How DAM can support your global content strategy

It’s hard enough to create on-brand content that delivers a memorable customer experience in one language

To do that for multiple languages, regions, and cultures can feel like an impossible challenge. Global marketing teams need special content tools to manage the needs of audiences and teams across the globe.

With a digital asset management (DAM) system, you get a central hub for global content access, localised content management at scale, and insights into content performance across channels. Here’s a closer look at the ways DAM can support your global content strategy.

Create a central hub for global content access

The more locations your business is spread across, the more important it is to have a central hub for global content access. Using FTP, Dropbox, Google Drive, thumb drives, and other scattered storage methods leads to content inefficiencies, security vulnerabilities and potentially brand-damaging mistakes.

With a DAM system, your teams around the world are given secure, permissioned access to the same files to create with, work on, and share with partners. Using a DAM solution as a central hub for content access ensures you’re all working with the same file versions on the newest product launch or marketing campaign. DAM is a crucial tool that global companies like Harman International have used to support rapid growth in business units across the globe.

Global wins:

• Manage global content access and user permissions through a central hub;
• Increase collaboration between teams; no waiting days for teams on the other side of the world to respond to a request;
• Work on the most up-to-date content versions across time zones; files aren’t stored on local servers and hard drives.

Manage localised content at scale

Managing content for local audiences is one of the biggest challenges for global organisations. Your content has to be crafted and then adapted for different locations, regions and languages. With the right DAM platform, it’s possible to scale this effort across teams and efficiently produce materials for your local audiences.

Widen’s DAM solution, the Widen Collective®, comes with two features that make managing localised content easier — Templates and Portals. Templates let teams modify certain aspects of marketing materials (like sell sheets and brochures) to fit local needs while staying on brand and saving regional creative teams time. Portals make it easy to share curated groups of assets with outside partners or teams, using the right language, messaging and assets.

Global wins

• Use portals to share and distribute localised content;
• Create templates that teams can use to localise on-brand content;
• Set permissions for user groups based on region that only shows content approved to use by specific region.

If you want to know more about localised content, take a look at how Elsevier, a global information analytics business, uses the Collective to streamline their global marketing workflow and translate their content into multiple languages.

Quantify content performance with

It takes a significant investment to produce compelling, high-quality content. Using a DAM solution can help you understand how that content is being used across regions and performing on different channels. This gives you insight into your best performing assets, including which files are viewed, downloaded and shared the most.

Brooks Running and Hootsuite both use share and embed codes to measure content performance on different channels. They each use the Collective to distribute their content across channels and understand how it’s performing.

Global wins

• Understand system usage across regions for content strategy and usage optimisation;
• Coordinate global workflows for creation, proofing, and approval;
• Distribute content from the Collective to different channels (e.g. social) and understand the performance.

DAM is a critical tool for global marketing teams

Your global marketing team needs to deliver the right content, to the right customer at the right time, no matter where in the world your audience is. This kind of sophistication takes efficient collaboration across regions and time zones that’s only possible with a central hub for global content access. That’s where DAM software comes in.

Global brands like Crayola, New Balance, and Energizer all trust the Widen Collective for their global content operations needs. Take a moment to see why their global marketing organisations all rely on the Widen Collective for DAM.

By Nate Holmes, product marketing manager, Widen, an Acquia company