Your model is broken, and you know it
The principles of good marketing remain the same as 20 years ago. Stay on brand. Be relevant. Adapt and localize your content. Be creative. Make an impact on an emotional level. Engage with your prospects and customers at different parts of their journey. It’s about customer experience.
Brands are all grappling with the challenges of feeding their channels with the right volume and quality of content, delivering at the speed of light, and without busting budgets. That’s the nature of marketing these days!
The speed requirement, in particular, puts tremendous strain on brands looking to develop a consistent approach across all their channels. Many are developing an omnichannel strategy. This approach prevents a silo mentality of solving the problem in one channel without considering the needs of all other channels. Adaptation is still needed but many aspects of the content can be retained across these channels.
of marketers are unable to create enough content
The problem is that this omnichannel upstream ‘content engine’ is often still quite fragmented, and not supported well enough by a correctly configured Digital Asset Management platform. Without this central resource correctly in place, it’s hard to evolve into better, efficient ways of working.
If your marketing teams around the world don’t have instant access to the wealth of material that’s already been created, how can you take advantage of the resources at your disposal? How can your brands be more effective in budget planning? How can your brand managers be consistent with their efforts across the company if they don’t know what’s been done elsewhere? How can they allocate their budget effectively to create unique content and maximize its utilization?
The inertia in our industry to develop content in the same way as we always have is huge. Marketers understandably stick with proven ways of developing new creative assets. It has, after all, worked well up to now. Marketing teams and their agency rosters can end up perpetuating the existing model, and the financial imperative for the agencies to produce new content can work against the brand’s need for more reuse, more repurposing and less duplication.
The big constraint now is that budgets can’t expand exponentially to keep pace with the rapid growth in demand for content. This situation is exacerbated by the increasing speed by which content has to be created. Any ‘creation’ process will be longer than a reuse or repurposing exercise.
If we look at the differing growth rates of content types we see the acceleration of social media, online video and online display. The good news about these specific channels is that you already have the start point. You need assets, copy variations, different calls to action, different ways to fit a particular space or time slot. You rarely need a new ‘big idea’ to be developed, but instead, new ways to use or apply the existing content.
ACCELERATING GROWTH ACCELERATING COMPLEXITY
A look at the scale and scope of a daily effort
For global companies and their portfolio of brands, the challenge to create, manage and optimize all this content is exponentially greater - as are the benefits of getting it right.
ACCELERATING OPPORTUNITY
A look at where the increase is and how to deliver against it
If we look specifically at digital shelf, we know that content volume and speed get you to the starting line, but it’s the relevance and quality that determines whether your product is selected versus the competition. The digital shelf unites the dual objectives of what was previously separated into ‘marketing’ and ‘sales’ objectives. Your product, its identity, its description and its marketing content have never been so unified before.
Take a look at these statistics from Amazon that demonstrate the importance of content relevance and quality. We know videos can provide a real boost to purchase likelihood. Automation and personalization become important in this context, and it’s rarely the case that the same content is used everywhere for long periods.
AND IT’S NOT JUST MORE,
PRODUCT CONTENT MATTERS
Complete, correct and compelling content on the digital shelf boosts sales, traffic and conversion
86% of consumers rely on digital information while researching and shopping online. More than a third say images, product size and materials information, and ratings & reviews help the most when deciding whether to buy.
- Salsify
This is not a once-only task. Digital shelf owners are constantly adapting their templates and these stats show just what a task this is to cope with every year. Another case is made for having the slickest possible content selection and adaptation engine to cope with these changes.
SOUNDS SIMPLE? WHY YOU CAN'T SET IT AND FORGET IT
The benefits may be clear, but the ever-changing standards are not
The dynamic nature of eCommerce means brands must be diligent about keeping product content up to their own internally established guidelines as well as those of retailers.
