As the number of charitable organizations and causes they support continue to grow, the nonprofit sector is becoming more competitive and complex year after year. With each organization striving to increase the impact of their investments, attract new donors and recruit volunteers, outreach strategies are becoming more sophisticated and engaging—with a heavy emphasis on digital.

Moreover, as a nonprofit organization, maintaining a significant digital presence is now more crucial than ever to effectively drive funding and highlight the importance of its cause. Doing this well requires a strong toolbelt of compelling images, videos, and content to help potential donors connect with the brand. Since content is only valuable if it can be found and used, to make the most of it, it’s important to properly manage it. For this reason, many nonprofit organizations have begun looking into a digital asset management (DAM) solution.

What is a DAM?

Digital asset management (DAM) systems have emerged as a solution for nonprofit organizations, allowing them to better manage and distribute their content and establish a solid foundation for their long-term digital strategy. A DAM system not only helps nonprofit organizations manage, organize, share, and distribute their digital assets from within one central library — it improves productivity while increasing the ROI of all content produced.

Most nonprofit organizations that do not have a DAM in place struggle with these similar issues:

• Discoverability: Organizations are storing marketing material in multiple locations, making it extremely difficult to find what they need,
• Accessibility: accessing and finding assets can be cumbersome and lengthy,
• Workflow: The process of finding assets is taking up way too much time, which is slowing down projects as well as the execution of outreach campaigns, and
• Security: They don’t feel their assets are truly secure.

Benefits of DAM for Nonprofit

All the common pain points for nonprofit organizations can be solved with the right DAM in place, on top of the several additional benefits it has to offer. The top 4 benefits organizations gain from implementing a DAM include being able to:

1. Better leverage your brand,
2. Empower your affiliates and drive collaboration,
3. Increase the impact of your content, and
4. Preserve your legacy.

Let’s dive into each benefit in more detail.

1. Better Leverage Your Brand

Maintaining a strong brand and ensuring everyone is using consistent messaging can be challenging when multiple departments and affiliates are all creating marketing collateral for various campaigns. A DAM ensures that all users are equipped with marketing materials that are on-brand and up to date, drawing from one central library. This allows your organization to ensure consistent branding as all assets become visually aligned with a DAM—no more outdated logos!

2. Empower Your Affiliates and Drive Collaboration

With a DAM, users can easily find, download, and share approved work-in-progress and finalized assets. Additionally, marketing material and content will be readily available when anyone is organizing events, launching campaigns or running educational initiatives. Availability in the cloud also ensures that even users in the most remote areas, with no access to IT, can easily access those resources or upload their own materials.

3. Increase the Impact of Your Content

Whether it’s creating new marketing collateral for donor campaigns, fundraiser events or recruitment material, a DAM ensures you’re getting the most from your marketing materials and the money spent creating them. By having a library that is organized and easily accessible, your content’s lifespan gets extended and maximizes its value. Additionally, you can organize marketing content by campaign name, region, years, etc., allowing users anywhere to easily find and re-use visuals, content, and media.

4. Preserve Your Legacy

A DAM allows nonprofit organizations to maintain and preserve their growing library of fundraising collateral and historic content, enabling it to be used for future initiatives, educational events, anniversary marketing campaigns and more. These assets help preserve the memories that are important for connecting with donors and engaging volunteers.

The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI)

JGI came to MediaValet with the challenge of preserving Dr. Jane Goodall’s 60-year legacy and distributing marketing imagery to various global chapters and stakeholders. The advanced functionality allowed them to extend the use of the DAM to areas they hadn’t even dreamt of—scientific research. The Jane Goodall Institute’s top three benefits from using a DAM include:

1. Marketing Material Distribution: Storing all assets used for storytelling purposes—the photos and videos from years of JGI initiatives.
2. Scientific Research Distribution: Using the platform to facilitate scientific research and discovery—the 60 years of handwritten notes, field videos, etc., used to help researchers and scientists around the world understand great apes.
3. Organizing Precious Archival Assets: Creating a digital home for the ongoing archiving of Jane’s global outreach past and present. A place where they gather and transcribe Jane’s digital recordings from throughout the years, making them easily searchable and shareable.

