These days, you can do some pretty impressive things with content. However, you’re not the only one using content to win the attention and mindshare of audiences. Thanks to the success that content marketing has seen over the years, there’s a lot (and we mean a lot) of competition out there. For example, there are over 4.2 million blogs written each day. Pair that with the nearly 1.8 billion websites out there — and you have a lot of content to contend with.   

To break through the noise, you need to add some horsepower to your content marketing efforts by incorporating visual content. To help you do this effectively, it’s important to know the what, why, and how behind it.

Marketing teams are always looking ahead, preparing for deadlines that will bring the next big campaign or project to life. But it’s important that they also periodically look back, and review all of the content that’s been created. Conducting a content audit gives teams a holistic view of their content inventory, helps them identify gaps, and surfaces opportunities for repurposing or reuse.

While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to a content audit, there are four major steps that any team or business can do. Plus, there are tools to help make the process more manageable.

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.

In about 15 years social media has gone from an entirely new concept to an integral part of everyday life. Now, any marketing mix that doesn’t include social media is unusual. With nearly 80% of Americans possessing a profile on a social networking platform, marketing through social media is one of the best ways to reach members of your target audience — no matter who they are. Plus, almost all prominent social platforms have paid advertising options that brands can leverage to increase exposure to relevant audiences. If you want to reach potential customers and key stakeholders, you need to be using social media.

But that doesn’t mean that social media marketing is easy, or even altogether straightforward! You and your team have probably struggled with how to create the right kind of content to engage the right people, and how to best measure success online. Don’t worry, you’re not alone — social media is a difficult and confusing tool for many marketing teams. A great step toward demystifying social media marketing is to streamline your social media workflow.

As your business grows, so will your library of assets. Assets include everything from videos to photos to graphics and more. And, as you know, creating assets takes time, money, and resources which are all lost if you don’t have a plan for creating, maintaining, and storing them.

How you interact with your assets should be dictated by where each falls in its lifecycle. For instance, you will treat a new asset differently than one that’s been around for years. In some cases, as an asset reaches the end of its lifecycle it may be time to retire it altogether. Having a solid understanding of your digital asset lifecycle will help you keep track of your assets during each stage of its life.

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?

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.

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.