Why IT Managers Must Help Marketing Manage Digital Assets

Why IT Managers Must Help Marketing Manage Digital Assets

Posted on July 15, 2013 0 Comments

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Selecting a Web CMS with a Lightweight Digital Asset Management System

In the past, IT Managers focused a great amount of their attention on infrastructure and the integration of systems.  But today, IT leaders must satisfy a growing number of constituencies within the business, including content contributors, business users, and marketing.  IT must now consider it their responsibility to empower these business users to improve their business processes and to unchain them from their dependence on IT.  This includes helping business users manage digital assets.

Through the selection of the appropriate combination of Web CMS and DAM solution technologies, IT can assist marketing and content authors down the path of best practices for the reuse of content and digital assets to save costs and increase efficiencies.  Without this in place, businesses risk capitalizing on the value of the digital assets they’ve created and impair their ability to drive customers to a buying decision.

One starting point to derive better value for the business is through the combination of a Web CMS with a lightweight Digital Asset Management solution.

Users Manage a Mountain of Digital Assets to Derive Value

Today’s customer is becoming more particular in the type of content they consume when making a buying decision.  This modern customer has less time to read long winded white papers and articles.

They want short bursts of information that educate them about how to solve their problem and how to use the product they’re considering. So instead, visitors to Websites are turning to content in the form of digital assets such as infographics, images, video and audio as a major part of their buyer decision process.  

As such, Rich Media Assets (RMA) are becoming crucial for businesses to engage customers on their public-facing online experiences.   (Though some consider rich media assets specific to video, industry analysts today describe RMA as anything from images, graphics, PDFs, audio, video and more).

In response to this trend, organizations have been creating an increasing number of these digital assets.  However, while this mountain of digital content is being created and dumped into CMS Media Libraries, there seems to be no strategy in place for the business to truly manage the volumes of images, graphics and video, much less derive any measureable business value.

What Businesses Expect From Their CMS – A Lightweight DAM Solution

The reuse of content in the form of digital assets is a critical component for any cohesive business strategy – It saves money, boosts efficiencies and increases the likelihood of program success with customer engagement.  In order to achieve the full value from the investment in digital media assets, businesses are beginning to expect more from their Web CMS.  They expect a CMS with lightweight DAM functionality that:

1)      Makes rich media assets more findable. A Web CMS with a lightweight DAM should empower business users with quick and easy access to digital assets.  It provides no value to the business if these assets are simply stored away in a media library and not reusable. There must be strategies around uploading, tagging and applying meta-data to rich media assets so that content is findable by content contributors and marketers to be reused with other content types like news, events and blogs. 

2)      Lowers the re-creation costs. As stated above, business derives more value out of digital assets that can be reused.  But that value is also diminished each time that a content contributor or marketer has to rely on an outside agency to manipulate a digital asset.  It is now expected that a Web CMS with lightweight Digital Asset Management must also provide the ability to easily edit and manipulate assets such as images for instance – to be able to crop, resize, add color, sharpen, or adjust hue.  It must also provide the ability to edit PDFs and other digital assets held in the CMS Media Library

3)      Maintain Brand Consistency. Companies face a challenge of keeping customer experiences consistent across mobile and web experiences.  A CMS with a lightweight DAM solution should be able to manage multiple renditions of the same digital asset across multiple channels and keep a consistent look and feel.  Thumbnail generation is a perfect example of this.  CMS Media Libraries become bogged down with multiple versions of the same image. Performance begins to slow and the processes to manage the digital assets becomes unruly. A modern CMS will have a DAM solution to enable content authors to upload one version of a digital asset like an image and use it in multiple variations without having to upload it again.

Aligning the Objectives of IT with the Marketing Organization

In short, businesses must derive more value from their libraries of digital assets.  So it is more critical today that IT step into the fray to assist the marketing team to manage digital assets with proper solutions.  A Web CMS with lightweight digital asset management can help.

It is up to IT leaders to help content authors and the marketing organization to organize the digital media asset chaos – to make it findable and reusable.  IT leaders must provide an infrastructure that enables digital media assets to be found and used outside the applications and contexts in which it was originally created.  If this can be achieved, businesses will attain a higher return on investment from the digital assets they create and be able to reuse these assets in conjunction with content on their site.   

Learn more about how a Web CMS works together with a lightweight Digital Asset Management solution

Eric Odell

View all posts from Eric Odell on the Progress blog. Connect with us about all things application development and deployment, data integration and digital business.

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