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1Adobe Experience Manager | 7 Trends Impacting How We Use Digital Assets

7 Trends Impacting How We Use Digital Assets Key Considerations for Creating, Managing, Delivering, and Optimizing Content


66% of marketers believe companies need a digital strategy to succeed.

91% Aren’t sure their own companies’ digital strategies are working

Source: Adobe Digital Distress Survey, 2013

Today’s customers demand engaging visual content whenever they interact with brands—whether these experiences happen through traditional media such as billboards and catalogs or through mobile apps and websites. Videos, animations, audio, and other assets have become the lifeblood of cross-channel marketing. Without the right assets, delivered in the right ways, companies can’t enable the meaningful, personalized customer interactions pivotal to success.

Marketers have traditionally been challenged by asset creation, management and delivery, especially in today’s multi-device, multichannel world. Managing content versions, approvals, and optimizing assets in real time for multi-device viewing are just a few of the hurdles that must be overcome to maximize asset value.

This paper highlights seven trends impacting how digital marketers create, manage, deliver, and optimize their digital assets:

• A Multiplicity of Screens

• Rise in the Importance of Metadata

• Analytics Driving Attribution and ROI

• Enabling End-to-End Customer Experiences

• Increasing Speed to Market

• Rich Media and Asset Personalization

• Improving Collaboration and Asset Access

7 Trends in Digital Asset Use


A Multiplicity of Screens

“Mobile first” is now the foundation of customer engagement. But today’s consumers interact with brands through a lot more than smartphones. Interactive store windows, digital signage, wearable devices: These are just a few of the Internet-connected screens people use on any day. As the Internet of Things heats up, the number of screens is skyrocketing.

Marketers face the hard task of creating and delivering assets that offer consistent, compelling brand messages across screens. They must create more content than ever for more audiences. And they must optimize it with digital assets that are either automatically responsive (resizable) or completely reconfigured for different screens.

Organizations are scrambling to keep track of the exploding number of digital assets required to engage customers across channels and on their favorite devices. Marketers need powerful tools that help organize and automatically transform assets into the right size and formats to reach customers everywhere on any screen.

1 Enterprises are managing an average of 268 customer-facing websites, mobile sites, and mobile applications.

Forrester Research, Inc., “The State of Digital Experience Delivery, 2015”, April 9, 2015


Rise in the Importance of Metadata

Metadata is foundational to any creative and marketing workflow. Metadata allows you to encapsulate important information about digital assets, such as intended markets, licensing restrictions, descriptions, and other details that can be leveraged for many purposes. Well-structured metadata allows digital assets to be found faster, helps ensure assets are used correctly, and lays a foundation for targeted access across teams and channels.

Open metadata standards such as XMP makes it possible to embed this information directly within digital assets and share information across different systems and applications. Asset management systems, such as Adobe Experience Manager assets, can interpret metadata and make it widely available for search and workflows across your organization.

Applying and augmenting asset metadata can increase brand consistency, facilitate business processes, and help ensure regulatory and licensing compliance. Important tools that provide access to metadata, templates, and schemas to manage quality and bulk asset processing to automate metadata have become must-haves for organizations dealing with a lot of media content. Marketers assemble assets into campaigns in Experience Manager and augment them with relevant metadata as they are deployed to multiple channels.

2 74% of marketers agree that success requires capturing and applying data to inform and drive marketing activities. Adobe Digital Roadblock Survey, 2014.


Analytics Driving Attribution and ROI

According to research from McKinsey, companies making extensive use of customer analytics show a 126% profit improvement over their competitors that don’t. As organizations become more data- driven, using these insights to demonstrate ROI is extending to the individual digital asset as it is used across web, mobile, email and social channels.

Too often, though, there’s a disconnect between recognizing and then harnessing the impact of an asset. Adobe research has shown that while most marketers know analytics is important, almost half still “trust their gut” for making marketing-spend decisions.

When it comes to digital assets, marketers need to measure more than creation costs and embrace the broader spectrum of available asset data. They need to know, at a granular level, which assets deliver the most consumer engagement and value. For example, are people watching videos to completion or turning them off mid-stream? On what device was a given image consumed most?

To support the move to more data-driven decision making and demonstrate the ROI of digital assets, marketers are turning to more robust analytics such as attribution modeling and cross-channel analytics. The goal is to capture true ROI of a campaign or property and to assess and manage the role of an asset or collection of assets in a customer journey.

3

Capturing and centralizing data for analytics is vital to success.


Enabling End-to-End Customer Experiences

Marketers have replaced the traditional sales funnel model with the idea of a complex, fragmented customer lifecycle. Along this path are touchpoints, or opportunities for brands to engage in meaningful ways with consumers.

Marketers are now mapping digital assets to reach customers at every point along this journey as they discover, engage, and purchase.

Organizations need to consider all potentially relevant touchpoints. For instance, print marketing—such as through a shopping catalog—is still a powerful medium, especially when tightly integrated with online campaigns. At the same time, marketers need to be agile enough to respond to customers as they browse items on laptops at home, compare product prices on their smartphones, and interact with in-store kiosks.

Underlying all of these interactions are digital assets that act as the building blocks of experiences delivered across touchpoints. To enable the best possible customer experience, marketing teams are working to personalize interactions by location, demographics, language, time of day, consumer interest, and other factors. And of course, every experience must reach the right consumer at the right time and in the right context.

