With Valentine’s Day upon us, romantics across the globe will be thinking of novel ways to surprise their loved one.
Long gone are the days when a simple bunch of flowers or box of chocolates were the only options for someone hoping to treat their partner. February is now one of the most important times of the year for retailers offering huge ranges of products and services. In fact, in the UK alone, Valentine’s Day spending is estimated to total around one billion pounds.
For marketers, the race is on to battle it out and win a share of the romantic revenue. Every year we are bombarded with persuasive messages about why investing in X brand is the only way to show that you really care. The significance of this time of year for many brands, and the level of budget used to make a big impact, highlights the importance of ensuring that marketing teams – experiencing greater pressure than ever before to prove ROI – get it right.
Anyone involved in organising seasonal campaigns will be well aware that one of the main challenges is ensuring that the wealth of marketing collateral is consistent, and on-brand. The challenge is even greater as a result of the growing number of channels – augmented reality, social media, chatbots and AI have made their way into the marketer’s toolkit, and organisations are constantly experimenting with new customer touchpoints.
But, regardless of the touchpoint – or the location of the customer – this can’t be to the detriment of a consistent, harmonious, brand experience. One voice, multiple channels, the customer at the heart. The challenge is ensuring a company’s assets (like photos, ads and videos) are always on-brand, and easy for disparate teams to find, at the right time, for the right marketing campaign. But the result is love at first sight – and hopefully an everlasting love boosting brand loyalty.
So how can marketers ensure they use brand assets to present a consistent story to their customers and stakeholders?
The brave hero in this romantic story is a digital asset management (DAM) solution, providing a single source of truth and content hub for every team. Through DAM systems, marketing, creative and sales teams can get their hands on the content they need to get their work done, collaborate more effectively, and unlock creativity.
Let’s take the example of a global confectionery company launching a new heart-shaped cake to mark Valentine’s Day. As the marketing teams in each country prepare for launch day, they need photographs, descriptors, collateral and videos to communicate its values, make the sale and deliver a consistent message, no matter where in the world it’s being received.
And if the company decides to use the launch to enter a new geography, it needs fresh messages, visuals and languages that are going to reach and resonate with new audiences. Marketers and sales teams alike are able to access approved content, and adapt it, whenever they need it. DAM simplifies and streamlines this cycle of work so that organisations can become more agile, more efficient and more creative – all through the smarter use of content.
DAM not only makes the campaign process more efficient; it also helps ensure that the high-quality visuals your brand invests in are being used to their full potential. In the latest Widen Connectivity Report, we explore how using quality visual design in marketing content can bring a human touch to the digital experiences we engage in every day.
A massive 98% of global creative and marketing professionals surveyed for the report said that quality visual design in marketing content enables stronger relationships with their audiences. The benefit of a DAM system is that it helps to streamline repetitive manual work in the creative process, like searching for creative files, converting artwork to different formats, versioning image files, and sharing files across teams. Simplifying – and in some cases, eliminating – tedious creative tasks will give your team more time to develop quality visual design that captivates audiences.
And DAM ensures consistency of quality by enabling marketing stakeholders to access files they need no matter where they are, or what time it is. This reduces the risk of recreating marketing content incorrectly because it can’t be found. Brand portals, collections, and links make sharing on-brand creative easy, while embed codes ensure that new versions of visuals populate automatically across all digital channels after they’ve been updated in the DAM system.
Finally, DAM helps marketers prove that all important ROI by allowing them to track and assess the performance of assets, both on an individual asset level, or on a wider scale. This enables brands to measure success, and make improvements where needed. Is the right picture being used? Which touchpoint has the best customer engagement?
So, as you enjoy the barrage of Valentines themed campaigns this week, show some love for the hard-working marketing teams that have spent many hours making their brands shine above the competition. It is highly likely that those brands that do succeed have benefited from using a DAM system.
By Sairah Mojib, Head of Marketing, EMEA, Widen