With omnichannel marketing becoming common practice, the need for all kinds of content is on the rise. There’s photography, graphics, videos, white papers, sell sheets — not to mention emerging content types like 360-degree images and interactive content like room builders. Let’s just say there’s a lot of content. 

Depending on the maturity of your brand and your content efforts, you may already feel the weight of these demands within your own organization. And as you know, content creation requires significant time, money, and resources, which are lost if you don’t have a plan for maintaining, improving, and storing your valuable assets. 

When it comes to managing your content, it really depends on what stage it falls into in the content lifecycle. For instance, your interaction with assets that are in high demand, like images from a recent photoshoot, is likely to be quite different than with low-demand assets, like last season’s digital ads. That’s why having a solid understanding of the digital content lifecycle will help you keep track of your content and ensure you get the most out of your investment.

Like many of you, I’m a proud homeowner. And while I’m content with my cozy abode, over the years I’ve identified opportunities for improvement — everything from small painting projects to a large-scale kitchen renovation. 

Something similar is happening in your Widen Asset application. We are remodeling your DAM experience to make things better by improving the user interface (UI), adding new functionality, and making pages more accessible.

This is especially true for Widen’s Asset Digest page, which will have a series of enhancements in the coming months. Let’s take a look at what this entails and how these updates will simplify how you interact with content in the DAM system.

Every marketer knows that brand management is extremely important. After all, the strength of your brand is dependent on customer perception. But influencing how you’re perceived in the market is extremely complicated, and unfortunately, there’s no magic formula or quick fixes for earning customer loyalty.

To build a brand that customers choose over competitors takes dedication and hard work. It starts with a clearly defined brand vision, organizational self-reflection, and company-wide discipline. Easy to say, harder to execute. But having a solid understanding of the components of brand management will help you get there.  

Your content influences how customers find, choose, buy, and use your products. Sales channels and regions need product assets and attributes to represent your products across in-store displays, sales conversations, email promotions, and websites. So it’s essential to have a way to give your teams, partners, and customers accurate, frictionless access to this information. 

The Portals app in Widen’s digital asset management (DAM) solution offers a flexible, attractive, and easy way to share content within a branded environment. 

Our blog post Portals Examples and Use Cases showcases a range of creative and powerful ways that our customers are using portals to share assets, connect teams, and advance brand stories. In this article, we’ll share functionality details and best practices that will help you build a portal that meets your unique content and business needs.

In June we launched our first-ever Widen Portals Contest, to gather outstanding, real-life examples of how Widen customers are using the Portals application to support business goals. 

And the response was fantastic! We received over two dozen, top-notch submissions across industries and use cases. 

Our panel of judges included Widen’s Creative Manager, Senior Manager of Support and Community, and VP of Marketing and Sales. They selected the winners based on three criteria:

• Clear organization
• Cohesive branding and style
• Strong purpose/use case 
  

While shopping online has been around for a while, the dynamics of e-commerce are changing. After all, one in four people across the globe now make purchases online — and this number is only growing.

According to statista, “In 2021, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately 4.9 trillion US dollars worldwide. This figure is forecast to grow by 50% over the next four years, reaching about 7.4 trillion dollars by 2025.” While this kind of rapid growth is exciting, it brings with it some challenges, too. It demands that companies scale along every part of the value chain, and marketing is no exception.

So how can marketers keep pace with these business trends? By relying on the same thing that their customers do: technology. Shoppers want to move fast with minimal friction along their buying journey. That’s where digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) software comes in. 

Let’s explore how DAM and PIM technology are helping e-commerce teams move faster to meet consumer needs. 

It takes a lot of work to implement and manage a digital asset management (DAM) system. From integrating your DAM platform with other technologies to organizing your product images, sell sheets, videos, branded graphics, and other assets. Getting the most out of your DAM solution requires maintenance and optimization – including creating a taxonomy that’s easy to navigate and evolve. 

Empathy is central to our values and culture. It’s reflected in our exceptional customer service, respect for our teammates, and commitment to building quality software. Our General Manager, Matthew Gonnering is so passionate about the importance of empathy in business that he made it the focus of his TEDx Talk.

So our interest in building technology that’s accessible to all users is a natural extension of our corporate culture and mindset around empathy and inclusion. We have infused this passion in our digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) platform at Widen and are carrying this foundation into our user experience (UX) work on all Acquia products, too.

Because this work is so pivotal to who we are, we’d like to share more about our effort to meet accessibility standards across all Widen and Acquia products. 

In today’s modern workplace content creation is almost constant. New files like contracts, presentations, photography, and creative assets are being added daily, if not hourly.

When these files are created, inherently, so is their metadata — or data about data. Metadata can include things like the document’s name, date, file size, and creator. 

As a result, companies are awash with content and its related metadata. They need a system for keeping it all organized. That’s where metadata management comes in.