Personalized Omnichannel Experiences
How DAM Empowers Global Companies to Deliver Personalized Omnichannel Experiences at Scale
Omnichannel marketing and sales has become a top priority for many management teams in global companies. Why? Well, it all starts with the customer!
Buyers now prefer a cross-channel mix, choosing in-person, remote, and digital self-serve interactions in equal measure in 2021, and this cross-channel trend is not a coincidence, according to McKinsey. Eight out of ten sales leaders say omnichannel engagement is more effective than traditional methods, such as face-to-face (F2F) meetings, phone calls and e-mails alone.
This is a growing sentiment, rising from 54 percent pre-COVID to 83 percent in 2021.
Omnichannel is not the same as multichannel.
Multichannel is simpler in intention. A multichannel strategy makes content available in offline and online channels, but buyer interactions with each channel are siloed.
An omnichannel strategy takes a multichannel strategy one step further. The content is still available across the different channels, but as buyers move across devices and online and offline platforms, transitions are seamless.
An omnichannel approach enhances the customer experience by tying the different channels and touchpoints together, so that the brand is consistently present and helpful across every platform.
What omnichannel marketing & sales looks like in action
“Omnichannel” has been around for many years, but until now it has mostly been reduced to a matter of synchronizing the website with e-mail marketing and social media programs.
This is rapidly changing due to recent advances in technology.
The hallmarks of authentic omnichannel marketing & sales are:
Information and content which are delivered in the customers' preferred language, format, and unique needs – no matter the touch points
Content is updated across channels - in real-time
There is total uniformity in the experience across all internal and external platforms, be it sales force, e-commerce, digital marketing, distributor, wholesalers, marketplaces, dealer network, and retailers.
The customer experience builds on immersive tools such as virtual product demonstrations, solution configurators and virtual showrooms that are fueled by rich content such as VR/AR, 3D and films. No more flat text and pictures only.
But becoming omnichannel is easier said than done! the most important barrier to adopting and omnichannel marketing & Sales model for is to setup an efficient content supply chain that helps you create, manage, and distribute content in an efficient, fast and automated way.
The current content operations model is not built to enable omnichannel marketing & sales
While many companies have adopted new ways of handling content (enterprise DAM) many companies still manage their content in basic file storage or “Light” DAM systems.
While using file storage and media libraries for content management works well for smaller companies (few languages, few channels, few users, few assets) it creates significant challenges for global enterprises that want to excel at omnichannel marketing & sales.
Challenges with a broken content operations model:
Inconsistent content tagging in multiple sub-optimal systems used by different departments leads to massive inefficiencies, and unused content and a need to recreate content that has been “lost”.
Local and decentralized storage without any reconciliation against master versions or changes in policies or governance
Delicate content that needs to be legally or brand compliant is released without any ability to bulk edit or recall it
Lack of content governance that can lead to huge inefficiencies, as, for example, if products are launched and promoted in countries where they aren’t sold
Limited automation when master content is changed, requiring all variations and formats to be adapted as well.
Sharing the newest content with partners and external platforms is a manual and cumbersome process that leads to lost revenue
More content and users than ever before leading to increased risks of violating brand policies, rights, and regulation.
Marketers struggle to develop, organize, and distribute sales enablement content to a very decentralized salesforce.
All of the above explains why creating and managing content accounts for the second-highest area of marketing spend (13.4 percent of the total marketing program/operation area expense budget), according to Gartner).
Creating, managing, and distributing more and more content is simply one of the most pressing challenges for marketers today who wish to create personalized and rich content, at scale.
At the core of the content operations engine lies digital asset management: The underlying marketing technology that allows global companies to succeed with their content operations and enable them to reach their omnichannel ambitions while improving operational efficiency.
How digital asset management powers omnichannel marketing & sales
There are basically three core parts to fixing your content supply chain if you want to excel at Omnichannel Marketing & Sales: Content creation, content management, and content distribution.
Let’s go through each of these individually and see some practical examples of how DAM can help within each step.
1. Content creation:
Creating entirely new or updating existing content in the most efficient way while reducing the risk of creating faulty, uncompliant, or low-quality content.
A DAM system enables ingestion and gathering of all data related to product from multiple data inputs across the organization, such as creative agencies, photographers or and more. Also, with an advanced DAM in place you can edit content through preconfigured workflows that provide a sound overview of changes in content, reviews of specific stakeholders and final approvals.
2. Content management
Ensure that the right people (or systems) can access the right content as easy and fast as possible. Advanced DAM systems give you the capability to archive expired content to avoid rights infringement. Furter on it provides an easily searchable content repository through meta-tagging for convenient identification and reuse.
3. Content distribution
Distributing content is about delivering content to all the relevant internal and external endpoints as automated, seamless, and fast as possible. Proper content distribution ensures companies deliver highly personalized and scalable manner via social, web, e-commerce, and much more.
Conclusion
All in all, the omnichannel revolution is here to stay.
While many of the customer-facing tools such CMS, marketing-automation and help-desk software attract lot of attention, the most important technologies to get in place are actually core enablers like PIM, DAM and CRM.
When it comes to those systems, do you have your house in order?
If not, we would love to show the great things a DAM system like Digizuite can do for your business. Sign up for a free demo here.
If you’re not ready for a demo, feel free to read more about our platform here.
