Buying Decisions Today: Utilizing a Creative Asset Management Platform to Increase Conversion
By Luke Schneider, Business Development at Globaledit
Few imagined a decade ago that a large percentage of our transactions would take place through the phones in our pockets. As the last decade has invited opportunity for a long list of start-ups, it has fundamentally changed the way brands effectively reach customers.
Combined with ever-increasing manufacturing quality, it’s easier than ever before to purchase a high-quality product at a fair price.
It isn’t enough today simply to have a great product. The rise of direct-to-consumer brands like Glossier, Warby Parker, and Harry’s Razors have shown how important it is to create a brand voice to reach customers through more than direct advertising alone. This need for a diversified marketing plan challenges creative production to produce higher-quality content for more channels in less time.
Modern Effective Advertising – A Coffee Subscription Story
Think about the last time you discovered a product you didn’t know existed. Do you remember where you were first exposed to the brand? Did you see one ad and buy it immediately? Or did you take more time, require multiple touches, and do some of your own research? If you’re like me, chances are you take more convincing; my most recent ad-driven purchase was a Trade Coffee subscription (This is not a sponsored post, but I wouldn’t turn down free coffee beans). When I look back and study what brought me through their marketing/sales funnel, I see multiple touch-points combined with interesting and eye-catching content that made me thirsty for more.
I was first exposed to Trade Coffee through an Instagram sponsored post, likely spurred by my consistent views of high-end coffee machine pages like La Marzocco. I thought it was interesting and they certainly had beautiful content, but I had tried direct-roaster subscriptions before and wasn’t crazy about it due to the price and, frankly, getting bored of the same product over and over again, I quickly moved on.
Over the next few weeks I saw multiple ads through online search and video streaming. I then saw a Facebook ad with some more details and a call-to-action that spurred my interest. This ad got me to click-through to the brand’s website. I was now solidly within the “discovery/evaluation” stage of their pipeline. After thoroughly researching the company, I found their product offered a solution to an issue I was facing—not having consistent access to fresh, high-quality, interesting coffee beans at a reasonable price. To put the cherry on top, I was presented with a promotional offer of 30% off and free shipping for the duration of my subscription, which led me to my first Trade purchase a few weeks after the first touch.
For many brands, this would be the end of the story, but their content and customer service didn’t stop there. I received further information about the product I had ordered through beautiful visual and written content, as well as suggestions for my next coffee selection through information about their other partner roasters. Trade Coffee’s full-cycle marketing had brought me from an unaware consumer with a desire to a loyal customer who happily refers all of his coffee-loving friends to their service.
Getting Competitive
Keeping up in our modern direct-to-consumer, omni-channel, social- and brand-voice guided consumer marketplace requires breaking through the status quo and looking at your overall marketing plan with the future in mind. Customer stories like mine continue to show how important a cohesive brand voice is to bring in new customers and increase brand loyalty, in turn increasing the reach of your products beyond your direct marketing efforts.
In the perpetual race for market share, new and established brands alike utilize social media more than ever, but, in an unexpected turn, brands are once again tapping direct mail, billboards, and out-of-home advertising to stay at the forefront of consumers’ minds. Staying competitive requires an expanded marketing reach, necessitating more content than ever before. This has put stress on the old way of doing things when it comes to creative and marketing operations, with significant backlog build-up during the editing, retouching, design, and approval processes.
The Right Tech
At the same time, it can be hard to parse the increasingly crowded marketing-technology landscape. From CMS to MRM, CRM to DAM, it’s easy to lose sight of the original goals of your solution search, often resulting in running in place.
When we look at creative operations through the past few decades, not much has changed when it comes to overall workflow. Instead of editing and passing around film, we now work from hard drives or a local server, as full-res files are still too large to send back and forth quickly without physically moving a hard drive. The current process tends to require teams to be in the same location when production wants to be decentralized. New technology can help both small in-house teams and the biggest global marketing departments stay organized and on-schedule while producing more great content.
Companies leverage traditional Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms to organize and distribute their digital files, including marketing materials. While these tools are effective long-term repositories, they quickly find their limits when confronted with the access demand required during marketing production. Here at Globaledit, though our solution has the capabilities of a DAM, we refer to our software as a “Creative Asset Management” (CAM) platform, built specifically with the work-in-progress (WIP) workflows of creative photography and visual production in mind.
The Benefits of a Specialized Creative Asset Management Platform
A powerful CAM platform can unlock collaboration in ways only previously possible through in-person interaction. Photographers, creative directors, art directors, clients, retouchers, graphic designers, marketing directors, producers, and project managers can all log on to the Globaledit platform from anywhere in the world through our browser- and iOS-based platform.
Globaledit can be used by creative directors to build cohesive pre-production decks to communicate the vision and direction that they have in mind. Clients and other stakeholders can easily view, comment, and annotate materials to further develop concepts into the focused direction. You can upload and store PDF decks alongside the raw assets, ensuring that teams are on the same page from pre-production through post-production.
Our platform makes it simple to keep your content secure by determining which users can move, add, delete, rate, and annotate which assets. The same user control allows you to assign groups of users to a project to ensure everyone is kept in the loop, or you can control what users access which assets, ensuring that unfinished content isn’t accidentally published.
Our rating tools leverage industry standards: 1-5 stars, color tags, and select/approve/alt/kill to narrow down your edit and designate final selections. Not to worry if you make a first-pass on set—ratings within CaptureOne, Bridge, and Lightroom will automatically transfer to Globaledit, allowing you to pick up where you left off to make your final edit simple.
Once final selects are made, use our visual markup tool to draw the changes you want retouchers and graphic designers to make. This streamlined process eliminates the need for vague or complicated text-based descriptions of retouching call-outs. Once the edit is finalized and markups have been made, you can easily transfer large files by building a Collection within Globaledit to quickly share with your in-house or freelance creatives.
Our easy approvals tool ensures that even the busiest stakeholders have a quick and simple way to sign off on finalized content. Our clients shave days off the production timeline by breaking their dependency on hard drives and printed contact sheets.
Digital Asset Managers utilize our organization capabilities, tapping industry-standard metadata schemas, as well as the power to build their own custom schemas for their unique business applications. Metadata best practices ensure that organizations are able to find assets that fulfill their marketing needs instead of unnecessarily repeating the production process. With unlimited folder levels, Producers and Digital Techs can utilize the same folder hierarchy they would use on a local server to keep assets organized by project and stage within the post-production process.
Because our platform brings people to content instead of the other way around, it’s easy for marketing departments to know where to find creative content that they can shape into their next campaign. Whether it’s locating eCommerce imagery, developing seasonal lookbooks, or finding social-ready content, Globaledit makes it simple to find what you need, when you need it.
While Globaledit can be utilized as a DAM for long-term archival storage, it can also integrate with a variety of other production management, studio management, and existing DAM platforms. Globaledit was built by and for the creative department; our solution can scale-with even the largest creative departments. Contact us to learn how we can fit into and increase the yield of your creative stack today.