Why DAM is your best friend when it comes to re-using media content
Companies rely on content marketing to gain visibility on the Web and to connect with audiences on social media. Images, videos, infographics, articles, podcasts… Creating a large volume of varied content is a must, but it also consumes a lot of financial and human resources. How can you improve your ROI for the media you produce? For marketing managers, part of the answer lies in strategies for re-using this content. The point isn’t to repost a video or a set of images as they are, but to recycle published content in different formats on different channels.
What’s the best way to reuse content to increase their returns? How can DAM (Digital Asset Management) support your content re-utilization strategy? Let’s focus on two opposing but complementary strategies, content snacking and atomic content, and how DAM contributes to them.
Content snacking: re-structuring your content into bite-sized pieces
Recycling is a buzzword with numerous applications these days, including content management. We’re not just talking about texts, but especially visual content (images, videos, rich media assets). Recycling this content – in other words, giving it several lives beyond its original format and publication platform – has become a discipline in itself, known as “content snacking”. This consists of dividing the original content into several parts, to make the most of it over a longer period of time.
Let’s take a video interview, for example, which took time to prepare and produce. You can publish it using different formats: video capsules, short video “teasers”, striking “punchlines”, behind the scenes videos, or even re-use the audio as a podcast, etc. There are many possibilities. This micro-content strategy helps make original content go viral in a variety of formats, which extends their lifespan and therefore significantly increases their ROI.
In other words, content snacking turns an existing asset into multiple different types of content with shorter and more targeted treatments. Dividing one piece of content into several bite-sized “snacks” means you can have a presence on more channels and media formats, and thus reach a wider and more targeted audience. In particular, it meets the distribution needs of fast-paced social media channels and their various formats (videos, stories, image carousels, etc.)
After all, social media is where this kind of content, which is designed to be consumed quickly, really thrives – in fact, several major companies have established their own, internal “content factories” to create “feed content”. And to industrialize their processes, these “factories” rely on solutions like DAM. For good reason: DAM’s functions offer more than a library.
From streaming to indexing and chaptering, DAM offers a wide palette of features that ensure you will get the most from your video content. These features offer content factory teams everything they need to turn visual content into “snacks”. From creating video clips from longer sequences, exporting them in various formats like animated GIFs, to publishing them on social media…
Atomic content: how to prepare and aggregate content
When it comes to reusing content, content snacking isn’t the only option for marketing teams. These days, “atomic content” is another valuable recycling strategy. “Atomic” content is very short content that can be dynamically combined with another piece of content to create something new. As a strategy, this is the opposite of content snacking. This process starts with the production of very small pieces of content, which are then assembled into something larger.
The power of this strategy, in addition to recycling existing content, lies in its ability to easily generate customized content to deliver a personalized experience to every Internet user. This is also called “customized atomization”. It’s a key concept for any marketing professional looking to deliver the right message at the right time to each persona.
What’s the best way to deploy “atomic content” in practice?
Let’s say you have a library of 2,000 images, including product and ambient photos. By adopting an atomization strategy, in which you identify, calibrate, then tag each photo, you can implement generative technology (usually AI) to create a link between two photos. These photos are assembled to create a new visual. If your product is a pair of round sunglasses, and you are targeting an audience of urban women, you can generate a visual displaying these round sunglasses in an urban setting. The final image is assembled using existing content, which is intended to be used this way.
Atomization isn’t just about reusing content, it’s also a means of creating personalized content.
Digital Asset Management is a major advantage for reusing content
Like Content Snacking, Atomic Content can be integrated into your production workflow using DAM. Here too, DAM provides all the functions you need: indexing and tagging content, either manually or using AI-based automatic keyword generation, editing, merging assets (foreground and background), multi-format publications, and more.
Note that indexing and tagging content are critical in this strategy. This is what allows visual content to be properly documented so that they can be identified and reused later. DAM relies on this metadata to connect the right elements together.
Once your assets are correctly indexed and prepared in your DAM database, generating a special set of images for Black Friday, for example, becomes a mostly automatic process. Using existing, organized micro-content, you can replace all the product photos in your e-Commerce website with branded Black Friday images, for example, with just a few clicks.
With Atomic Content and Content Snacking, DAM demonstrates that it is more than just a content management tool: it helps you create engaging, personalized experiences. Digital Asset Management supports marketing teams in optimizing their content lifespans and industrializing content recycling.
Whether you opt for an “atomic” or “snacking” approach, DAM is there for you.
