Understanding how and when to use copyrighted materials like stock photography, logos, videos, and more can be a full-time job. Using a piece of content incorrectly could result in a fine or even a lawsuit. On the flip-side, there’s the possibility of someone using your materials without proper permission. Neither scenario is desirable — and without consistent copyright management, you might not even know it’s happening.

With new material being created at a rapid pace, having a single gatekeeper to keep track of everything is unrealistic — but you need some way to easily see how your content’s being used. That’s why many companies are turning to digital rights management tools to keep tabs on their digital content.

The stories that customers tell about your company have more impact on brand perception than most ad campaigns ever will. That’s a big reason why brands are investing $15 billion into influencer marketing in 2022. But it’s important to remember that paying for influencer posts isn’t the only way to get valuable user-generated content (UGC).

Billions of pieces of social content are published every day. And some of that UGC is valuable information about your brand that you can harness by using a digital asset management (DAM) system to collect, organize, and publish the positive stories your customers tell. You can even spin the negative, one-star customer reviews in your favor. 

This is a beginner’s guide to the benefits of UGC and how it works with a DAM system. Let’s start by defining UGC. 

A digital asset management (DAM) system is a powerful tool on its own. Acting as the foundation for content, teams rely on their DAM solution to centralize assets, collaborate across teams, provide secure access to collateral, and so much more. So there’s no doubt that the business case for DAM is there. But many teams are extending this value even further through digital asset management integrations. 

People expect a consistent and relevant digital experience from their home office to every place they bring their smartphone. Your customers might encounter you on a website, app, chatbot, social platform, customer portal, in-store kiosk, digital stadium billboard, and wearable all in the same day. And they’ll want each of those experiences to reflect any interactions they’ve had with you since they woke up and drank their morning coffee.

To create this kind of customer experience you have to get your content and customer data to interact with, update, and trigger personalized events in real-time across all of these channels. Integrating all the required marketing technology (martech) solutions to make this possible is one of the biggest challenges all brands face. That’s why companies across all industries are turning to a combination of digital asset management (DAM) and digital experience platforms (DXP) to power their ever-evolving customer journey.

Consumers today expect relevant, meaningful, consistent experiences at each and every intersection with a brand. If a buyer purchases a product via an Instagram ad, they don’t want an email days later pushing the same item. They want smart communications, personalized content, speed, and an all-around reliable and cohesive brand experience. 

The problem is this caliber of experience isn’t easy to deliver. Marketing technologies address different pieces of the omnichannel puzzle, but stringing solutions together to work as a cohesive, data-driven marketing technology (martech) stack is often a challenge. That’s why industries and user types of all kinds are turning to the next generation of marketing technology — the digital experience platform (DXP). 

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.

Let’s take a look at how image recognition software works and the efficiencies it can bring to DAM workflows.

The use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving in the digital asset management (DAM) community, and rightfully so. AI-powered tools support metadata creation, a time-consuming process that’s often one of the biggest pain points for DAM software administrators and users.

This is why these tools are no longer merely a nice-to-have. As digital libraries expand and AI becomes more sophisticated, image recognition and auto-tagging tools have become a must-have for any enterprise DAM solution. 

The adoption of AI tools in the Widen Collective^® has kept pace with this evolution, and as with any other software developments within our platform, we’ve gathered customer feedback around the functionality to ensure the capabilities meet their needs.

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.