How DAM powers customer obsession

In recent years, we have been finding ourselves faced with a paradoxical situation. Users have a ravenous appetite for rich media – interactive multimedia content (text, videos, images, etc.). On the opposite side, the marketing teams responsible for its creation and diffusion often find themselves struggling to keep up with the production required. In the end, however, as much as people really need content, that produced by the brand does not manage to have the resonance hoped for with the audience.

Indeed, more than 60% of consumers claim to receive too much content from brands and end up getting help from other sources in order to make their purchasing decisions (Forrester).

How, then, can we make corporate content more appetizing? How can we reinforce the relationship that exists between content and conversion rates?

How Do You Create Effective Content?

European consumers are increasingly educated from a digital point of view and it is reasonable to expect that what happens online will have ever more influence on the purchases that we make. It is, therefore, becoming urgent to understand how to create effective content, that produces and strengthens conversions.

Let’s take the photo of a car in a realistic and pleasant setting as an example: This may unlock the emotions and senses of the visitors to the automotive brand’s web page. They will associate the product with a whole series of related meanings that are both abstract (freedom, power) and concrete (the size of the car). People are able to imagine themselves in that car, immersed in that setting as well. It is different to finding themselves in front of a decontextualized car, where only its design can be appreciated because it is floating against a white background.

Another interesting example of how to effectively engage customers is presented to us by Sephora. It does not stop at sending a message to the consumer, but takes them directly into the experience, making them the protagonist of the communication project. Asking customers to upload photos showing their own make-up style, as the famous cosmetics brand did, creates a genuine display showcase that is much less corporate and much more personal and diversified. It has the power to fascinate potential customers more than decontextualized photos of products.

Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the content that we are offering, ensuring that it is the kind that consumers like. Besides this, technology can also come to the aid of brands to make them more customer obsessed.

This is where the latest generation DAM systems come into play. Their role is no longer to be a “parking lot for content” but becomes that of supporting content life cycle phases. For example, those of creation, review (ensuring that the content is in line with the brand’s guidelines) and delivery. Indeed, an important aspect of these DAM systems is that they integrate with the various delivery systems, and not only the traditional ones, but also the most advanced (e.g., voice channels). Furthermore, they can provide data on content performance.

Which aspects make a DAM solution interesting? Following the introduction of a DAM system within their companies, those I have managed to speak to have noticed an improvement in customer experience, as well as both a time and financial saving: beforehand, they spent hours searching for the content they were looking for, whereas now, it happens in less than a minute!

38% of companies state that they would like to initiate activities to put the customer at the center of their communication. These brands would like to better understand the needs and interests of their consumers, something that can certainly help to build and strengthen the company-customer relationship. Indeed, knowing what each individual is interested in allows for the creation and proposal of content that will be perceived by the audience as relevant. That is to say, it allows for the creation of content that is not only personalized, but also individualized. Or rather, that responds to the needs of the single individual. This approach, together with an Intelligent DAM, can improve the creation of content.

A DAM for the Optimization of Corporate Content

Latest generation DAM (Digital Asset Management) systems represent a valid support for communication strategies that can be adopted by companies. This is because they enable corporate content to have that resonance with users which, as we saw above, is often missing.

According to the studies carried out by Forrester on the producers and users of DAM, the four main characteristics that make these solutions so in demand are as follows:

1. Cloud – we are noticing an increase in Software as a Service solutions around the world. There is still a large gap between North America and Europe, but we also expect the use of cloud in the latter area to increase exponentially once it fully recognizes its importance and advantages. These include the possibility of scaling, thanks to the ease of integration and activation of these systems. In this way, it is possible to pass over to the opex model from the capex model, or rather, to substitute production expenses with management Cloud content is not located in a specific place and is distributed, as well as being accessible, anywhere. This is very important for those companies who work in multiple international markets and with people who access content from different devices, having different connections at their disposal. The cloud solves all these problems.
2. Atomization – there is no need to reinvent the wheel every time! Managing to break content down into many atomic parts allows for its easy reuse. In this way, different teams can use a piece of content – or some of its parts – that has already been used, simply by adapting it in accordance with the use they need to make of it. As well as benefitting the content strategy, it will no longer be necessary to create more than one version of the same piece of content for different channels. This means that omnichannel delivery will occur in a more effective manner. Finally, it also contributes to removing silos between departments, strengthening their collaboration, as well as reducing production times and costs.
3. Analytics – companies feel the need to collect data to understand how their content is used and if it is appreciated by users: a DAM system can provide such invaluable data. This information allows for the value of each content to be established and the ROI to be calculated. Editorial production can then be altered in the future as a result and personalization can be improved in order to increase conversions.
4. Artificial Intelligence – AI will increasingly help companies both in the organization of content and in the improvement of content strategies. Indeed, there are already some services that are able to label digital assets with the tags and metadata that describe them, optimizing their classification and saving editors', who would otherwise have to carry out this activity, time. At the same time, bringing together AI’s capabilities with the data obtained from analytics tells us what the characteristics of a good content are.

