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.”

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. 

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.

Widen and WNDYR announced today that they are partnering to simplify martech integrations for companies that use Widen’s digital asset management (DAM) platform. As Widen’s full-service integration deployment partner, WNDYR will handle managed and custom integrations. The partnership will improve the speed, quality, and variety of martech integrations available to Widen customers.

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.

“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.

Globalization and e-commerce present huge opportunities for consumer packaged goods companies. Deloitte estimates online sales of consumer packaged products will increase by 350% to $36 billion in 2018 from $8 billion as recently as 2013.

Joint customers can now leverage the security and searchability of the Widen Collective within Hootsuite to post content and measure performance across major social networks.

Integration enables marketing teams to ingest user-generated content from TINT into the Widen Collective® with metadata and image rights

We’re thrilled to announce our integration with the social display platform TINT. Mutual customers can now ingest user-generated content (UGC) from social media via TINT directly into the Widen Collective with all the metadata, including image rights. The integration enables brands to easily repurpose UGC for marketing initiatives at scale without the risk of misusing images.