ECommerce sales are growing at five times the rate of in-store purchases, according to research from Forrester. Furthermore, 30% of consumers say that they expect to shop online more frequently in 2022. As a result, the demand for digital content and new eCommerce experiences is growing fast. This is pushing brands to present their products and services in an increasingly appealing manner.
However, while endeavouring to deliver a highly visual and captivating experience, many brands are running into major challenges. This includes resource bottlenecks, performance issues, antiquated tools and processes. Besides, brands must consistently deliver compelling content front and centre to numerous platforms and channels. Of essence is a solution that meets all those needs.
The report suggests that to stay competitive and thrive in today’s visual economy, brands must take advantage of modern technologies and systems. For example, they can switch to an integrated PIM-DAM [Product Information Management-Digital Asset Management] strategy. This will lower the cost of content delivery while generating engaging user experiences.
The challenges of managing media assets
Consumers are increasingly relying on visuals online for a good idea of what a product looks like in real life. This fosters confidence in purchasing decisions. However, fulfilling that requirement is an extremely complex undertaking. Particularly, in the face of stringent deadlines. These three roadblocks are immediately obvious.
Lack of resources.
Not only must brands meet the requirements for web, media, and social applications, but they must also deliver fast at scale through emerging channels. This includes voice assistants, IoT, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). Ultimately, managing the ever-growing volume of content for delivery to all omnichannel touchpoints is humanly impossible.
Optimisation of assets for performance.
To ensure assets load fast for both web and mobile, creative teams and developers need insights into media performance to improve the quality of visual assets and their loading speed for all devices and browsers.
Legacy systems and siloed workflows.
To keep up with the latest innovations and stay competitive, brands must generate riveting experiences with modern techniques. This includes headless content management system (CMS), single-page applications, and progressive web apps.
The benefits of an intelligently automated solution
To overcome those challenges, businesses must adopt an intelligently automated and purpose-built solution, which offers three key benefits.
Increase conversions.
Interactive video and personalisation foster customer engagement, often boosting sales. A recent study from Wyzowl found that 84% of consumers made purchase decisions after watching a video. Hence, why many brands are adding video to their sites. In addition, the Forrester report points out that “Better content drives better product experiences, which means more conversions. Equally important, fewer returns.”
With AI, brands can deliver relevant and rich media experiences that feature personalised images, videos, 360-degree product spins, and AR. All those enhancements promise to thrill and inspire consumers, often spurring conversions.
Improve team agility.
Adopting automated and intelligent workflows throughout the visual-media lifecycle eliminates functional silos that are prevalent when humans manage the workflow. By embracing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution, businesses can grant role-based access privileges to internal and external teams. This is managed through a central repository. As a result, businesses can securely and seamlessly collaborate, share, and distribute assets from one source of truth.
Streamline processes.
To run omnichannel campaigns, teams must go from creation to consumption. Prepare asset variations with different formats, crops, resolutions, layouts, and sizes—in record time. Yet manually tackling those tasks is labour intensive, time consuming, and error prone. As a resolution, automate image and video transformations and management to compress workstreams and shorten time to market. All enterprises need to create experiences once only for any channel with automated omnichannel transformations for videos and images.
Forrester endorses such a game plan: “A robust DAM-PIM integration approach streamlines your organisation’s content-creation process, enables more content reuse, and allows companies to deliver richer product-content experiences that drive conversions.”
The advantages of automating the Visual-Media Lifecycle
An intelligently automated solution must be purpose-built for all the stages of the media lifecycle. The solution must provide flexibility through an API-first approach and able to deliver the right media to all touchpoints.
The Cloudinary MXC offers three main features:
- Omnichannel speed which reduces time to market with new or updated experiences at all touchpoints. Thus, consumers enjoy the same high-quality experience as they hop from one device to another—with no heavy lifting.
- Innovative experience, which is enabled by hyperautomation everywhere, freeing up teams from mundane media-related tasks. As a result, affording them time to focus on creative projects that require brain power.
- Capabilities that focus on customer engagement, which include real-time optimisation and personalisation, hence inspiring interaction and connection. For example, teams can quickly convert videos and images into bilateral, rich shopping journeys through automation. Alternatively, attract shoppers with enhancements like video previews.
Summary
Consumer demand for digital content and new eCommerce experiences has never been greater. As a result, companies ramping up their product content face two related challenges. First, how to manage product data, rich media, and branded content across complex and often disconnected systems. Second, how to deliver more compelling product content across channels at scale. Both are highly manual and ultimately ineffective at many organisations. Digital businesses should read this report to learn how an integrated PIM-DAM strategy can lower the cost of content delivery. This will be needed by enterprises to develop more effective and engaging commerce experiences.
