Artificial intelligence, or AI, has been a buzzword in the martech industry for years, but in recent months AI within digital asset management (DAM) technology has been especially popular. But what specifically does having AI enablement in DAM entail, and how will it benefit marketers?
While there is certainly an intrigue involved in integrating AI functionality into your martech stack, marketers need to remember that AI is not a catch-all solution to all their problems. Rather, AI needs to be looked at as a tool that can help them get to the solution in a better way. Nonetheless, when implemented properly, an AI-integrated DAM software can provide many content managers a fix to various problems a brand may face, all while improving the overall customer and brand experience.
As many marketers know, any external (and often internal) asset goes through multiple rounds of time-consuming edits and reviews before heading out the door. Even before a first draft is put to paper, it can take hours for teams to come up with an idea, audit all available and approved assets, and do the proper research to inform the asset. This is a perfect example of a situation to which AI can provide a solution every step of the way, allowing marketers to focus on the big picture and not get bogged down in the tedious steps along the way.
Byung Choi is President & CEO of MarcomCentral
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Trend analysis and prediction
With the help of AI, marketers can monitor industry and company trends in real-time. Knowing what is up-and-coming before it gets to the top can prove a huge advantage for any marketing campaign, as content perceived as original or unique can leave a lasting impression with key audiences.
More than just trend predictions, AI can analyze how current assets stored within a DAM system are performing, make data-backed recommendations on what assets to use together, which copy performs best, and even provide edits that can improve performance based on trends from previously used assets. In this sense, think of AI as predictive A/B testing.
Based on prior data, it can predict audience reactions and sentiments, letting marketers know what will be successful without going through the work of actually creating and testing multiple assets. This will allow marketers to operate with more efficiency and create data-driven campaigns that will better-meet KPIs.
By supplementing the ideation process with AI, marketers can spend less time (and money) getting an asset started and instead prioritize the execution and implementation.
Streamlined and automated content creation and distribution
Beyond just trend analysis and predictions, AI can also be used to automate the creation process. While AI isn’t at the point where it can create full-fledged marketing assets on its own, it can point marketers in the right direction or give them a starting-off point.
Once an asset is ready to go live, meanwhile, a DAM software fully-integrated with AI can provide marketers recommendations on how and when they should distribute their assets to maximize exposure and return on investment. AI can look at previous assets’ performance on various platforms and come up with a data-backed plan on where each asset will perform best, taking the guesswork out of creating a marketing distribution plan.
Enhanced discovery with auto-tagging
After an asset goes live, it’s easy to forget about it. Many approved assets sit buried in a folder where, while technically everybody can access them, nobody will find them until eventually they get deleted in an effort to clear out space on the company’s network. With personnel turnover and constantly-changing marketing teams, that old asset could be the very thing needed for a campaign down the road and without proper tagging, it will continue to go unused and likely be re-created, wasting company time and resources.
This is where AI-enabled DAM can once again step up and shine. DAM software with AI integration can automatically tag every asset stored within it, indexing not only new assets as they’re created but looking at a company’s full library and auditing it for future use. This content profiling will allow anyone within a company to quickly and accurately assess relevant assets regardless of location, removing the risk of redundancy within a content-creation team.
Marketing takes a certain je ne sais quoi that no machine will ever be able to fully replace, but by integrating AI into their DAM software, marketers will be able to streamline and speed up every step in the process of getting to a final product without sacrificing (and likely improving) quality and user experience.
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