Marketers today can no longer win on price or quality of offering alone. The competition is just too fierce. It seems there’s always another brand doing it better, quicker, and with a more steadfast method for keeping customers coming back for more. 

So what’s the answer? To gain the competitive advantage, you must adopt a customer-first approach that puts experience at the heart of your strategy. No matter when and on which channels people encounter your brand, you must deliver the same positive, superior customer experience each and every time. 

To do this, you need to strategically manage the content you use to communicate your brand. By doing so, you can act smarter and move faster to facilitate deeper audience connections, inspire action, and ultimately deliver a customer experience that’s second to none. Here’s what you need to know. 

In 2020, 85% of businesses use video as a tool in their marketing strategy. That’s because video works — it can increase traffic, leads, sales, and audience understanding. But, it only works at an enterprise level if you store and distribute your videos strategically.  

The differences between product information management (PIM) and product lifecycle management (PLM) systems are easily misunderstood — even among business owners in an e-commerce environment. Although both of these tools are designed to streamline how products are brought to market, they have distinct roles and value. Fortunately, they are able to work together to create efficiencies across your business operations. 

Learn more about the unique features of both PIM and PLM systems so you can determine if you need one or both!

Each year over 200 Widen Collective® digital asset management (DAM) practitioners gather at the Widen Summit to learn, make connections, and have fun.

This year’s event will be no exception, despite the shift from in-person to virtual. We’ve designed a highly-interactive agenda full of sessions that will advance your DAM skills and  inspire new DAM goals. 

Here are a dozen reasons why you should join us October 13-14!

Smart businesses of every kind know that they need a content strategy to create a stellar customer experience and succeed in today’s information-overloaded world. They need a guiding beacon, a grand vision that’ll steer the development, delivery, and management of their content.

Your digital asset management (DAM) solution is one tool you can use to support your content strategy. Here’s how!

In today’s digital landscape, staying ahead of the curve is more important than ever as brands vie for profitability in a crowded, competitive online marketplace. Finding an effective approach to managing product information is critical...it allows you to be confident that your product data is complete, consistent, and up-to-date at every stage of the process.

A product information management (PIM) system can help you manage data associated with your product lines. PIM e-commerce solutions offer significant benefits that can promote higher profitability in today's fiercely cutthroat consumer and B2B markets.

Marketing organizations today are in constant competition to deliver the absolute best customer experience possible. But in a mad dash to achieve excellence, many businesses fall short. They are focused more on speed for the sake of speed, rather than ensuring their teams, assets, and processes can move more nimbly — and therefore more quickly when their customers need it most.

You know how important it is for potential and existing customers to feel good about your brand. Their impression of your brand creates expectations around the quality and value of your offering, and what it will feel like to use your product or service. Create positive expectations and your customers buy from your brand before they think of others in your market — that’s branding 101.

To create that kind of impression, every business needs to tell a memorable story about who they are, what they stand for, and why that’s valuable. Once you’ve got this story down, you’ve got to tell it consistently across all touchpoints to foster a clear, reliable, and strong recall of your brand story and its value.

That’s where your brand style guide comes in. It bundles up all the information and resources your internal and external teams need to represent your brand. With clear instructions on how to use all your brand assets, you can create and maintain brand consistency.

Back in 2011 when we first published this article, referencing “the cloud” still felt fresh and cutting edge. Almost a decade later, cloud-based solutions are standard for collaboration, communication, project management, and many other business needs. Digital asset management (DAM) is no exception.

The very nature of DAM – management, organization, and distribution of digital assets from a central content hub – is a perfect match for the cloud. Businesses rely on content that comes in many forms, and has countless sources and destinations. To facilitate that flow of information, you need a scalable, secure, and cost-effective system.

If you think back ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago, it’s hard to fathom how marketers got anything done without the help of the technologies we have today. But it happened. And for some of us, it felt like a simpler time. There were fewer channels to worry about. There wasn’t such an always-on mentality. And, there certainly weren’t a trillion technology acronyms to decipher. I mean, come on. From CMS to CRM, DMP, DAM, MRM, PIM, and…you get the picture — it’s all a bit overwhelming.

But, with technology comes benefits like efficiency, brand safety, and scale. It seems there’s a solution to help you with every marketing challenge out there. Maybe it is worth stomaching a few acronyms if they (or rather what they stand for) make our jobs as marketers easier. So if you can look past the acronym overload for a moment, we’ll peel back the layers of three important, often misunderstood technologies — DAM, PIM and MRM.