For marketing professionals today, a great deal of the tasks depends on their ability to not let things get on top of them. Data and information sources are increasing, as are the variety of tools at hand to handle them. What companies require, for that reason, is something to centralize procedures and ravel the rough edges.
Ahead of his session at DMWF Europe Virtual on 24-25 November, Jake Athey, VP marketing and client experience at digital asset management (DAM) software service provider Widen, talked to MarketingTech about how Covid-19 has challenged organizations to reassess their martech stack, how it has impacted Widen, and the actions smart online marketers should take with their material and property methods moving forward.
MarketingTech: Hi Jake. Inform me a bit about your career to date and roles and obligations at Widen?
Jake Athey: After completing university in 2004, I joined Expand as an intern and never ever left! I ended up being the business’s very first marketing worker in 2005 when Widen was preparing to release its cloud-based digital property management (DAM) system and required to communicate this new technology to the marketplace. 16 years later, I function as Widen’s VP of marketing & & consumer experience and concentrate on growing our brand.
MT: What errors are companies making when it comes to digital property management presently –– and what do they pertain to Broaden with in regards to issues which need to be solved?
JA: The most typical DAM mistake is to assume that innovation alone can fix an organization’s material problems. Usually, these obstacles consist of disorganization, several disconnected storage systems, sluggish content approval processes, and how to get individuals content without a barrage of email demands to the marketing department’s informal “finder of stuff.” To solve the real problem, we assist our customers to establish a method that aligns individuals, processes, and technology towards wanted marketing results.
MT: With the broad range of tools online marketers utilize –– the company mentions Hootsuite, Salesforce, Slack, WordPress, etc as its primary combinations –– how important does a company like yours become in the martech stack? As more tools appear, how challenging does that make your job therefore too?
JA: In a martech stack, Widen is the main content repository for every single group that utilizes material and every system that publishes it, consisting of the ones you mentioned above. Our specialty is to help brands construct a searchable material library, secure brand name consistency, enhance content creation processes, and prepare eCommerce listings with our product info management (PIM) tool, the current addition to the platform. Having integration partners does not make our job more hard– rather, it makes our innovation more available and useful to groups covering marketing, sales, eCommerce, engineering, HR, and beyond.
MT: Could you provide me an example of the most intriguing consumer story and how Widen assists them?
JA: HARMAN International, a leader in connected automobile innovation and audio innovations, came to Broaden when they were introducing various customer products at when however having a hard time getting marketing assets to their worldwide business systems, distributors, and dealers. After developing a technique with HARMAN, we set them up with our DAM+PIM solution, which functions as a system of record for all of their product content and information across 21 languages. Today, HARMAN can go to market substantially quicker due to the fact that its stakeholders can access up-to-date, precise material from their DAM system, anywhere and anytime– in truth, they have downloaded over 284,000 possessions in the last 21 months.
MT: You wrote a blog last month with regards to how image recognition software (AI) can be used to improve DAM workflows. How are online marketers –– as well as customers and potential customers –– seeing AI innovations in this context presently, and what in your opinion is the optimal use case for this going forward? Will it be key in creating a 360-degree consumer view?
JA: Currently, AI is an effective tool for auto-tagging properties with metadata upon upload, which saves DAM administrators loads of time and allows users to discover and utilize new material quicker. Quickly, AIs will recommend assets and find associated content for users, who will no longer require to discover metadata taxonomy to discover what they need in their DAM system. The mix of auto-tagging and suggesting marketing assets will be the most optimum usage case for AI in the near term.
MT: What has the impact been of Covid-19 on Widen in regards to consumer acceleration towards DAM services, client renewal, and acquisition? Are more businesses understanding the advantages of DAM as a result?
JA: Covid-19 challenged organizations to rationalize their martech stack, keep the fundamentals, and terminate services that aren’t mission-critical. Broaden has kept its 95% customer retention rate throughout the pandemic, and our numbers show greater utilization and continuous growth. DAM is seen as more crucial than ever, especially for distributed groups that need to not just strategy, produce, and release content remotely however also demonstrate its value utilizing analytics, which Broaden offers.
MT: You will be speaking about ‘Brand name Mayhem To Technique: The Tools And Tactics Of Straightening Your Brand Name To A Post-Covid World’ at DMWF. What will the audience take away from this session?
JA: The audience will learn that the strategic option to realign a brand has a massive influence on the method marketers prepare, create, manage, release, and analyze content. For many audience members, this discussion will be a wake-up call to make their brand more relevant and relatable in the next phases of the pandemic. A lot of repositioning has currently happened, however as economies reopen once again (hopefully more permanently), marketers who straighten their messaging, content, and experiences to this reality will recuperate greatest.