Admins spend a lot of time in the Widen Collective®. Whether they’re auditing the system, doing some clean up, adding metadata, or sharing a collection with a colleague, we know they take pride in a well-oiled digital asset management machine. But have you ever wondered what all that DAM work adds up to?

When’s the last time you’ve taken a step back from the planning and creation of content to evaluate it?

It’s a healthy thing to do. A content audit is a systematic review of your content. This systematic review helps you organize, evaluate, and then refine your content.

In this post, we’ll walk through four major steps and share a spreadsheet to help you conduct a content audit to help inform your content strategy.

In Part 1 of this series, we shared our research findings around connectivity for marketers and creatives. Here, in Part 2, we’re going to reveal the relationship between connectivity and digital asset management (DAM) software. After all, DAM is what Widen is best known for!

Connectivity is something everyone experiences to some degree. At Widen, we talk about it often because we’re aware that connectivity affects our clients and our teams every day.

In this three-part series on connectivity for marketers and creatives, we’ll be discussing:

1.     Connectivity research findings
2.     Connectivity and digital asset management (DAM)
3.     The future of connectivity

Before we get started with part 1 of the series, let’s begin with a baseline definition of connectivity.

Recently, I had the pleasure of co-presenting our webinar, The Essential Guide to Visual Content Marketing, with Peg Miller of the B2B Marketing Academy.

The webinar offered a deep dive into content strategy, and included trends and actionable tips to give an organization’s marketing efforts more horsepower. Since these strategies have become so critical to marketing and content pros, we wanted to share them here, too.

So, let’s get started with our essential guide to visual content marketing with an overview of what we’ll be talking about.

Andy Wang, former Digital Marketing Manager at World Kitchen, kicked off his Widen Summit 2016 presentation by saying, “Every company and organization has a challenge. How do we connect authentic stories to our consumers?” As marketers, we tend to gravitate to talking about ourselves and features of our products. But if we want to create deeper, more genuine connections with our consumers, we can’t just talk about ourselves.

If you work with visual content and a DAM system, you’ve probably heard the term search engine optimization (SEO) mentioned more than once. And although you know it’s important, SEO can be hard to understand — let alone master.

Since the mastery part can take years, let’s focus our attention today on gaining a clear understanding of what SEO is, and how you can begin using it more productively within your digital asset management system — specifically with your visual content and embed codes. We’ll also debunk a couple of SEO myths, too.

What is intelligent content?

As the name implies, it’s got to be smart, right? But beyond that, things may not be as clear.

Today, we’ll be sharing some of our learnings and philosophies revolving around intelligent content strategies and their relevance to the modern marketer. In addition to good, clear information, we’ll also give you opportunities to clarify your organization’s strategy with a little bit of homework, which in the long run will make your content marketing process easier, more efficient — and more successful.

The content universe is ever expanding, as more content is being launched into the digital galaxy each day. Readers and buyers want to find content that will comprehensively and intelligently solve their problem or answer their question. But the challenge is that most marketing content is hard to find, poorly conceived, and dependent on highly skilled content creators to be repurposed, reformatted, and redeployed. What’s the solution? Doing all you can to create content that is helpful and then helping readers get to that content.