How Digital Asset Management Impacts The Buyer Experience
The most compelling rich media, including video and images, capture the interest and attention of eyes, hearts, and minds throughout the buyer experience journey. Digital transformation is a long-term play, and prioritizing investment in customer-facing profit centers is always a good bet.
Prospects engage visually and audibly with your brand in a multitude of ways, including:
Scrolling through your products on an e-commerce marketplace
Scanning down an infographic on a landing page linked to an email newsletter
Watching product explainer videos on your YouTube channel
Viewing a slide deck at a conference kiosk
Flipping through a glossy brochure on a showroom floor
Your physical and digital media should be consistent in emotional tone and brand-centricity. Not just the first time a prospect first discovers your products and services, but throughout the entire buyer experience lifecycle.
While your media should be consistent, it should also be personalized and targeted for select audience segments.
Personalizing the images on your public website or social media can be challenging. You can, however, easily personalize the content and media associated with:
Minisites for specialized services, market segments, or regions
Landing pages linked to your social media posts or channels
Specialized email distribution lists
Authenticated portal or ecommerce store users
Neither one size nor one image work for your entire audience. Your rich media should also be responsive to fit appropriately on user devices. Some image and video licensing only last for a finite amount of time, which can be challenging to track and resolve.
Managing Videos, Images, and Audio Files in the Age of Hybrid Workplaces
According to the MarTech Zone website, mobility, AI, rights management, and integrations were four of the top trends in digital asset management for 2021. Selecting a DAM platform from a vendor which addresses all these trends is a great strategy.
Much of the planning, design, and publishing of digital marketing assets takes place on desktop and laptop computers. Yet, some users need to access those materials or other assets on their smartphones when they attend customer meetings or conferences. A mobile-first DAM experience is ideal for customer-facing users and convenient for the clients they meet with.
Many brands apply text overlays, logos, color filters, or other treatments to their images to create consistency. A DAM solution that seamlessly integrates with graphic design platforms like Adobe Creative Cloud makes customizing digital assets and submitting them for approval fast and easy. Prospects, clients, and partners can instinctively identify your company's marketing assets and ensure the content they are reading is authentic and trustworthy.
As we move into 2022 and beyond, hybrid workplaces and remote work are becoming the norm. Enabling geographically dispersed team members to access shared asset repositories via the cloud collaboratively makes sense for national and international teams. Most DAM solutions are cloud-native by design and are adept at serving distributed teams.
Resizing content, maintaining a standard file storage system, and manually tracking digital rights licensing may work for small companies while working in a shared office. Yet, these approaches won't scale for large enterprises. An intelligent Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform can make all this easier while enhancing the overall customer experience.
Digital Asset Management Platforms Add Value Throughout the Buyer Experience
To better understand how DAM impacts buyer experiences, it helps to separately approach each stage of the customer journey. Each stage of a customer journey uniquely applies DAM features and functions from discovering your digital channels, your company, and your products and services to the buying process and beyond.
Product or Service Supplier Discovery
When a prospect first lands on your website, they typically want to find the fastest path to the information they are seeking. If your business serves an international audience, they prefer to see localized content, including culturally appropriate images and videos for their region. Localized video subtitles, captions, and tags are equally important.
Examples of rich media assets a prospect may encounter in the discovery phase include infographics, podcasts, thought leadership videos, and social media posts.
As companies create localized content for international countries, leading DAM platforms enable their users to collaborate across borders. Designers can submit digital assets from a company's global offices to a central content approver via a digital workflow.
A modern DAM solution can help content managers profile, tag, find, and publish suitable media quickly on their international web pages. It can also help a business comply with the EU's GDPR rules to ensure a website can personalize content or product recommendations with a visitor's consent. Yet if they prefer an anonymous experience, they are welcome to that, as well.
Pro Tip
Deploying a DAM solution that can make photos, graphics, videos, and sound files discoverable and sizable is only the beginning. A DAM application worth your investment should enable distribution functions like sharing assets with colleagues and delivering them via seamless workflows for publishing.
DAM applications don't work in isolation. Your business needs a solution that facilitates seamless integration with content management systems (CMS) like Sitecore or Optimizely, and e-commerce platforms. An open, flexible API offers your DAM users and approvers more control over what is published across the web and how it looks on modern devices.
Exploration and Consideration of Competitive Solutions
When a prospect is aware of your company and what you have to offer, you can't just rest on your digital laurels in today's competitive marketplace. Equipping your content managers with digital asset management tools enables them to create more engaging, relevant, and timely visual experiences.
As prospects move further in your marketing funnel, they often look for photos or videos of your products in use. Maintaining a comprehensive library of these images and tagging their use cases can be published quickly with compelling descriptions.
Recognize that your competitors are also hard at work producing videos, infographics, and other rich media. It should motivate you to generate fresh content continuously while repurposing, refreshing, and reusing your existing assets.
As accessibility requirements grow increasingly strict, video transcripts, image metatags, and audio descriptions are climbing on priority lists for many digital marketers. AI-powered DAMs which enable image capture and automated meta tags and transcription can save your team a great deal of time and effort.
As prospects compare your products and services to that of your competitors, it helps to offer a variety of ebooks, how-to videos, product comparison charts, user-generated content, and testimonials.
Pro Tip
Maintaining a library of these sorts of assets demands constant repurposing, repackaging, and updating of the most impactful content. If you are in the market for a DAM platform, ensure it has an analytics engine to assess the engagement and attention your audio and visual assets are generating.
Look for a DAM that is compatible with a data visualization dashboard tool that you may already be using, like Microsoft Power BI.
Your ability to analyze which videos and images are consumed the most and where in the world they are being viewed can be very helpful as you plan your digital asset curation. Increasing video or podcast plays might only require a change of thumbnail images or headline copy.
