DAM Workflows: Why Content Operations is Critical to Your Customer Experience

Earlier in the year, we wrote about one of the most difficult aspects of marketing: being a modern marketer means dealing with the constant pressure to produce a huge amount of content to support the customer experience.

To most brands, the customer experience typically means personalized communication driven by customer data. If you’re a content professional, you’ve heard that before and you’re probably screaming at the screen “but with what content?!?!”

The most pressing need for organizations who have to compete based on customer experience is to scale content production. But of course, this is hard! Personalization requires more than just loads of data. It requires a new way of working that centers DAM workflows.

For example, in the most recent Forrester Wave™ Report of Digital Asset Management (DAM) for Customer Experience, 83% of digital retail professionals cite organizational silos as a challenge when executing a digital strategy.

Forrester reiterated this theme in separate research on personalization:

Layer in resource constraints and organizational silos — since personalization can manifest in marketing, service, sales, product, and other types of experiences — and it’s no wonder personalization is a challenge.

– Forrester, Use Personalization to Drive Loyalty and Customer Obsession

Robert Rose, a content operations expert and advocate, frequently mentions key points on how DAM can serve as the backbone of a content operations strategy that supports your wider customer experience efforts.

Yes, a humble DAM can do a lot more than most marketers expect.

DAMs have evolved

If folks at your organization only see a DAM as a place to store assets, things need to change—fast. A DAM is not just a place to store images, and its usefulness doesn’t stop at storing emerging rich media either.

A DAM is now a place to streamline and automate all the upstream processes for content—ideation, planning, creation, enrichment, and distribution to channels for execution. All of the phases of putting engaging, converting content into market can now happen in your DAM. What’s more, much of it can happen automatically, making the whole process faster, less prone to error, and much easier on the people you count on to serve up your awesome digital content.

But which processes should you automate?

Most DAMs come with basic review workflows —for example, you have an asset and you want to send it to one or more people to review—but what if you needed something more?

Consider the following types of workflows. If you’re not automating them today, you’re probably being outpaced by your competitors who have already embraced the new way of working.

Workflows to Automate

• Content Creation: Can be as simple as tracking a minor change to an asset, all the way through making something net new. Most users find these workflows most useful if they can link to a starting asset or a collection of starting assets. Advanced content creation workflows can leverage resource optimization and AI-powered routing to make sure the right person (or team) works on the request at the right time, making everybody’s lives easier.
• Review and Approval: Review and annotate assets within the DAM to simplify approvals but also to ensure the proper process is being followed as efficiently as possible.
• Content Ingestion: Once the content is created, automate the collection and enrichment of content prior to uploading it to ensure maximum findability and reuse.
• Content Versioning/Revision: If you have content that must be updated regularly, a DAM can track all historical versions and changes to every piece of content for easy, no-mistakes auditing.
• Usage Expiration: Set processes in place to review the expiration of certain assets. This might entail kicking off one of the above workflows as well if changes must be made to an expiring asset in order to maintain compliance.

Put the “flow” in “workflow”

Automated workflows in a DAM are employed by organizations that want to make how work gets accomplished more streamlined and more consistent. This results in getting more work completed on time with less chaos and providing transparency to parts of the organization that are desperate to know “what’s going on in marketing.” And in compliance-based businesses, automated workflows are a requirement for validation and audits.

Catch up to organizations that have already gone digital and start getting the most from your digital asset management system.

Want to see what sets our DAM solution apart from the competition? Take a 10-minute tour of Aprimo’s DAM.