily access all their valuable digital files seamlessly from a visually stunning, easy-to-use web interface and ipad app for on-the-go convenience. Flight is a turnkey multitenant, SaaS platform for businesses that need to get work done, fast. 28 2014 Canto
Ready to get started with your Digital Asset Management initiative? Join thousands of top brands and organizations across the globe that trust Canto to support their DAM needs. From DAM strategy to software deployment and DAM business consulting, Canto is here to help. #CantoIsDAM Get Started with Canto DAM today +1 (415) 495-6545 info@canto.com Americas 116 New Montgomery Street Suite 810 San Francisco, CA 94105 USA Tel: +1 (415) 495-6545 Europe Alt-Moabit 73 10555 Berlin Germany Tel: +49 (0) 30 390 485-0