When you hear the word ‘ecosystem,’ you might think about the meaning you learned in your high school biology class: a community of living things – people, animals, plants – and their relationship both with one another and with the physical environment they all call home.
A digital ecosystem is not so different from a biological one: just swap out the physical environment with a virtual network and add technology solutions to the mix. Your organization’s digital ecosystem is defined by how all software platforms and other IT tools connect with one another, and with the people using them.
A completely integrated ecosystem enables everyone in an organization to conveniently collaborate with teammates, people on other teams, and even relevant people outside of their organization. Also, when people are part of an integrated digital ecosystem, they can both communicate with one another and efficiently perform their tasks, at any time and from anywhere in the world. As stated in a Forbes Insight, “digital ecosystems bring companies together across industries and technology areas by offering access to a common set of content, applications, analytics, datasets and other tools.”
In other words, a successful, efficient digital ecosystem is an integrated digital ecosystem – one in which all software connects to eliminate redundancies and to automate workflows. Every platform in a fully integrated system of technologies will consistently come together and function as one holistic solution and unite every single user. Such ecosystems also allow companies to work more efficiently with their corporate and sales partners.
According to MIT Sloan’s Management Review, “high-growth companies are increasingly achieving results by creating and orchestrating digitally connected ecosystems — coordinated networks of enterprises, devices, and customers — that create value for all of their participants.” And, a digital marketing ecosystem is a crucial component of this package.
Why you need an integrated digital marketing ecosystem
Your digital marketing ecosystem encompasses every component of marketing technology (martech) stack, along with every person who uses any part of the system to do their job. And, in an integrated marketing ecosystem, all of the solutions and resources in your martech stack will complement one another instead of simply operating alongside each other. This is ideal because the more that technologies synchronize, the more effective its human users will be.
There are many components to a solid martech stack. However, the companies that we at Digizuite have seen with the strongest ecosystems all have the following marketing technology solutions at the foundation of their stacks:
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A digital asset management (DAM) solution
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A content management system (CMS)
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A product information management (PIM) platform
In an integrated digital marketing ecosystem, these aforementioned technologies will talk to each other. Their functionalities will also complement one another’s. Also important, a DAM, CMS, and PIM should each integrate with other tools in a martech stack, like marketing automation platforms, social media management tools, and so on.
For example, take the Digizuite DAM. It fully integrates with the Episerver CMS so that when these two solutions are in the same marketing stack, they function as one holistic solution. Digizuite and Episerver platforms connect in a way that allows you to leverage assets stored in your DAM directly from your CMS. There’s just one login required to leverage any asset you need in order optimize your website content.
How does an integrated marketing system of technologies lead to better sales?
An integrated digital marketing ecosystem doesn’t only make things easier for marketers – it also provides strong bones for sales enablement. And marketing technology best fuels sales when it is part of an integrated digital marketing ecosystem – an interconnected one that also fuses people and processes.
Here’s what an integrated digital marketing system helps companies achieve:
Efficiency
An integrated digital marketing ecosystem is an efficient environment – and this efficiency spreads to the people leveraging it. From there, sales enablement is a natural byproduct.
Specifically, with all the time savings that results from the simplification and streamlining of business processes, marketing professionals and sales representatives have more time for business generating activities and content production.
With technology solutions that are all fully synchronized, users don’t have to log in and out of different systems to execute any one task or complete any workflow. Instead, it’s as though multiple platforms combine their functionalities to form one solution that gives users every resource they need to complete all of their job duties. For example, when a CMS and DAM are integrated, users can access all digital assets directly from the tool they use to create and manage websites and landing pages. This means website updates and other changes happen far more quickly, as does content production. Efficiency in this way also yields faster times-to-market.
Automation also plays a key role in efficiency gains across sales functions, and a modern marketing stack will indeed be composed of software that turns repetitive tasks into automated workflows. And when all these software platforms are connected, there are no limits to the kind of workflows you can set up. An action in your DAM, for example, can trigger your CMS to perform another automated action (a website change, for example). This removes just about every repetitive, manual, administrative task on your sales and marketing teams’ plates.
Digizuite customer M/I Homes is one company that has realized significant efficiency gains by way of their integrated digital marketing ecosystem. As a homebuilder, M/I Homes relies on digital imagery for B2C sales, and collectively, they upload between 1,200 to 2,000 photos every week to their corporate and regional websites.
As a result of integrating their Digizuite DAM with their CMS, the M/I Homes sales and marketing teams have cut their SLA times for each photo down from weeks to hours.
M/I Homes’s integrated system of technologies has directly resulted in faster times-to-market in addition to significant time savings for all users. The business implications are huge here, considering that for M/I Homes, a picture quite literally is worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Hands-on sales teams
The greatest sales representatives are those who take initiative – go-getters who are comfortable and proficient independently hunting for new business. And, an integrated digital marketing ecosystem raises and fosters this initiative within sellers.
Take Dura-Line, for example, whose marketing department recently implemented a DAM, PIM and CMS simultaneously. And with these three solutions at the heart of their new-and-improved integrated digital marketing ecosystem, Dura-Line – a global manufacturer of telecommunications solutions – has given a whole new level of autonomy to every member of their sales team worldwide.
It works like this (in the words of Tanya Kanczuzewski, who oversees all of Dura-Line’s marketing): “Every [asset] lives in the DAM, which is connected to our PIM and CMS…It makes things simple because all editing is done in one place, and then it gets pushed to the website and CMS for content production and distribution everywhere.”
“Everywhere” includes going into the hands of Dura-Line’s internationally scattered workforce, who rely on pictures to sell their highly complex products. With their integrated ecosystem – which can be tapped into via mobile devices – these sellers always have access to the material they need to differentiate Dura-Line products from those of competitors. They never need to request this information from marketers or technical teams; every bit of content and information is all right there in the DAM, for the taking (just like the commission they are more likely making).
Personalized, customer-centric digital experiences
Any seasoned sales rep with chops will tell you that timing is everything.
The further down the sales funnel that a lead is, the less time it will probably take for that lead to turn into that coveted sale. So, the more leads you can introduce to your sellers further down the funnel, the better your sales forecast will consistently be.
Website leads, for example, will likely convert in less time than those leads that come in through cold calls; their baseline interest puts them further down the funnel. This is why it is important to provide personalized, customer-centric digital experiences to everyone who visits your website. And an integrated digital marketing ecosystem makes it possible – simple, even – to deliver the right content to the proper people at the exact right time.
One Digizuite customer, a provider of network infrastructure solutions, has been able to do just this with their fully integrated CMS, DAM, and PIM. Following a large-scale business acquisition in 2019, this international corporation relied on their integrated digital marketing ecosystem to rebuild their website. With all their digital assets connected to, and easily accessible from the CMS and PIM, this company has built out an efficient digital experience – one that delivers a simplified and holistic view of their now expanded offering.
Digital marketing ecosystem integration: it all starts with a DAM
Modern marketing technology isn’t just flashy and fun for creative professionals to use for creating brilliant material. It can – and should – come together as the basis for an integrated digital marketing ecosystem, which impacts business at every level.
With an integrated digital marketing ecosystem, companies give their sales teams exactly what they need to bring in more leads, and to more effectively nurture and convert those leads. And, closing the chasm between marketing and sales in this way starts with a sophisticated, highly-integrable DAM platform.
Want to find out how DAM could enable your sales channels?
Schedule a call with a DAM expert today to find out more.
