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!

1. No travel required.
The upside of an all-virtual, no-hassle event is that you can participate from anywhere — for free! So invite a colleague (or your whole team) to join you.

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.

At Widen, we know how important agility is in fueling a superior customer experience. We also know how critical an organization’s digital assets and their content marketing efforts are to this endeavor. After all, a brand’s photos, images, videos, sales content, and other digital assets are how they bring their content marketing strategies to life, tell their brand story, educate consumers, and ultimately mold the experience of their customers. 

To explore this topic further, we joined forces with our friends and long-time partners at The Content Advisory (TCA) and Content Marketing Institute (CMI) to discuss how agility, not speed, is the key to better customer experiences through faster content marketing. 

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.

What is omnichannel retailing?

Omnichannel retailing refers to the use of various sales channels (physical and digital storefronts) to create a unified, seamless brand experience for consumers on any platform, at any time. When done effectively, users should be able to move freely from one channel to the next, building a relationship that improves the overall buying experience and encourages brand loyalty. 

Welcome. There’s not a doubt in our minds that you are here for a good reason. There comes a time in the digital asset management (DAM) journey where you just know there has to be a better way. Whatever finally pushed you down this path — the unrelenting search for assets, the lack of brand control, the broken workflows, the sheer chaos of it all — you’ve taken a step in the right direction. 

So now what? You’ve started down the path to find the best DAM solution. There is a lot to think about before you sign on the dotted line. DAM is an investment of time and money, and you need to make the absolute best choice for you, your teams, and your business. 

That is why we are excited to bring to you (and all DAM explorers out there), . Step-by-step, exercise-by-exercise, we give you the tools you need to find the right DAM solution. 

Thinking about integrating Salesforce with your Widen Collective^Ⓡ digital asset management (DAM) system? There are many ways to connect these powerful tools. Let’s explore how this integration works, why it’s valuable, and relevant use cases.