If a picture is worth a thousand words and the digital world is a visual experience, why has it taken so long for many marketers to realize the importance of orchestrating consistent content at a massive scale?
In recent years we have seen the world’s leading platforms evolve to be visual first. But brands and marketers have routinely deployed tactical content solutions on a case-by-case basis to try to take advantage of this trend.
As consumers increasingly expect a consistent brand experiences across channels and devices, marketers must now work on an omnichannel basis for both audiences and content.
Marketers have spent years investing in, and developing, much needed and sophisticated ID resolution and management engines to understand who they are interacting with — across almost any channel — in near real-time. These engines have also expanded to include predictive analytics, delivering next-best action recommendations. Capabilities like these are critical to a marketer’s success. But to really take advantage and drive superlative results through exceptional customer experiences, brands need to stop taking a parsimonious approach to content operations.
In the past 18 months, Gartner has seen an accelerating interest in digital asset management (DAM) and content operations as marketing leaders grasp the need to manage and scale their content. As marketing leaders realize content’s critical importance in delivering consistent and connected customer experiences, they are removing content repositories and development from channel engines and centralizing these in content operations ecosystems that include digital asset management (DAM) solutions. These new ecosystems allow them to deploy brand efficacy and control on a universal basis, as well as create efficiencies and accelerate speed to market for planning, building and launching campaigns.
With emerging and advanced capabilities like using machine learning in automating content deployment from micro-components, Gartner has seen bespoke and targeted channel-specific creative developed, approved and deployed in minutes to drive conversion rates and revenue.
But the content operations space is a confusing place of overlapping capabilities and marketing technologies. With acronyms like PIMs, DAMs, MAMs, CMP, MWM and DXP, it’s no wonder marketers struggle to understand how they can get started.
Gartner clients can access a deep and growing library of related research, as well as talk with Gartner analysts to uncover the best opportunities and next steps to pursue. For a great starting point, visit Gartner’s “The Future of Content Operations: How to Deliver Marketing in a Changing World.”