Read the Jane Goodall Institute’s DAM Story, here.

Get Ahead with DAM

A DAM helps nonprofits manage their marketing collateral, preserve their brand history, and improve collaboration with both staff and affiliates. For more details on how MediaValet supports organizations in the nonprofit sector, check out DAM for Nonprofits, here.

This blog post was originally posted in February 2019 and has been updated.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.

With the recent acceleration in the number of companies shifting to eCommerce, several organizations have already invested time and effort into their big transition. Many of them, however, are unfamiliar with how to do it well and so we’ve put together some guidelines to follow throughout the process. Ground zero is ensuring your eCommerce site is packed with high-quality, accurate product imagery, but that’s not all.

Here, we’ll outline the seven best practices for managing your eCommerce images:

1. Only use high-quality images,
2. Use singular images of the product,
3. Make sure your images are accurate,
4. Show multiple angles and illustrations,
5. Use a white background,
6. Incorporate lifestyle imagery, and
7. Optimize for mobile.

These practices will help to build brand loyalty, boost sales and drive revenue. Let us discuss each step in more detail below.

1. Only Use High-Quality Images

Online shoppers want to see the most detail possible, but they also want the images to load fast. When choosing your image resolution, consider the page speed—if it’s three seconds or more the bounce rate dramatically increases. It’s been recommended that anything above 800kb is pushing the limit, and you’ll likely lose visitors. A good rule of thumb is to aim for the smallest file size that still provides optimal image size and resolution.

The optimal page size depends on the kind of site you have, and typically, eCommerce platforms have product photo size restrictions. According to Verdure Digital, here are the restrictions on the most popular eCommerce platforms:

• Shopify: Image sizes of 1024×1024 are recommended but can support up to 2048×2048.
• Wix: Two formats are recommended. 200×200 for gallery images, and 400×400 for product pages. Photos require an image ratio of 4:3.
• Magento: Three image sizes are supported. A 50×50 thumbnail for purchasing charts, thumbnail galleries, etc.; 370×370 for listings on new product sections and category and search results pages; 1000×1000 for zoom images.
• LightSpeed: Maximum image size of 512×512. Images above this size are automatically reduced.

2. Use Singular Images of The Product

Online shoppers want to see detailed images of the stand-alone product without being distracted by other items. Ensure you include singular images of each product individually before introducing lifestyle photos incorporating multiple items.

While you want to show products in context, it’s also important to have standalone images of the key product so visitors can analyze whether it meets their needs. This can also prevent confusion about whether something is sold as a single item or a set (for example, a swimsuit top and bottom, sold as separates).

3. Ensure Your Images are Accurate

To ensure that you’re accurately depicting your products to customers, it’s recommended to do the primary photoshoot indoors with professional lighting that won’t impact the true colors of the product. Avoid doing too much post-production work or applying filters to the photos. Customers want a “what you see is what you get” approach to online shopping, which builds consumer confidence.

4. Show Multiple Angles and Illustrations

A benefit of shopping in-store is being able to see the product from all perspectives and angles to ensure you’re getting what you want. When you move to eCommerce, you want to give customers the same confidence as if they were in the store, which is why the photos you choose to demonstrate your product are so important.

BlueBoard suggests using at least four different product photos, although each platform allows different numbers of images. They also recommend to use a combination of the following product images on your site:

• Main image
• Detail shots
• Features and benefits
• The scale of product, and more

You can read about each in more detail in their post here.

5. Use a White Background

While it can be tempting to use product imagery as an opportunity to represent your brand, it’s essential to use a neutral background to ensure you’re appropriately demonstrating your product. You’d be surprised at how much background colors can impact the perceived color of a product.

Using a white background minimizes distractions and ensures your product’s colors pop. Plus, many websites require white backgrounds.

6. Incorporate Lifestyle Imagery

Along with your product-only main imagery, incorporate lifestyle images of people using your products. This helps to create a narrative around the product, and brand, which in turn can better increase understanding of your target market and encourage customers to imagine themselves in your products. For example, if you sell something like skis, you can use lifestyle imagery to demonstrate if the product is meant for leisure or extreme sports.

