What really unlocks the value of DAM (or any technology, for that matter) is when you have a clear strategic objective built around it. Not just, how can we improve the way we work with content, but why do we want to? What can we achieve, if we set our minds to it?
We call this the ‘content why’.
What we find is that businesses are very good at talking about the purpose and strategic objectives of the products or their brand, but not so much their content. That stems from content being traditionally viewed as a means to an end, the vehicle through which products are presented to would-be customers, for example, or the means of communicating your brand values and identity.
But this obscures the fact that content has an agency of its own. When someone looks at a product image, it’s not just the product they are seeing. It’s the way the image is framed, the coloring and lighting, what’s in focus, what else is in the picture. The picture acts on the observer in both conscious/rational and sub-conscious/emotional ways. Depending on the composition, they might like or hate it. It might grab their attention and push them to explore more. Or put them off and decide to look elsewhere.
Whatever form it takes - image, text, video or audio - content has the power to influence your audiences, to shape how they think and push them to act. That’s the true value of content. The aim of a robust content strategy is to unlock it.
Your ‘content why’, then, involves thinking carefully about who you want to influence and how, what you want people to think about your brand and its products, and how you want them to act. All of this should reflect business objectives (the idea that content can be a vehicle for achieving business goals remains a revolutionary one to many brands). And there might be many different answers to your ‘why’ - different answers for different audience segments, different markets, different channels, different strategic goals.
Once you have those answers, you can start to plot routes to achieving them. It’s the classic model for planning for success through complexity - start with the goals, then map out how you intend to get there. From determining your content why, you can look at your content value chain and operational set up, and think about how creative, production, distribution, etc. all need to work together to meet your goals. This includes thinking about how your teams need to be organized, and where and how technology can help.
There are a lot of moving parts involved in content production and management, particularly when it comes to collaborative operations. The right DAM implementation can play a vital role in the orchestration of it all, bringing order to the chaos and making tangled webs of processes logical and manageable. But the real value comes when you implement DAM with a purpose, when you have figured out the ‘why’ behind your content strategy and have a clear sight of your objectives. Without clear goals, without a clear ‘why’, it’s hard to target real improvements in your current ecosystem, and to drive tangible results throughout your content value chain.
Join Mark Deal at DAM New York when he co-hosts the session with Rob Driscoll from Optimizely, Using DAM to Power Your Content Lifecycle, and further explores the art and science of building an effective content value chain to deliver quality experiences at scale.
