4 Ways to Solve your Omnichannel Marketing Challenges With DAM
Even though the pandemic might be coming to a close, the types of strategies we continue to implement and deem “the new normal” throughout it are here to stay.
One of which is omnichannel marketing, - the new standard within B2B sales.
Steering away from being just a buzzword, omnichannel marketing has proven to be one of the most beneficial strategies used by companies to increase consumer spend frequency by 250%.
As people are now given the choice to engage with a brand remotely through various digital channels or in-person, it's no wonder the opportunities are endless for increased conversion and customer satisfaction.
It’s what people want, too - with 90% of customers demanding consistent communication and interactions through all channels.
People want to experience a brand in store or digitally, without having to deal with lack of quality in regards to which channel or touchpoint they choose, as the chart below from McKinsey shows.
But realistically, a great strategy like omnichannel rarely comes without any kind of challenges. Challenges like maintaining brand consistency, creating a seamless experience, providing the right content and even implementing the strategy itself.
But what’s the easiest way to make sure content is personalized enough, and that your campaigns are delivered efficiently across all channels the right way and at the right time?
Marketers should look to tools and technology that can help solve the pain points that come with omnichannel marketing. As omnichannel itself is highly digital, technology like digital asset management can be one of the most valuable tools to facilitate a seamless strategy.
In this article we’re discussing four challenges associated with omnichannel marketing, and how DAM can help solve them.
Table of contents
What does Omnichannel have in common with DAM?
4 Ways to approach your omnichannel marketing challenges
Challenge #1: Creating a seamless journey across all channels
Challenge #2: Maintaining brand consistency through an omnichannel strategy
Challenge #3: Content isn’t effective, personal or accurate
Challenge #4: Omnichannel is hard to implement
How MCR Safety used DAM for optimal omnichannel experience
Conclusion
What does Omnichannel have in common with DAM?
Omnichannel marketing is about creating a customer journey and experience that is integrated across multiple channels.
The focus is on how buyers are able to interact with the content across all channels without dealing with gaps or inconsistencies when it comes to brand experience.
People should be able to seamlessly transition from one channel to another, and all brand touch points should be tied together.
There’s a reason for doing this, too:
Companies that use three or more channels in campaigns earn 90% higher customer retention rates than those that only use a single channel.
That’s where Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software comes in.
Digital asset management (DAM) is a tool used to control all your digital assets in one central location. And it’s these assets that your omnichannel strategy heavily relies on.
All users are able to edit, share and distribute the assets found in a DAM. That means most of the workflows related to content management - production and distribution - are now streamlined, which means a much more productive workspace and collaboration.
Omnichannel is about how and where you communicate with customers. DAM is the engine that powers the communication.
Let’s take a closer look at 4 key omnichannel marketing challenges and how DAM can solve them.
4 ways to approach your omnichannel marketing challenges
A DAM can help solve a lot of the issues related to creating an omnichannel marketing strategy.
Whether it be the challenge of implementing the strategy itself or making the content personalized enough, a digital asset management platform can serve as a valuable helping hand to make every marketer’s life a bit easier.
Challenge #1:
Creating a seamless journey across all channels
One of the main challenges marketers face when it comes to omnichannel is being able to create that unified experience.
One of the key prerequisites for succeeding with omnichannel marketing is that notion of flexibility. Globally, 49% of people want to be able to purchase something at any time, no matter where they are.
Your brand needs to be equally as helpful and interesting on whatever kind of channel a customer finds you on.
But this could be easier said than done, especially when you take into consideration how people change their behavior and shopping habits over time.
So how do you make sure you successfully bring it all together when people transition from one channel to another? And that all platforms and channels are synced?
DAM’s solution:
One central truth for assets
First of all, an omnichannel experience can only start if you have all the content in one central place, which DAM provides.
This makes it much easier to connect the dots and provide seamless transitions across channels.
If you want your content on all the channels possible, you need to have a base where it’s all located. No more trying to find assets on employee’s personal and local drives, or in someone else’s cloud.
Digital asset management tools will be your organization's one-stop shop for all the ready-to-use and approved marketing collateral.
Meeting the needs of your buyers is possible with DAM, as the tool helps efficiently tailor and deliver the right content across devices and channels in real-time.
More specifically, a DAM will further help you create that seamless experience by…
Giving you an intuitive and fast search for assets
Automatically executing workflows to deliver assets in multiple channels
Accelerating the accessibility to content for all users using the DAM
Helping to repurpose content for different channels and uses
Challenge #2:
Maintaining brand consistency through an omnichannel strategy
As omnichannel is about the same experience on all channels, companies and brands should strive to be as consistent as possible.
Sure, you might be able to deliver content across multiple channels, but if the content isn’t consistent across these channels, you might be causing some problems, such as:
- Lower credibility
- Increased costs
- A slower sales process
Remaining consistent and the same over a longer period of time breeds trust. And trust breeds purchasing. 81% of consumers need to actively trust a brand in order to purchase from them, and if you get brand consistency right, you can expect 33% business growth.
It can be a challenge for enterprise marketers to ensure the content delivered to both digital and physical channels are the same and coherent. Think about the brands you have within the group, the number of languages you deliver content in and the local regulations you need to comply with. That’s a lot to manage.
What happens when you don’t get consistency right?