7. Optimize for Mobile

It’s been reported that nearly half of consumers shop more on their mobile devices than they do in person. With that knowledge, make sure that customers on your eCommerce mobile site are seeing optimized images.

Ensure to account for different screen sizes when creating your mobile platform as sometimes photos can be too small/large or disoriented from webversion to mobile, not to mention that customers need to be able to see the products clearly and ideally zoom in or out on their screen.

Apply What You (Now) Know

In today’s environment, it’s not enough to just have an eCommerce site – you need to provide a digital experience. Ensuring your eCommerce images are in tip-top shape to optimize visitor experience and increase purchase confidence is the first-step in having a successful eCommerce improvement.

Once your images are in good shape, there are other media types that can help you sell your products online even better. In certain instances, 3D models may be super helpful to depict product information and context. Video content can also help give a more in-depth look at your products and the user experience—building on the product narrative we previously mentioned.

Give Your eCommerce Images a Safe Home

High-quality product images and engaging content are essential for you to build brand trust and drive purchase-ready behavior online. Digital asset management (DAM) enables you to better manage and distribute product and brand material for online customer touchpoints like eCommerce and social media. Using a DAM like MediaValet, you can leverage AI for asset tagging and discovery to organize and search for product visuals using SKUs, product IDs, colors, and custom metadata.

Take it a step further with a PIM integration

Do you already have an existing PIM? A DAM can tie right in and add to the benefits that you know and love. Learn more about MediaValet’s integration with PIM here.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.

The travel industry took one of the biggest hits of any business sector during the COVID-19 pandemic as the world was almost completely shut down. To put it into perspective, “in March 2020, U.S. air passenger travel decreased by 90%, and in April 2020, U.S. hotel occupancy was at just 25%” (Deloitte): a shocking fall from grace for an industry that had been steadily growing for a number of years.

Now, after the perspective on traveling has been drastically changed, tourism marketers are faced with the challenge of bouncing back and enticing people to get out and explore the world. While the good news is that people are, mostly, ready to travel again, the hard part is that the marketing environment has changed—probably forever. The expectations of travelers, how they book their trips, and how they physically travel has shifted—meaning travel and tourism marketing campaigns and strategies need to shift as well.

In this post, we share the 4 most important marketing trends to watch for in 2022, as the travel industry makes its long-awaited, substantial comeback.

Top 4 Tourism Marketing Trends in 2022

While there are many emerging marketing trends in this complex, “post-pandemic” world, there are four, in particular, that stand out:

1. Shifted Expectations

One thing that the pandemic drilled into everyone’s minds is that anything can get canceled—anytime. Even your big vacation plans, and with the new “anything can happen” mentality, travelers don’t want to be locked into their purchases. Flexible cancellation policies will be the new norm, and marketers need to be aware of travelers’ hesitancy and even anxiety. In fact, “50% of travelers consider flexible cancellation policies as a top factor in their 2022 travel decisions” (Evolve). Offering low-stress, free cancellation, and excellent customer service in dealing with changes or canceled plans will go a long way in 2022 and beyond.

2. Video Marketing and Live Streaming

Video marketing has blown up in the last few years, and that growth isn’t expected to slow down any time soon. In addition to video production, many brands have tapped into the power of live streaming to show off the visitor experience. Live video costs less to produce, and it offers a more authentic way to show off a hotel, destination, or experience compared to a polished, edited video project. Expect to see both edited video marketing and live streaming more and more, as big brands like Airbnb have already seen success in incorporating it into their marketing campaigns.

3. Mobile is Still Growing, Thanks to the Pandemic

According to a survey by Statista, “70 percent of responding internet users worldwide were using their smartphones or mobile phones more as a direct result of the coronavirus outbreak.” Basically, people are more glued to their phones than ever before. And lucky for the travel industry, it’s been reported that nearly half of the smartphone users in the U.S. are completely comfortable researching, planning, and booking their travel plans entirely on a mobile device (Google).

