A while ago, ADAM Software contributed to the Gilbane research report on Multilingual Marketing Content. In the age of global marketing and communication, branded materials need to reach across the planet to serve many regions - fast. This comes with inevitable challenges and problems. The report delivered some great in-depth understanding on these issues.

Marketing content often consists of lots of tiny parts

First up was the fact that marketing content often consists of lots of tiny parts. Of course, a marketing project can be really small with just a single web banner graphic, a short email message, a three-line Google AdWords advertisement, or a Tweet in Twitter. But it can also be a worldwide campaign that combines hundreds of such elements.

The large number of digital assets required for such a project results in huge complexity for marketing content localization. Files of all kinds are spread around the globe in different locations in the organization, and often the project stakeholders struggle to keep track of them. Assets are also accessible to anyone – when they can be found! – and are not secured. Further, as your campaign goes global, assets multiply uncontrollably as you create multiple language versions, originals and corrections, duplicates, and so on. This leads to confusion with people using the wrong file versions. And if files are not found fast enough, they’re simply reordered again from the agency – at great cost.

That’s where the intelligent part a DAM solution comes in. An enterprise DAM should allow you to store different versions of assets, in different languages, in different file formats. Conversion of files happens on the fly, so there’s no need to store or order file-type versions separately. Advanced taxonomy, security and metadata always point people directly to the right file meaning your central library always starts with a ‘single version of the truth’.

Marketing content can involve hundreds of file types and channels

The second challenge addressed in the Gilbane research report is that marketing content can involve hundreds of file types and channels such as websites, email messages, online catalogs, mobile media, videos, trade show exhibits, Facebook pages, eBay listings, and all this requires specialized tools to create, manage, and publish your collateral. All these different channels and specific content types need to be implemented in local markets without losing control of the big picture. This requires flexible workflow integration that allows publishing the same assets to different channels.

Marketing content technologies evolve

Next up was the challenge of keeping up with the ever rapidly evolving Marketing content technologies. As a result of this technology evolution, managers have a rich landscape of digital marketing solutions for campaign management, social networking, multichannel publishing, search engine optimization, analytics, and customer relationship management. In other words, for DAM to bring strategic advantage to your enterprise in the modern world, it needs to be far more than a simple silo application.

Since media or marketing processes require intensive delivery and retrieval of files, we think there's a real need for a complete end-to-end control of marketing operations – a Marketing Execution Platform. The combination of DAM with BPMS unleashes huge potential for a platform to become the cornerstone of all media and marketing automation architectures. And on this subject, you might want to read our CEO Pieter Casneuf’s white paper “DAM, what’s next?” It provides an expert’s vision of the future of DAM.

These were a couple of the challenges covered in the Outsell Gilbane research report and faced by today’s large brands when going global with their brand communication. The topics above are only a small part of complete content in the Outsell Gilbane research report, so feel free to download the full report with the key findings and recommendations from our website.
And get in touch any time to let us know what your daily marketing challenge is! We’d love to talk about it here.