IT: Unleash Your Content Blockage with a Next-Generation DAM

Given the high consumer expectations brands must meet, IT teams face increasing pressure to help marketers rapidly create personalized and relevant digital experiences. Yet many are finding that they can’t keep up, even with an investment in a digital asset management (DAM) to centralize asset and content management.

Consumers now spend an average of 7.8 hours engaging with digital content and almost half (42 percent) say they get annoyed when content isn’t personalized, according to a 2018 Consumer Content Survey by Adobe.

Traditional DAM systems were built primarily for archival of assets, not to support the omnichannel content demands of today. Even DAMs that claim to have APIs can make it hard to “unlock” digital assets for external channels. As a result, teams must spend additional time and resources bolting together disparate systems and programming workarounds to deliver content across multiple channels and devices.

To eliminate these types of content blockages, you need a modern, flexible DAM system that helps rapidly create and deliver personalized, media-rich experiences at scale. A next-generation DAM not only adapts to your organization’s needs, but can also allow you to keep a lean, efficient, and secure IT environment, including government-approved security capabilities and compliance with FedRAMP, HIPAA, and GLBA.

Here are some of the ways a modern DAM makes this possible:

Flow content everywhere

One of the biggest challenges your team likely faces is finding and supporting technology that delivers personalized experiences across channels. With a more user-friendly interface that doesn’t require any coding and automatically propagates updates throughout the site, a next-generation DAM allows all business users, not just IT, to make edits and generate different formats on the fly. This speeds content creation and delivery, allowing your team to focus on more strategic business initiatives.

For example, the College and Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta (CARNA) was struggling to keep content up to date. Updating their website often required time-consuming workarounds like creating microsites or complex web programming that only one person in the organization had the skill set to do.

However, using a modern DAM system, CARNA has been able to deliver more personalized information to its customers faster, without needing to sustain a large staff of in-house web application developers. CARNA’s modern DAM has made it faster to publish news and other important information to members, using powerful content organization capabilities like the ability to tag events or create folders to easily track content and keep it up to date. It has also enabled CARNA to create, manage, and deliver content across all channels, including web, mobile, and social media — something they couldn’t do before.

Deliver more cohesive customer experiences

Management of disparate technologies is another barrier to accelerating content production and providing customers with a seamless experience. A modernized DAM uses a large ecosystem of third-party applications, not just a handful, to help you achieve an integrated backend that is easier to manage.

As CARNA discovered, the ability to connect a DAM with other critical enterprise systems also helps create a better customer experience. By integrating a Java-based DAM with their .NET-based Aptify Association Management Software, CARNA was able to create a more cohesive system that didn’t require its staff to piece together disparate applications. Equally important, it has allowed CARNA’s customers to enjoy a single sign-on environment.

“We can report a dramatic increase in engagement by our visitors, as well as a reduction in bounce rates,” says Rachel Champagne, manager of communications at CARNA.

Achieve cloud scale

Next-generation DAM’s are also moving to the cloud — and for good reason. With a cloud-based system, it’s easier to scale production based on demand. Content can be pushed directly to the web, and cropped and edited as needed — without leaving the platform. This creates a more efficient process for your end users.

Additionally, managing, configuring, and pushing customization through a self-service cloud interface creates a more seamless experience for you and your operations teams. With a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, customizations are available to DAM users in a matter of hours or days, versus weeks and months. This accelerates both content creation and production customizations, like altering the user interface or adding new functionality to a custom media portal.

Gain content velocity without sacrificing governance

When every business unit is doing their own thing with digital assets, it can be difficult for your team to maintain control. With assets scattered in multiple systems and departments, business users often struggle to find the content they need, limiting their ability to rapidly scale production and increasing their frustration.

With a more intelligent and automated DAM system that leverages artificial intelligence and machine-learning services, your business users can quickly find the assets they need. Additionally, recent innovations within DAM technology have improved governance by eliminating compliance and licensing issues. Now, the same licensing rules and brands standards can be applied across the organization through improved link sharing of license agreements within the brand portal.

A better-built DAM

It’s time to reimagine what a DAM can do — not only to support IT management, but to deliver a new world of experience to your customers. With less effort and greater oversight and control, your organization can open the content floodgates, delivering a consistent flow of dynamic and engaging experiences to your customers across any channel or device.

Learn more about how a next-generation DAM can help you meet your content demands. Read “Conquer the Content Deluge.”

Adobe recently introduced a more automated and intelligent DAM platform in our Adobe Experience Manager 6.4 release. Explore what’s new.