The right set of creative assets can make or break your next marketing campaign. Coming up with a clear strategy around creative asset management can be a game changer for content production, campaign execution, and overall results.

Without a strategic approach to managing creative assets through their lifecycle, you can easily waste resources and diminish the impact of your team’s work. With a solid strategy, you can deliver engaging omnichannel marketing campaigns that convert and build brand loyalty. Here’s a look at what creative assets are, what asset management entails, recommendations for software, and some tips on how to get started. 

Incorporating a digital asset management (DAM) system into your business’s repertoire of invaluable technological resources is a decision that will have a significant impact on marketing strategies. A DAM platform is the central source of truth for content that can help you improve cross-functional collaboration, automate manual tasks, simplify asset searching, and deliver a consistent brand across all channels.

With so much at stake and so many vendors selling DAM systems, it’s important to carefully consider your business priorities.

Each year hundreds of Widen Collective^® digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) practitioners gather at the Widen Summit^® to learn, make connections, and have fun.

This year’s event will be no exception. Our second all-virtual Summit has a highly-interactive agenda full of sessions that will advance your skills and inspire new goals. 

Here are 10 reasons why you should !

It’s increasingly difficult to orchestrate a cohesive customer experience across multiple channels and touchpoints. And at the same time, it’s never been more important — customers spent US$861.12 billion online with U.S. merchants in 2020 (up 44.0% year over year). You need to build a seamless omnichannel e-commerce experience to capture your share of these growing online sales.

That means you’ll need to prioritize the mobile experience, understand how your customers like to shop, establish a strong brand position, and create a consistent experience across platforms. We’ll cover the basics of those areas and give you some tips for launching your own omnichannel e-commerce strategy. First, let’s start with a clear definition of what omnichannel e-commerce is. 

Brand storytelling is an increasingly popular approach to marketing that taps into the foundational human need to connect with others through story. It’s a method that centers your customer as the main character in the story, not your brand or your product. When you share relatable stories about life experiences that matter to your audience, you create strong emotional connections with your ideal customers.

Those connections build brand awareness, keep attention on your marketing channels, and establish trust. Not everyone agrees on the best way to do brand storytelling, but everyone knows it matters. To get us started, we’ll talk about why it’s so important, show you some examples of brand storytellers you can learn from, and provide ideas on how to start using the tactic yourself. But first, let’s outline and agree on a clear brand storytelling definition. 

With paper almost extinct, your vital company documents and information need to be digitized, stored, and used in a way that supports transforming processes, workflows, and business goals. Enterprise content management (ECM) systems make it possible to rethink how you manage your enterprise content and choose more interactive ways to work with information across your organization.

Chances are, you use a digital asset management (DAM) system to handle your customer-facing content for products. But do you have centralized management for your internal documentation, invoices, training materials, contracts, financial records, etc.? If you want to reduce the time and cost it takes to manage all your content lifecycles, it’s time to think about ECM, too. 

Keep reading and you’ll learn what enterprise content management is, see examples of software choices, and get an idea if it’s the right fit for your business. 

Not too long ago, artificial intelligence (AI) was just a concept from science fiction movies. But today, AI is changing the status quo of entire industries — including marketing technology (martech). When it comes to digital asset management (DAM), image recognition software has a valuable and growing role in metadata creation by automatically tagging assets during the upload process.

Let’s take a look at how image recognition software works and the efficiencies it can bring to DAM workflows.

The use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving in the digital asset management (DAM) community, and rightfully so. AI-powered tools support metadata creation, a time-consuming process that’s often one of the biggest pain points for DAM software administrators and users.

This is why these tools are no longer merely a nice-to-have. As digital libraries expand and AI becomes more sophisticated, image recognition and auto-tagging tools have become a must-have for any enterprise DAM solution. 

The adoption of AI tools in the Widen Collective^® has kept pace with this evolution, and as with any other software developments within our platform, we’ve gathered customer feedback around the functionality to ensure the capabilities meet their needs.

One of the biggest psychological influences on customer behavior is brand association. This can be the silent difference between someone buying your product or a competitor’s. It’s a complex phenomenon that every brand wants to establish in the minds of their audience but few understand how to create.

What brand comes to mind when you think of Bill Gates? Jeff Bezos? Arianna Huffington? Microsoft. Amazon. Huffington Post. How does that work? 

Let’s start by establishing a solid definition of what brand association is. Then, we’ll go into the different kinds of brand associations, some specific examples, and direct you toward getting started on your own brand association strategy. 

We’re exposed to product branding every day. From the coffee cup we’re handed at Starbucks to the toothpaste we choose from the shelves of grocery stores and the ads we see on our smartphones. Companies like Coca-Cola, Apple, and Starbucks have product branding that is so recognizable we take it as a normal part of our environment.

When you hone and execute your product branding strategy to this level, you get some serious advantages. One of them is that people recognize your product and buy it without having to qualify whether or not your product is good enough. Let’s take a closer look at the definition of product branding, learn about some of the advantages of getting it right, and take a look at some of the most successful product branding examples.