• by Jeremy Sohn , August 24, 2011

The changes in the marketing landscape are vast, and poised to permanently disrupt traditional marketing practices. The onslaught of media, including video, and the explosion of social media have accelerated the engagement process, driving companies to try everything and anything to keep pace and maintain engaging relationships with communities of consumers.

It seems that content is once again king. More and more brands are realizing that they need to dynamically create alternative forms of content in order to ensure meaningful engagement with consumers.

For CMOs and marketers, supporting a content marketing strategy also means figuring out how to manage the workflow and process for both the creation and distribution of that content.

A recent study from Forrester Research showed that companies that don't consider how to best manage their rich media assets and workflows wind up with production and, ultimately, brand inefficiencies. This has left many marketers with their heads spinning at the idea of trying to keep up with the monumental challenges that go hand-in-hand with modern "Now" marketing. Companies that fail to develop an efficient way of managing the process are quickly falling behind.

Following are the three biggest challenges facing companies as they continue to adopt new ways to develop and deliver content and embrace content marketing on a greater scale.

Content Creation

Today's consumers are increasingly media savvy and demand a more engaging experience. As a result, many marketers are using video and other media as part of the marketing mix to ensure increased interaction at every turn. But organizations are finding that the content creation process is breaking down. Without the ability to see and search across all of the available rich media assets, how can they efficiently and cost-effectively identify what content is available and how it was previously used?

Companies that have implemented a way to identify what content they already have and how it may have been used, in addition to what they need, are well ahead of the game. Content Management technologies, like Digital Asset Management, make this possible. They provide efficiencies that are saving time and money for companies as they work to create more compelling content, respond more quickly to changing content needs, and make smarter decisions.

Content Management

Without content management, the process of content creation becomes exponentially more difficult, if not impossible.

Consider how many different people are involved in creating, editing, approving, updating archiving and removing content for a brand. If every person involved with a brand's content is in a different location, it gets extraordinarily complicated, to put it lightly.

Today, the companies seeing the greatest return on their content strategy are those willing to adapt a software strategy to centralize, automate, and manage these complex workflows, from the beginning of the creative process through to the expiration and removal of that content / campaign. Content Distribution

In addition to streamlining the process of creating and managing content, brands today are just as concerned with distributing that content. In order to secure and maintain consumer attention, marketers must find a way to reach widely dispersed audiences with messages that are constantly evolving and changing. They need to be able to respond to any message that doesn't connect with consumers and make changes across multiple mediums and campaigns in real-time.

But the rapid pace of distribution today can also serve as an advantage for marketers that both understand and are able to leverage tools which automate and manage the distribution of content, including the download, conversion, distribution, and rights management of video, images and other rich media.

Without a process for managing each step, these efforts are likely to fall flat. As companies begin to implement digital asset management technologies that can streamline this process, they become much more equipped to take advantage of the revolution in content marketing.