In many cases, you end up communicating outdated products or worse, products that are no longer available in a specific country.
DAM’s solution:
Correct categorization of content
One of the biggest pros with a DAM is that it makes your assets much more organized.
A DAM can help you categorize all your content into categories like:
Style
Theme
Campaign
File type
Team or department, or
Channel
When you’re able to assign assets to a category like channel, it will make it much easier to consistently deliver the brand’s content to the right channel. It’s much easier, and much faster.
That way you avoid miscommunication and misconceptions about which product catalogues you're supposed to use for your European campaign, for example.
Correct categorization not only helps your team operate better, it also improves brand consistency and remaining on the same page - on all channels involved.
DAM also facilitates a more consistent buyer experience through an omnichannel strategy by more efficient version control of assets.
Having access to the most recent and updated assets means that customers receive only one, consistent experience of the brand. Elevating your company’s voice, and hopefully elevating the retention and purchase intention of your products.
Challenge #3:
Content isn’t effective, personal or accurate
Another struggle most enterprise marketers face is not having the right content to distribute.
What does “the right content” mean?
It means the content is right for the recipient. Relevance is key.
It’s not an easy thing to achieve though.
In most cases, the content is generic. It’s not personalized enough.
When you’re implementing an omnichannel strategy it’s highly important that the content matches and meets the needs of the buyer. Otherwise, you could be wasting your time and resources.
DAM’s solution:
A tool to retrieve meaningful insights
76% of US adults are more likely to buy something if they’ve had a personalized experience. And they’re willing to pay more for more personalization.
At an aggregated level, DAM can help you find the information you need about which assets are performing well, and which aren’t. These insights can further help you tailor which content fits which kind of consumer - making it more personal.
DAM analytics are at the forefront of more personalized omnichannel experiences.
By seeing what assets are streamed the most at one time, you’re able to see where to improve the content for which touchpoints your customers have with your brand.
For example, you’re a retail marketer and have just launched a new product line.
The first product is a t-shirt. On the product page, you show the product through images and in video. Using out-of-the-box reports in a DAM, you see that video gets 3X more engagement than the images. You use this data to allocate more budget into video production.
Now, you’re meeting the buyers and their needs on their terms.
The result? More purchases.
Challenge #4:
Omnichannel is hard to implement
Another challenge facing enterprise marketers looking to go omnichannel is the implementation itself.
Various research studies continue to report that organizational silos are cited as one of the biggest challenges for omnichannel implementation.
Omnichannel strategies are all about speed, and silos significantly increase the time it takes to distribute the right assets to the right person.
If you’re too slow delivering the right assets, you could be missing out on keeping the customers you’ve worked so hard to attract.
DAM’s solution:
Break down silos and improve collaboration
Collaboration between departments, partners and freelancers becomes much easier.
The easier it is to collaborate, the easier it will be to implement.
With the right DAM system, you can:
Use permissions to share the right assets with the right people - whether that’s internally and externally,
Connect with existing business apps within your digital ecosystem as well as native-like integrations to tier one platforms such as Optimizely, Sitecore, Office 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud,
Use workflows for managing tasks, reviews and approvals so that marketing and sales teams are in sync with the latest product information,
Deliver a seamless omnichannel experience by getting production, distribution, logistics and order management teams all on the same page with what assets to use and when,
Bridge the gap between sales, marketing and legal departments by ensuring that the assets you use are available and have not expired.
For those that use it successfully, DAM is at the core of their organization. Silos are broken, teams are more collaborative, and they work more efficiently. This leads to faster time to market and in enterprise, this means faster growth.
How MCR Safety used DAM for optimal omnichannel experience
MCR safety, the large manufacturer of PPE-equipment, took DAM to good use in order to increase the control over all their brand assets.
Not only did this make collaboration much easier and speed up internal processes, it also facilitated a better omnichannel experience.
By using DAM, MCR safety makes sure that every department and team in the company is able to retrieve assets (at any time) from the mutual platform.
This way they break down silos and make it easier for all touchpoints with the brand to remain on the same page, enhancing the mutual vision and voice.
“We have over 6,000 independent SKU’s and each SKU has multiple sizes. If we include videos and action shots, I’d say we have about 80,000 to 90,000 assets.
“That’s why we knew that whenever we implemented some kind of asset management system, it had to be a Tier 1 application because it was going to touch every aspect of the business from marketing to sales to distribution,”
- Bret Lipscomb
Manager of Digital Solutions
Digizuite is a platform that supports MCR’s omnichannel strategy. Every department in the company pulls digital assets and product information from the platform.
Read the entire case study here.
Conclusion
Omnichannel marketing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
It’s no surprise, as companies see that they retain about 90% of their customers when they use omnichannel marketing.
Although omnichannel marketing has proven to be successful, companies may face various challenges when it comes to actually going forth with that kind of a strategy.
However, the remedy lies in tools like digital asset management.
A DAM tool can help you streamline content operations, make sure the right content is delivered on the right channels, break down silos, increase speed and improve brand management.
Omnichannel marketing will help you deliver that consistent brand experience you’ve been striving towards. A DAM ensures that you have the resources you need to make it happen!
Looking to find out how you can use DAM to solve your omnichannel marketing challenges?
Book a call with our experts now.
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