The start of the pandemic in 2020 forced consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies to streamline their e-commerce experiences. And unexpected changes in customer behavior brought with it expedited digital trends that are disrupting the consumer-goods industry forcing them to shift away from traditional success models. For example, online sales of food and beverages reached an all-time high of $66 billion in 2020 and according to NielsenIQ, online CPG food and beverage sales could reach as high as $109 billion in 2021. What once was a shopping trend embraced by a select few, is now a common occurrence for many households. 

However, this kind of rapid growth also brings with it some challenges. It demands that companies scale along every part of the value chain, and marketing is no exception. Widen customer HARMAN International, a global consumer electronics company, found their marketing communications tools and processes became a hindrance to delivering products to market, so they invested in a product information management (PIM) system and then a digital asset management (DAM) system. 

Let’s take a closer look at what HARMAN has achieved with their DAM and PIM investments.

Anyone who has worked in digital marketing knows that marketing and technology go hand in hand. Successful marketing strategies rely on a variety of tools to evaluate data, connect with audiences, and create engaging content. With thousands of martech tools to choose from, the key is determining the right ones for your team. 

Imagine that your marketing team has the ideal technology stack. The customer experience is seamless across every device and channel. Your analytics give you insight into every touchpoint of the customer journey. All your software is integrated, redundancies are eliminated, disconnects are connected, and bottlenecks are gone. It’s a nice dream, right?

With the right marketing technology team, you can bring a lot of that dream to life. Probably even more of it than you think. Assembling an effective group of martech heroes takes some work, but you can do it. Just like you would map out the ideal future state of your marketing technology (martech) stack, you can map out the people and team structure you need.

“Everything’s fast now and it’s totally unreasonable,” says comedian John Mulaney. “The world is run by computers. The world is run by robots. And sometimes they ask us if we’re a robot just because we’re trying to log in and look at our own stuff!”

Marketing teams face the opportunities (and temptations) of more channels, more content, and more technology. And thinking about how it all works together to deliver a consistent, effective customer experience can lead to more headaches.

If you’re feeling like your marketing technology is making you work more not less, or you’re struggling to keep up with the speed of business, it’s time to take a step back and think about what your technology is doing for you, your business, and your audiences.

Not too long ago, artificial intelligence (AI) was just a concept from science fiction movies. But today, AI is changing the status quo of entire industries — including marketing technology (martech). When it comes to digital asset management (DAM), image recognition software has a valuable and growing role in metadata creation by automatically tagging assets during the upload process.

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.

As businesses look for new and effective ways to engage customers, many are exploring how to advance their content marketing strategy into brand publishing. As publishers, brands form connections through high-quality stories created by talented journalists, photographers, videographers, and illustrators. Content is continually created and shared to cultivate a stable audience and build long-term brand awareness and growth. 

One distribution format that is gaining traction among brand publishers is podcasts — not only are they relatively inexpensive to produce, but they have growing consumer interest. According to Edison Research and Triton Digital, roughly 55% of Americans (or 155 million people) have listened to a podcast — up from 23% a decade earlier. And there are now over 800,000 active podcasts with over 54 million episodes available worldwide. From news and history to true crime and culture, podcasts span every subject and interest. 

But podcast distribution entails managing feeds to a variety of networks — including iHeart, Google, Spotify, Tunein, Stitcher, iTunes, and more — which can be time-consuming. Any Widen customer can use our digital asset management (DAM) software, the Widen Collective^®, to streamline their podcast production process and publish content efficiently across various networks. To explain how, let’s look at an example from a Widen customer.

Best Friends Animal Society is an animal welfare organization that finds homes for rescued pets across America. They use their digital asset management (DAM) system, the Widen Collective^®, to store, organize, and distribute all of their digital assets — which includes a lot of images of ridiculously cute dogs and cats. 

Sarah Kichas is Best Friends’ Photography Manager, and DAM administration is just a small part of her job. It entails managing a constant stream of new content from a diverse group of photographers — including staff, freelancers, and volunteers — many of whom take pictures at just a single event. Giving them all access to the Collective with the appropriate login credentials, permissions, and upload instructions could be a part-time job in itself. 

At the 2019 Widen Summit, Sarah shared how they use the Widen API and Dropbox to turn this onerous upload process into a simple, streamlined workflow. “I love it,” she said, “because it saves me time and energy, and most importantly, my sanity.”

Simpson Strong-Tie is one of the world's largest suppliers of structural building products. Their products include everything from fastening systems and structural connectors to software, and their Marketing department creates promotional material for all of them — both in print and online.

Producing and managing all of this imagery is an enormous job! Just ask Mark Hausler, who is one of their senior graphic designers. However, the recent addition of a digital asset management (DAM) platform with two powerful integrations — Adobe Creative Cloud and Hybris — has dramatically improved the speed and accuracy of their creative workflows.

The work of a marketer is never done. In addition to tackling what’s already on your long to-do list, you’re constantly fielding new ideas to get more customers, faster. It’d be great if you could just hire more people, but that’s not always possible. And sometimes, it feels like even if you had 1,000 people on your marketing team, you could still find work for 1,001.