Digital Transformation is Complex but Remember Content is Still King

The rapid growth of programmatic and social and the ever increasing usage of mobile platforms with all of the different formats, sizes and shapes that are required for communications, has led to an explosion in the creation and use of content.

According to eMarketer in 2018, mobile ad spending in the U.S. will grow to over $70 billion and will be 75% of all digital ad spend. This is more than a 20,000% increase over the last ten years.  So if we just consider the content requirements of mobile alone; when we think of the different formats, ad placement options, video view time optimisations required and digital channels available over mobile, this content explosion that we feel each day is no surprise.

With so much content, and so much potential to create amazing communications and journeys for users there is also a huge amount of waste in recreating assets you already have. There are video footage and photo shoots that needlessly take place when that image or footage exists already, but maybe in a different market or department.

Questions to be asked:

• How can you make sure that you re-utilise assets from one market and leverage them in another? Do you even know that 1 in 3 of your assets are reused…or is it each one is used on average 10 times?  There can be huge potential for savings here in time, money and materials.
• Do you have the Rights in your market?
• How do you know it’s the approved version? And the information on your ecommerce partner’s site is the latest and is correct?
• How do you manage it all?
• Critically, how do you get the right content to the right person?

Thankfully there is a lot of innovation taking place in this technology space.  But it’s getting complicated.

DAM, CMP, MRM, MPM, PIM, MRM 2.0 and other TLAs

There are lots of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) representing marketing technologies that essentially look at this same space from different perspectives.  DAM (Digital Asset Management) is the forerunner of these technologies, allowing efficient storage and retrieval of marketing assets. Content Marketing Platforms (CMP) have recently been described by one commentator in the phrase “if content is the soul of digital, then CMP is the church”, and look at the leveraging of assets across multiple (primarily digital) channels.  Marketing Resource Management (MRM) enables activity planning, project management, approvals and budgetary control; MPM associates performance data with the outcomes of activities planned and implemented through any one of these technologies.  PIM (Product Information Management) solutions allow efficient storage of product information, notably used to feed ecommerce applications. And these technologies are now colliding into what some people refer to as MRM 2.0.

So to maximise your marketing technology for digital transformation there are five things you need to do:

1. Really understand what you need. It is really important you know in concrete terms what you need to achieve as a business and in sufficient detail to specify the technology solution.  Technology of course can inform a business process, automate parts of it and maybe even all of it.  But the starting point has to be a set of requirements
2. When you review a technology, specify the uses and journeys you need people to take through the system. At least part of your assessment should be related to how the technology performs against very specific use cases.
3. Look at the problem through the lenses of the different technology classifications…MRMs, CMPs, MPMs etc. Don’t let the TLAs be confusing. And be open-minded to how technology solutions could improve your processes.
4. You may have to connect more than one technology into an ecosystem to ensure your requirements are met. Choose a central technology that answers the majority of requirements – a backbone – and then enhance elements that are deficient with best of breed solutions in those areas – maybe reporting or timesheet management.  Do not make your ecosystem too complicated, as the joins will be problematic later.
5. Finally, view the problem as a whole. At the time it looks a complicated problem to manage all the dependencies all in one piece, but time and energy spent at the start will yield saving in time and money later.

Whether an audit of your current martech, our support with recommendations or plugging it into a new eco system feel free to get in touch.