Once upon a time, AI was able to analyze the compositional elements of an image, but it could not recognize product information. Now, however, the ability of artificial intelligence engines to be trained is emerging: for example, looking at the image of a car that is speeding along a road, they can learn not only to say that there is a “car”, “sky” and “blue” in the image, but also what the make and model of the car is.

This is an enormous capability that allows for the extraction of specific product information from content. An interesting application is presented to us by Tesla, which shares content generated by users (very efficient, as we have already seen with Sephora). It ensures that the content is in line with the brand’s image thanks to screening performed by AI.

The trends described above are the key trends that every company should embark on in order to become customer obsessed. Intelligent DAM systems are the SaaS solutions that support such characteristics. Now, we’ll go into detail on the purely technological aspects of what Dario has spoken about.

Why Is It Necessary to Have an Intelligent DAM?

The main objective of an intelligent DAM is precisely to help brands focus on the consumer, that is, to make it become customer obsessed.

To make this possible, these solutions are equipped with powerful AI engines that respond to a dual requirement. On the one hand, they centralize all the corporate content, removing duplications and bringing about order. This allows for the atomization, and therefore reuse, of the content that we spoke about earlier and, ultimately, omnichannel delivery.

On the other hand, it optimizes content, making it suitable for use on different channels, such as e-commerce, in an intelligent way. Indeed, an interesting example of how the AI at the base of intelligent DAM systems works is that of product characteristic recognition, which occurs through the analysis of an image containing the product in a setting that is full of different elements. Dario has shown (and you can watch it again in the webinar) how AI recognizes the make and model of some electrical appliances fitted into kitchen furniture!

Contextualized images are considered most valuable by users and allow the brand to obtain great engagement. With such powerful AI engines, the company can choose to use images full of context on its channels, without having to sacrifice the automatic and efficient organization of all its content. This is because AI is able to analyze and classify even the most complex and elaborate photos (videos, text, etc.). In this phase, there is no need for editors to intervene manually as AI operates with great accuracy, making them save a considerable amount of time.

At the same time, a company may want to increase its engagement by using the content generated by users (like Tesla). This could consist of tutorials, or specific photos, created without focusing on displaying the product in its entirety. Having AI engines that are able to analyze such content allows them to be classified automatically, saving time and ensuring quality also for content that cannot be directly controlled.

AI can also improve the personalization of content and its recommendation, identifying the subject matters dealt with by content and user interests (information collected automatically thanks to the application of tags), and finding the best correspondences. Recommendations are not something new, but the difference with an intelligent DAM is that it does not just analyze the web page in general, but also its single components. Therefore, it includes in detail the elements of the page that resonate with users and improves their profiling. In this way, the best content to be recommended to people is extracted on the basis of their interests, with a subsequent increase in retention. Indeed, a DAM system may solve the problem of the so-called information overload, which comes from the fact that users receive thousands of undifferentiated pieces of content and risks pushing consumers away from the company’s channels.

With regard to analytics, intelligent DAM systems combine various metrics to reconstruct the decision-making process that has resulted in the user choosing to follow a CTA, analyzing the content that they viewed before and after. In this way, brands can understand the most efficient content and keep producing those of that type.

Intelligent DAM systems, therefore, offer a double advantage: They do not just reduce the costs of content production and management, thanks to the automatic tagging and organizational work performed by AI. They also improve its performance, taking advantage of and optimizing the content that the brand already owns.