What does the future hold for marketing asset management – and what should marketers expect over the next five or so years?
Increasing Volumes of Marketing Content
Obviously, in this Age of Content, we’ll no doubt see increasing volumes of marketing assets. Marketers will deal with larger and larger amounts of content in many different formats. Marketing asset management systems will need to accommodate this growing data volume. There’s a huge amount of work to be done in marketing asset management to help marketers manage, organize, archive, promote, highlight, and partition content as volumes increase. Count on additional software to support this growing volume of data.
Growing Marketing Complexity
The second area where marketing asset management will expand in coming years is in handling increasingly complex marketing organizations and providing greater levels of automation for marketing teams. Today, many marketing departments have content providers and managers in multiple (and even many) locations. They’re delivering content on a global basis and integrating their assets in the marketing asset management system with other systems.
That’s only going to increase over the next three to five years, and along with it will come the need for additional governance and process support within the marketing asset management system. Many processes that are informal or not enforced today regarding who can access what and when – as well as who can edit and who owns what – will evolve to enable more complicated and rigorous management of assets on a global basis.
Emphasis on Repurposing Existing Marketing Assets
Looking forward, a third area of development in marketing asset management is finding more creative ways to repurpose existing content, and thus, save money and time. Marketers repurpose lots of imagery today. They also repurpose page layout files, convert them, and translate them into different languages. But we expect over the next several years that marketing asset management will also allow marketers to break up their content into smaller discrete units and assemble them in multiple ways. So text (including boilerplate), graphics, video, audio – all of that will be available for repurposing, reformatting, and reusing into web experiences and printed documents. Marketers will be able to more easily take static content and make it dynamic. All of this, we believe, will be part of the marketing asset management system of the near future.
Deeper Analytics
Another area where we’re seeing increased interest among marketers – which we expect to grow over the next few years – is data mining and deeper data analytics within the marketing asset management system. We anticipate that marketers will not only want reports and alerts regarding activities within the system, but will also expect to manage data and take action based on analysis and conclusions performed by software instead of human intervention. This is an exciting area and one that potentially offers great competitive advantage for businesses that work with a vendor to implement their business logic within the marketing asset management system. See the current state of the art in marketing asset management reporting and analytics
Demand for Sophisticated Security
Lots of businesses today are certainly mindful of security – including privacy and access rights – within their marketing asset management system. In many cases, businesses are already able to provide sophisticated approaches to security for marketing content. We expect more and more businesses to see the need for first-rate security. And so, many more businesses are likely to recognize the importance of using tools available within their marketing asset management system to secure proprietary and confidential marketing assets.
Easier Integration
The final area where we expect additional development in marketing asset management is the ability of marketers to more quickly and easily gather collections of assets and provide them to other applications, other tools, and other systems – without requiring expensive integrations or much technical support. To the extent that the industry adopts more standard ways of exchanging data (e.g., XML, JSON), it becomes increasingly easy for a marketing department to make available collections of marketing assets on the fly to other systems, partners, vendors, and so on. We expect many marketers will demand that type of support from their marketing asset management system.
By now you’ve probably noticed there’s a lot we expect to happen in a fairly short time with marketing asset management. Increased data volume and complexity – plus a need for greater control and accountability – will drive it. In many ways, these are extensions of existing trends that brought forth the need for marketing asset management systems in the first place. The marketing asset management system of the future will be built to anticipate and successfully respond to these trends.
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