The Modern Enterprise Dilemma: Managing Content in the Digital Age

According to Gartner, digitalisation and digital marketing are considered a higher priority by Australian CIOs than their global counterparts. IT and other divisions are now required to work in unison with marketing to ensure content is delivered seamlessly across every communication channel, including online, mobile, print and social. In other words, many Australian organisations are moving away from operating models, which create business department silos that can stifle digital innovation.

However, as we move into an increasingly device driven world that is defined by our immediate, digital experiences, the expectation of businesses to develop and manage a constant flow of marketing content that can be adapted across a multitude of platforms is proving increasingly difficult to meet. Ensuring that marketing content, regardless of size or format, is agile and can be accessed on demand, will mean rethinking how digital assets are managed. 

Hence, organisations need to consider the automation of managing all assets, across all available mediums and explore the following five key steps to enable the delivery of a richer digital marketing experience for consumers:

1. Collect: When creating and storing marketing assets, content should be collected and automated to provide a single, authoritative system for all types of marketing media. This digital asset management system should be designed without silos, massive email files, or the need to play guesswork in order to locate the correct asset for a specific marketing purpose.

2. Manage: The ability to organise, categorise and apply appropriate rights policies to link related assets ensures rich marketing media can be managed efficiently.

3. Find: Effective search and retrieval is an essential part of managing assets. Enabling advanced and multi-faceted search options, such as the ability to include synonyms, improves the likelihood of marketers finding what they are looking for in the fastest way possible.

4. Repurpose: In today’s results driven and time-poor business environment, marketing assets need to be repurposed effectively and efficiently. This means delivering cross platform content, which allows marketers to maximise financial outlay, while minimsing time investment. Moreover, media management makes it easy for the entire organisation to find appropriate media for use in presentations, marketing and other business communications. Introducing workflows also ensures that employees follow processes for production, review, approval and legal sign off to maintain brand consistency, which is a key component for ensuring brand loyalty.

5. Distribute: The publication and distribution of marketing media can be as simple as emailing the right file to the right destination. Conversely, it can be as complex as requiring the transcoding, packaging, preparation and delivery of an asset. Yet, this process can be automated so that publishing and delivery becomes a one-step process. 

The management of digital assets is critical for any business that is juggling with multiple decision makers, long project lead times and complicated data sets. In addition, as the appetite for digital content, such as images, apps and videos continues to grow, systems that can generate, publish and repurpose digital assets across channels will become a vital part of effective marketing campaigns.