If you find the boundaries between digital asset management (DAM) and web content management (WCM) software a little murky, you’re not alone. After all, in the wildly diverse landscape of 5,000+ marketing technology (martech) vendors, these two systems both focus on managing digital content.

This overlap might make it difficult to decide which platform is best for your team. But understanding your needs upfront — along with the benefits of each solution and how they can play together — will help justify your purchase and meet your business goals.

Our digital asset management (DAM) system, the Widen Collective®, supports a range of short- and long-term business goals. From improving brand consistency and cross-team collaboration to optimizing workflows and brand management practices, DAM is an essential part of any marketer’s toolkit.

Leveraging the full value of a DAM investment begins with effective and engaging user training. That’s why we have recently enhanced and expanded the learning opportunities available to every Widen customer. Through a collection of on-demand and live training options, Widen users of all abilities can advance their knowledge of the Collective to achieve business goals. 

There are many ways to find an asset in the Widen Collective^Ⓡ. You can search, filter, browse categories or collections, access a portal...the list goes on. Each way has its own uses. Our newest ways to help you discover assets are available while you’re already looking at an asset.

In a notable passage from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Juliet ponders the value of a name. She says, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” In other words, she thinks that names don’t really matter all that much. 

But here at Widen, we disagree. After all, names are an important part of any branded experience. And when it comes to tools like a digital asset management (DAM) system, the right name can go a long way in bolstering system adoption and ongoing user engagement. 

That’s why many of our customers give their Widen Collective^® site a name that is descriptive, unique, or memorable. But finding a name that reflects your site’s purpose and company brand can be challenging. So let’s look at some tips and best practices that will help you choose a top-notch name for your Collective site. 

One of the biggest challenges today’s marketing teams face is the need to create compelling, on-brand content quickly. Requests often come in fast and furiously from just about every department in order to support the business. Instead of overwhelming your creative team why not try delegating? With Templates, permissioned users can fulfill many of their own commonly requested design needs while the creative team remains in full control of the brand. 

As countries around the world respond to the coronavirus pandemic, many people have made the shift to working from home. For businesses that had already adopted agile digital tools, this transition might not have caused many disruptions. But for companies who relied on face-to-face meetings or physical tools to execute their content workflow, these changes upended processes and forced teams to search for new ways to work. As a result for many, today’s working life is more chaotic than ever before.

To dig into these new challenges and understand the additional impacts they’re having on businesses, we interviewed Nick Barber, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, who says the coronavirus has changed consumer behavior. 

As businesses look for new and effective ways to engage customers, many are exploring how to advance their content marketing strategy into brand publishing. As publishers, brands form connections through high-quality stories created by talented journalists, photographers, videographers, and illustrators. Content is continually created and shared to cultivate a stable audience and build long-term brand awareness and growth. 

One distribution format that is gaining traction among brand publishers is podcasts — not only are they relatively inexpensive to produce, but they have growing consumer interest. According to Edison Research and Triton Digital, roughly 55% of Americans (or 155 million people) have listened to a podcast — up from 23% a decade earlier. And there are now over 800,000 active podcasts with over 54 million episodes available worldwide. From news and history to true crime and culture, podcasts span every subject and interest. 

But podcast distribution entails managing feeds to a variety of networks — including iHeart, Google, Spotify, Tunein, Stitcher, iTunes, and more — which can be time-consuming. Any Widen customer can use our digital asset management (DAM) software, the Widen Collective^®, to streamline their podcast production process and publish content efficiently across various networks. To explain how, let’s look at an example from a Widen customer.

The Portals app in the Widen Collective^® 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.

Products are becoming whatever shoppers can read, see, and hear. They use everything from product descriptions and technical specifications to inspirational videos and detailed photographs to inform their purchases.

We believe all of that content should be organized and reusable.

We bring you Entries, the new Widen Collective^Ⓡ app to manage your product content.

In the extraordinary circumstances of the coronavirus, many of the world’s businesses have pivoted to working remotely and are looking to trim operational costs. This heightened focus on efficiency means that teams need to have access to the right digital technology.