If your corporate career has spanned more than 15 years, you have live-witnessed the explosion of digital marketing, which is by definition “the use of the Internet, mobile devices, social media, search engines, and other online channels to reach consumers.” It really wasn’t all that long ago – before the mid-2000s specifically – marketing professionals primarily focused on offline avenues to establish their branding and promote their products and services – print advertising, TV and radio, direct mail, and larger and more prominent displays like billboards and other signage.
Then by 2008, wireless Internet was ubiquitous. And with the 2007 release of the very first version of the now-ubiquitous iPhone, more and more people were trading in their personal, standard cell phones for smartphones – portals to the online universe from the palms of their hands. Naturally, people began to spend significantly more time online. And, the modern marketing world caught on quickly.
If marketing is about meeting your customers and prospects where they are, then companies had to figure out how to reach them while they were online. And this, of course, paved the way for digital marketing as we know it today – marketing that is all about engagement. It is the process of creating conversations throughout which you respond to your customers with the exact content they want, right when they want it.
As marketing evolves, it becomes more about conversation. One way to look at it: where traditional marketing is static, digital marketing has, from the beginning, involved creating and delivering dynamic content that was less about companies talking at audiences, and more about communicating with prospects and customers.
The evolution of digital marketing
In the early 1990s, the public first got access to the World Wide Web – a portal to an online world that provided virtual alternatives to a surprising amount of manual ways of life. People found that using the Internet to supplant the traditional way of doing certain things eliminated so much of the time, effort, and even cost of so many of their daily activities: conducting information searches on just about any topic, checking on and interacting with friends and family, and more.
So with more people spending an increasing amount of time online, businesses unknowingly took the first steps on their digital marketing journeys – mostly by setting up company websites. And the most digitally savvy companies would sprinkle all the right keywords throughout the site for what we now know as search engine optimization (SEO).
As companies developed their digital real estate, according to the Digital Marketing Institute, “email became a new outbound marketing tool, joining the traditional arsenal of TV, radio and print advertisements and telephone sales.” The difference with email, though, is that it had greater potential as a catalyst for meaningful conversations with customers and prospects.
By the mid-2000s, digital marketing became even more social – conversational – with the widespread use of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These platforms provided accessible venues for businesses across all industries to strike up and perpetuate conversations with potential clients and existing customers. This was especially the case when people could log into these platforms with mobile devices – by then, it was hard to find anyone who didn’t have a Facebook, Twitter, and/or LinkedIn account.
Then, between 2007 and 2010, social media marketing became its own differentiable discipline of digital marketing. The different platforms made it possible – and simple – for any company to purchase advertising space, and then targeted advertising made social media marketing feel even more, well, social.
According to Hubspot, “targeting consumers with relevant ads – rather than bombarding them with a large volume of ad content – has become a standard practice for online advertisers, particularly on social media. Beyond Facebook’s targeting efforts, other social networks such as Twitter, YouTube, and Google+ focus on providing an advertising experience for users that doesn’t feel aggressive or impersonal.”
And of course, the advent of ROI tracking tools helped marketers evaluate what the best conversation starters were, who the most compelling conversations were with, and where the best interactions were happening.
DAM’s contributions to complex digital marketing conversations
Digital marketing, simply put, just keeps getting more complicated.
For one, the sheer number of digital avenues to start (and maintain) conversations has made it difficult to curate high-quality exchanges with customers and prospects who will all inevitably be at different points in the sales funnel. From ads and organic posts on social media platforms to sponsored blog posts your content team produces for third party-sites, it’s hard to keep track of everywhere your brand appears – and to then properly nurture each resulting conversation.
Then, just like anything else, digital marketing is the sum of all its parts. In this case, the parts are digital assets – files like images, videos, documents, logos, audio files, and more that come together to create content and customer experiences. And the longer that digital marketing has been around, the more complex these assets have become. In the early days of digital marketing, there were mostly images, documents, and other simple files. These days, the multiplying conversations have gotten richer – with rich media files like videos and other complex content like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and other multi-dimensional files.
Assets and their lifecycles have gotten so complex that, over the last five to ten years, digital asset management has become a distinct, important element of digital marketing. And, digital asset management (DAM) technology platforms have emerged as an important foundation of the marketing technology (martech) stack – the collection of technologies that an enterprise utilize to carry out all digital marketing initiatives.
A DAM platform (often simply referred to as a DAM) provides a centralized platform from which a community of users can manage the complete project lifecycle of all their digital assets. Directly from a cloud-based, modern DAM, you can create, manage, distribute, archive, alter, and even reuse digital assets. This type of solution will also automate certain asset workflows, too, so that no one ever has to waste time duplicating a colleague’s efforts or otherwise recreating the wheel when it comes to content.
Modern DAMs also comes with business insights and analytics that make it easy for marketers to see what content and assets are resonating the most with target audiences. This, of course, is great information to have as you approach future leads.
In other words, think of an enterprise DAM as a personal assistant that helps you keep track of, respond accordingly to, and overall optimize the many different consequential conversations that your company has online.
A solution like the Digizuite DAM will also be incredibly social. In other words, it will integrate with other marketing tools and programs to optimize content creation and distribution across multiple channels. For example, when Digizuite connects with a content management solution (CMS), the two software operate as one holistic, fully-content-functional program.
Why you need to invite DAM to the party
In a world where so many interactions happen online, enterprises have to be “on their game” at all times. Unlike with in-person commitments and experiences, it’s easy for online consumers to “exit the conversation” – to quickly and easily find alternatives to your offering if they don’t like something you say, or if you fail to provide them with relevant, up-to-date, clear cut information about what you bring to the table.
If marketing started out as an intimate, time-specific gathering, it is now an around-the-clock, open-invitation party at a venue with multiple floors and rooms – and situated within steps of places that are simultaneously hosting other parties. It may seem overwhelming, but keeping people in your orbit is simply about tailoring each conversation you have specifically to the individual in front of you. Consistent authenticity in the way you represent yourself is important, but at the same time, the ability to personalize responses is a key part of what you need to be a compelling conversationalist.
Luckily, a DAM facilitates this kind of digital marketing party success by making sure that you – your brand, in this case – is at its best, and that you create the highest quality, personalized experience for every unique person you encounter, armed with relevant conversation topics and in tow with value-add information.
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