Looking toward 2020, I’m excited to see the industry continue to focus on customer experience, which has been increasingly led by marketing departments! Brands are also retooling their work styles and their technology stacks to start competing on differentiated customer experiences.

But in order for brands to deliver an engaging experience, they need engaging content. High performing companies know this. They also know that the content creation process can’t be the result of sporadic, heroic efforts. Content has to come from sustained discipline and focus. The unfortunate reality is that most brands have trouble achieving the necessary discipline and then struggle to scale their content efforts.

Enter Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions.

Over the course of many years Aprimo has developed a reputation for creating market-defining content solutions that harness the latest innovations in technology. Aprimo was one of the first to move completely to the cloud. Aprimo has also been pioneering integrating artificial intelligence into the content lifecycle and supporting emerging forms of content like 3D and video to help leading brands deliver exceptional customer experiences.

I’m pleased to say that I feel our reputation and recent product innovations were validated as independent research firm, Forrester Research, has named Aprimo a Leader in Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience.

About the Forrester Wave™ report

In “The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience, Q4 2019,” Aprimo was one of 14 vendors evaluated across 28 criteria, each grouped into three main categories: current offering, strategy, and market presence.

The report states that Aprimo DAM positions its offerings to “cover the full content lifecycle: from support for upstream planning and creation to centralized storage and management to the handoff of assets to relevant downstream delivery technologies.”

The report also notes that Aprimo’s strengths include “strong support for core DAM capabilities like search, digital rights, and rendition management.” Not only that, the report also describes Aprimo DAM as having “best-in-class support for work-in-progress assets as well.”

OK, so what’s a DAM?

In short, a DAM helps brands create, store, and manage all of their assets.

Creating all that content is easy. But making full use of it? That’s the challenge.

According to the report, “[brands] have reached a tipping point: they can no longer control and organize their vast libraries of content using ad hoc point solutions or simple tools…” Instead, brands need solutions built around the entire content lifecycle, like a Digital Asset Management platform.

But DAMs are so much more than just storing content!  As Forrester points out, DAM solutions also help manage the complexities of creating content like “the number of people, the content mediums, the stages of approvals, the different renditions of content, and so on.”

What kind of capabilities should I be looking for in a DAM?

A DAM does a lot. What you need to know, though, is that your DAM can do exactly what you need it to. In its ‘Current Offering’ category, Forrester outlined key capabilities that modern DAMs should be offering. Here’s how we describe those capabilities:

• Library services – core capabilities that allow a firm to store, manage, and retain assets
• Work-in-progress assets – capabilities that allow users and creative teams to manage in-progress assets and manage content-approval workflows
• Video and emerging content support – enabling end users to work with and maximize the value of video and other emerging forms of assets (like 3D)
• Marketing support – supporting use cases where content is made available to end users as a package of content or partners via something like a specialized portal
• Usability and user interface – the DAM’s front-end should be unified and responsive (including mobile friendliness) to make it easy for a user to accomplish their task
• Enterprise platform integration – the DAM should integrate into other major enterprise platforms to enable DAM users to easily manage and deliver experiences

How did Aprimo get recognized as a Leader?

In this evaluation of Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience vendors, 14 vendors were researched, analyzed, and evaluated against the same scorecard based across 28 evaluation criteria.

Aprimo received the highest scores possible in 20 criteria, including:

I believe the scores we received are the direct result of Aprimo’s collaborative, iterative approach to our DAM. Our product team worked closely with our existing customers and prospects to get a gut-level understanding of their current challenges and to develop solutions that help them deliver the best possible customer experience.

Read the full Forrester Wave™

I’ve only scratched the surface on some of the best insights and recommendations from Forrester. So, check out the full report (on us!) and learn how a Digital Asset Management solution can help you win today, tomorrow, and in the future by delivering the best customer experience possible.

To learn more, download the full report, The Forrester Wave^TM: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience, Q4 2019.