The Buying Stage - The Moment of Truth
A sales transaction doesn't end the relationship when a B2B or B2C prospect becomes a customer. The role of your digital assets like videos, podcasts, and graphics simply shift from building your authority for conversion to deepening relationships for recurring revenue and sales.
Product images have always played an important role in compelling consumers to buy products online, such as electronics and apparel.
Strategies to convince shoppers to buy online include:
Offering pick up or return items in a merchant's store for "bricks and clicks" retailers
"Virtual try-on" experiences
"Mobile first" shopping experiences
Presenting products in multiple colors and configurations
Adding explainer videos to product pages to promote use cases
B2B buyers have grown accustomed to engaging, visually stimulating shopping experiences for their personal needs. The days where product SKUs, product or service descriptions, and pricing were enough to drive online sales are over.
Like B2C buyers, when B2B buyers shop for products without seeing them first stirs up feelings of risk and uncertainty. Presenting buyers with in-depth explainer videos, product roadmap sessions, and high-quality product images from multiple perspectives may be inferior to touching and feeling a tangible product. Yet, for most buyers, it is a close runner-up.
Many procurement professionals seek out ecommerce sites that offer 3D product images, interactive flythroughs, support documentation, and a host of other media before they complete their transaction. The value and volume of B2B sales ensure investing in a DAM can deliver innovative, appealing, dynamic buyer experiences.
B2B transactions often involve more than one person, including:
Business analysts and technical evaluators
A procurement focal or committee
An approver or decision-maker
A third-party reseller, consultant, or influencer
The number of people involved in a buying process generally depends on the financial value of the transaction and the strategic importance of the asset. Creating a library of audio and visual assets for all these stakeholders goes a long way to ensure all your bases are covered.
Every person prefers how they best learn and consume information through listening, watching demonstrations, reading, or interacting. DAM platforms help B2B companies to offer a broad spectrum of content types for all these content consumers.
Pro Tip
Case studies and ROI guides are just a couple of proven content types which have proven successful over the years. Storytelling is a robust online sales and business development tool, yet the most effective success story narrators likely aren't on your payroll. Nor do they work for digital agencies. They are your existing customers, with their visual content and testimonials.
A December 2020 Savanta survey quoted in an eMarketer article found that 62% of respondents said they were more likely to buy a product if they could view photos and videos from other customers. 21% said they would like to see the product "in action" before making a high-value purchase.
Source: A December 2020 Savanta survey quoted in this eMarketer article
Websites like Gartner Peer Insights, Capterra, and G2 provide similar "social proof" to consumer testimonials. It can be challenging to get customers to provide on-camera testimonials. However, it goes a long way to building authority, trust, and credibility. B2B experts often recommend testimonials and case studies for the "bottom of the funnel" to motivate buyers to authorize a transaction. They are, however, applicable throughout the buyer's journey.
Post-Purchase Account-Based Marketing
In many industries, an initial product sale or services contract is primarily a way to build a relationship with a customer and earn the right to promote other products and services—for example, the SaaS and systems integrator segments of the high technology industry.
Many businesses start with limited deployment of a SaaS platform. Once these companies achieve some initial goals, SaaS vendors help their customers to develop a strategy for additional deployments in other corporate departments or territories. Many B2B marketing experts call it account-based marketing (ABM), and others define beachhead strategy, or "land and expand."
Whatever you call it, it is undeniable that digital assets play an integral role in enriching relationships well beyond initial purchases or contracts. Building customer communities through videos, webinars, podcasts, and whitepapers have been vital in 2020 and 2021.
Many live expos, conferences, and trade shows were postponed or pivoted to virtual events, especially during the early days of the pandemic. Digital content took center stage, and in many cases, the caliber of speakers and content improved, as travel requirements were greatly diminished. Marketing investments pivoted from leasing event venue space to digital asset production.
Pro Tip
Fostering customer community and loyalty with digital assets often requires that a company share content that offers customers candid "behind the scenes" perspectives on their products and services.
Customer portals often deliver content like interviews with C-level executives and product managers on the future of a company's products and services.
Publishing this privileged content alongside best practices guides, alternative use case videos, and other exclusive digital resources ensures the most valuable digital resources are only available to paying customers behind an authentication layer. Your most valuable clients feel more valued, empowered, and engaged than when they receive occasional email updates and scheduled contact.
Conclusion
Videos, graphics, and audio files are playing an increasingly more significant role throughout the buyer experience lifecycle. Static, text-only content has a vital role for those who prefer to source inspiration through assets like ebooks, white papers, and articles like this one.
Yet, capturing the imagination, engagement, and interest of your company’s prospects, customers, and partners often demands images that catch the eye. Dynamic, immersive video and audio bring prospects and customers deeper into conversations and situations than they can by reading words on a screen.
Digital assets take a considerable amount of time and financial investment to produce, store and repurpose. Finding and implementing solutions that creatives can use to collaboratively find, create, share, and distribute rich media can pay considerable dividends.
The impact your digital assets make on buyer experiences often depends on your ability to source, optimize, distribute, and personalize those assets for your prospects and customers in your accessible market.
Does your organization produce your own video, audio, and visual assets in-house, or outsource some or all some of their production to agencies? In any case, DAM platforms enable your business to create impactful buyer experiences across all your digital and print channels.
A DAM which integrates with your existing investment in applications which create, store, and distribute images, videos, and audio files is critical to competing in the digital marketplace.
DAM incorporates analytics, AI, security, and all the benefits of cloud storage to ensure your technical, creative, leadership, and marketing teams have timely access to the digital assets which best convey the message they are looking to deliver, at the right time.
Contact us today to further expand your knowledge about digital asset management. Or book a demo to arrange an online demonstration of Digizuite DAM.
