When’s the last time you took a step back from planning and creating content to evaluate the content you already have? Conducting a content audit is an important part of maintaining your content library and optimizing your future content.

While there is no single content audit template for every team’s needs, there are four major steps that any team or business can use. Plus, there are certain content audit tools that can help facilitate your process – just like this free, downloadable content audit spreadsheet that you can use to get started right now!

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?

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.