4 “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology—not the other way around.” Steve Jobs

Asset Creation

Editors Legal Marketing partners

Creative Cloud digital teams

Creative Cloud print teams

Others

Images Videos Rich Media

Asset Type

Documents

Smartphones Tablets Desktop

Experience

Wearables Kiosk


Increasing Speed to Market

Digital marketing is quickly moving to a model in which brands have to interact in real time with consumers in individual contexts. Led by social media, other channels are increasingly able to support real-time conversations between brands and consumers.

In spite of the trend, most marketing departments still “deploy” campaigns that were planned far in advance but may no longer be relevant in the moments consumers actually engage with them.

Organizations that don’t respond to consumers in real time will miss crucial opportunities

to connect. To improve responsiveness, marketers need digital asset tools that:

• Reduce or eliminate wasted time with predefined workflows.

• Automate common tasks such as approvals, asset resizing, and localization.

• Easily locate assets. If you can’t find them, you can’t use them.

• Allow insights from analytics to guide real-time targeting and personalization.

• Create interactive experiences with assets and deliver them to any channel without delay.

• Enable collaboration across diverse and dispersed teams, where asset sharing,

updating, and management need to happen effortlessly.

5

“Consumers don’t care how much it costs brands to maintain a digital presence or the resources involved in being always available. If they are always on, they expect brands to be always on, too.” Gigaom Research, 2014.


Rich Media and Asset Personalization

With the rise in importance of personalized experiences, marketers are looking to take advantage of rich media to engage customers with more tailored, compelling content. Long before deciding on the best products or services for them, customers might watch videos, read reviews, use product configurators, view and zoom in on images from a variety of angles—often taking several approaches before making a decision.

The latest advances in rich media enable marketers to dynamically deliver content perfectly suited to each customer’s interests and preferred engagement. Instead of reaching 100,000 customers with the same digital asset, content can be recreated on the fly and delivered uniquely to each individual.

Marketers can tap into an individual’s implicit and explicit profile data and automatically send personalized images, video, or text to mobile devices, in-store service kiosks, emails, and other channels—all from a single master digital asset. In the end, customers experience a deeper connection with a company’s brand and services, while marketers enjoy higher conversions and returns.

6

Success relies on engaging customers with the most timely, relevant offers delivered via their preferred channels.


Improving Collaboration and Access to Assets

To create amazing consumer experiences, marketers need better collaboration processes and access to digital assets.

People who create and use digital assets today often work together across time zones, languages, and geographies, and on a variety of devices. The audiences they’re trying to reach are equally diverse. For marketers, these layers of complexity can slow time to market—something no one can afford.

To overcome the challenges, marketing and creative teams are turning to cloud solutions supporting shared asset storage, access, and delivery. Working together in a cloud, teams can overcome organizational silos, geographies, time zones, and languages. This is true whether people are working within their own organization or with outside agencies and consultants.

The integrated workflows help ensure that assets follow required QA cycles, as well as all processes to keep assets compliant with legal and brand requirements. In the end, the more seamless, cloud-based processes enable marketers to offer global audiences faster access to timely, accurate content.

7 “A global team working together means less chance for content duplication. Proactive communication also ensures that the content is appropriate for each audience in the global community.” Pam Didner, Global Marketing Consultant/Author


ABOUT ADOBE EXPERIENCE MANAGER ASSETS

Available in three delivery models—on-premise, managed services, and on-demand—Adobe Experience Manager assets empowers your organization to easily create, manage, deliver, and optimize digital assets from a single platform. Your team can collaborate with creative professionals, share campaign assets with cross-functional marketing teams, and deliver rich, interactive media experiences across all customer touchpoints, all from within Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Built for digital marketers, campaign managers, content publishers, and merchandisers, Adobe Experience Manager assets provides a robust, end-to-end toolset that includes digital asset management, dynamic imaging, video publishing , and interactive merchandising so you can create amazing experiences with digital assets.

Unlike traditional digital asset and rich media publishing platforms, Adobe Experience Manager assets helps marketers quickly find, manage, and share media more easily across organizational silos, and deliver dynamic variations of content from a single master asset optimized for any screen or device.

Integrated with Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions, Adobe Experience Manager assets gives marketers complete support to collaborate with creative teams and manage assets across digital marketing teams. With Adobe Experience Manager assets, your organization can enable valuable experiences that build brands, drive demand, and extend the reach and ROI of your content.


ABOUT ADOBE EXPERIENCE MANAGER ASSETS

By implementing Adobe Experience Manager assets, organizations are significantly accelerating time to market. Adobe Experience Manager assets on-demand offers digital asset management, dynamic imaging, video delivery, and a rich merchandising toolset within Adobe Marketing Cloud. The solution helps marketers quickly find, manage, and share compelling media easily across organizational silos and deliver variations of dynamic content from a single master asset. The variations are optimized in real time for any screen.

Adobe Experience Manager assets on-demand is also integrated with other Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions, as well as with Adobe Creative Cloud, giving marketers end-to-end support so all teams can manage assets from creation to delivery and ongoing optimization.

Learn more about Adobe Experience Manager assets: www.adobe.com/go/aem_assets

Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/tag/digital-asset-management/

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