“That chart I saw last week on the relationship between favorite type of milk and favorite type of cereal in young teens would be perfect for my article. Now where exactly did I see it?”
If you engage in content creation, you have almost certainly had a similar thought many times in your life. All too often, you then spend the next hour or so searching fruitlessly through your browser history until you eventually give up and insert a picture a kid eating cereal into your content.
Digital asset management, a growing trend in e-commerce, is the solution to this common problem.
Maintaining a Library
The main advantage of digital asset management for all types of e-commerce is the ability to store and organize digital assets for later use. This makes it easier to find good images, charts, and videos and attribute them correctly, when you most need them.
Statistics show that content with visual media garner 94% more page views than those without, which is why it is important to use good visual content in your content marketing.
A Consistent Voice
Voice is something that we have discussed often at Crowd Content, but one thing that is often left out in that discussion is how voice is affected by visuals. Once you have created a consistent marketing voice, you need to make sure the visual content you use maintains the voice as well as the written content.
Managing your digital assets allows you to easily tag any and all content (visual, audio, or written) with the voice it projects, so that anyone in your business can use that content consistently.
Repetition is Memorable
There is an old joke:
- What is the key to humor?
- Repetition
- What is the key to humor?
- Repetition
- What is the key to humor?
- Timing
The joke works for the simple reason that human beings tend to focus more on things when they are repeated. This principle applies to e-commerce just as well as it applies to humor. The trick is simply to create the repetition in a way that is consistent, but not dull.
For content creation, that means repurposing content. For truly effective repurposing, you want your audience to think back to the original content without feeling like you are simply rehashing the same old content without adding anything new. That can be a tricky line to walk because you want all content to feel fresh.
Digital asset management is the perfect solution. By re-using images from old content, you create a visual connection to the repurposed content, allowing the actual content to deviate more, while still seeming similar. The asset management simply allows you to easily track where images, video, or content was used before and to easily find it again when you want to re-use it.
Source of Ideas
An unexpected benefit of digital asset management is that it can be an excellent source of ideas for content creation. Lets be perfectly honest. The well of ideas runs dry occasionally, even for the best content creators.
A library of digital content that you can peruse when you are out of ideas can help spark new ideas. You can even proactively develop ideas this way by simply storing images, videos, or audio snippets that you think may be useful in the future. If an asset spurs an idea when you see it, but now isn’t the time to create content based on that idea, digital asset management even lets you tag that asset with your idea when you store it.
