Marketers in this day and age can no longer win on price or quality of offering alone. There’s just too much competition. And with consumers making buying decisions based primarily on their experience with a company, it’s clear that brands must adopt a customer-first approach to marketing.

As a brand in this day and age, you are (whether you realize it or not) in the experience business. Transactions are no longer a simple exchange of dollars for goods or services; consumers demand more. They expect you to win their affections and loyalty by delivering consistent, memorable experiences at each and every interaction. And, because of this, the digital assets and content you use to tell your story, educate your audiences, and represent your brand, are more important than ever. To help them deliver on this experience economy, more and more brands turn to digital asset management (DAM) systems. Here’s how the right DAM system can help!

“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.

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.

Whether your brand is traveling down the hall to a colleague's office or across the globe, you need to safeguard it for the journey ahead. With freelancers, marketing agencies, internal teams, and many others using your brand in communications and content, it's easy for inconsistencies and misuse to arise. A brand identity kit can help by providing disparate groups and individuals with the tools and information they need to uphold your brand consistently. While every brand identity kit looks different, here are a few essentials to pack in yours:

The connectivity between people, processes, and technologies allows marketers and creatives to perform their best and create incredibly meaningful experiences. But how? That’s what we decided to find out by talking with a range of professionals around the world about what’s behind true connectivity. Our team conducted and analyzed 32 phone interviews and 506 online surveys to generate the data.

The report explores how modern marketing organizations balance the power of technology with the familiarity of the human touch, and the role of connectivity in marketing operations, strategy, and business results. Among many findings, we discovered a significant gap between interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and understanding of that technology in marketing departments.

Which trends are marketing-driven organizations focused on in 2018? Inquiring minds want to know! If you said artificial intelligence, actionable data, customer experience, and building the right technology mix, you’re spot on. Connecting digital asset management (DAM) to these trends needs to be a priority for all marketing teams who want to maximize content value, create deeper emotional connections with their audiences, and improve the overall customer experience.

Katherine Knight is responsible not only for marketing but also for the love lives of hundreds of thousands of relationships all over the world. As director of marketing at Zoosk, a leading online global dating platform in over 80 countries, her work powers a platform that over 33 million people rely on to find true love. She oversees all of Zoosk’s digital marketing and advertising and uses the Widen Collective to house all of their creative assets.

Marketing Tech Talks originated at Widen as a way for our staff to learn from other marketers and marketing technologists. During Tech Talks, practitioners share their marketing strategy stories and how technology has played a role in them. The group also talks about common marketing problems and how people, process, and technology work together to create solutions.

Content is a powerful sales tool. 87% of buyers surveyed said that the solution provider they chose provided ample content to help them through each stage of the decision-making process (via DemandGen Report). Are your teams equipped to provide your buyers ample content throughout the decision-making process?