What does this mean for marketers? That the mobile experience for your brand must be stellar. So much of your audience is researching your brand on their smartphone. Invest in the best mobile experience you can offer. Whether that’s improving the direct booking website or developing an app for your brand, it matters—a lot—how travelers can interact with you via their mobile device.

4. Virtual Reality

Virtual reality and tourism marketing make complete sense, and it’s a tool that’s been growing in popularity for a few years. Why not be able to give potential buyers a virtual experience to represent your destination? With VR you can fully immerse them in your experience or destination, helping to entice them to book IRL. VR is going to become a big part of the marketing strategies of many prominent travel and hospitality brands.

These four marketing trends to watch for in 2022 prove that the need to create and distribute digital content is not slowing down. In fact, it’s speeding up. To ensure that your brand is getting ROI on all the digital assets being produced for marketing campaigns, virtual reality tools, app development, and more, you may need help from a professional digital asset management (DAM) partner.

What Exactly is a DAM?

A digital asset management (DAM) system helps tourism marketers manage, organize, share, and distribute digital assets all from within one central library. It improves productivity and increases the ROI of content and creative programs. Additionally, it helps tourism and travel brands improve their creative production process and efficiently manage and launch campaigns.

Investing in a cloud-based DAM can benefit your brand in several significant ways. Some examples include:

1. Access for remote teams: With the DAM, your marketing team can work collaboratively and efficiently, from anywhere.
2. Less time searching for assets: Kick-start your creative campaigns, stay on track, and launch on time by always knowing where your digital assets are located.
3. Tailored library access: Give partners and contractors access to the DAM for only the assets they need, helping projects flow more smoothly.
4. Improved brand consistency: Having one single source of truth for all your on-brand digital assets helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page, with only approved assets being used in high-stakes marketing campaigns—and everywhere else.

Ready to Get Started?

Getting a DAM in place is a smart move as you prepare to create more and more digital content. Not only does it help speed up projects and improve workflow, but it also ensures you are getting ROI on the valuable brand assets that are being created. To see more specifically how a DAM works for tourism marketers, check out a DAM demo.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.

StrikeTru is an expert commerce and data service provider. From content to creative to tools, they offer a suite of services to help brands and retailers modernize commerce environments. StrikeTru brings together commerce and data tools expertise, high-touch implementations, proprietary accelerators, and comprehensive product data services to fast-track superior digital experiences.

Twenty years ago, having an eCommerce store meant starting a website with basic product descriptions & one-dimensional stock imagery. That simply won’t cut it in 2022. Online firms looking to boost their digital commerce experience recognize this necessity for modern Product Information Management (PIM) solutions that can streamline product content management from end to end.

Today, ‘eCommerce experiences need to be frictionless for the digital shopper. Think, of channel-agnostic shopping, personalization, rich messaging, and highly engaging customer experiences. This is particularly important in the face of eCommerce juggernauts, like Amazon, making every other e-retailer play catch up.

Information-hungry consumers are searching for relevant, accurate, and engaging product information before and after making purchase decisions. According to Forrester, nearly one in five (18%) of surveyed US online adults returned an item bought online because the description was inaccurate. So, what do enterprises need to do to disseminate the right product data at the right time across all channels?

In this blog post, we will help you understand why PIM is foundational to creating better digital experiences, why businesses should care about a PIM solution, and how PIM allows you to be agile in a fast-evolving digital world.

What is Product Information Management (PIM)?

A Product Information Management system or PIM is a repository to aggregate, manage, enrich, and distribute product information across marketing and sales channels to help drive leads and conversions, build customer trust & loyalty through better commerce experiences, and automate mundane but necessary data management tasks.

Why Should Businesses Care About Implementing PIM in Their eCommerce Mar-Tech Stack?

PIM solutions are relevant to business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) Retailers, Manufacturers & Distributors that sell products through multiple sales channels across a wide range of industries. The use of PIM is mostly influenced by a company’s volume, velocity, & complexity of product data operations.

Let’s look at some critical PIM readiness questions:

1. Are your current product information management (PIM) tools & processes:
   • Delaying product launches and ongoing updates?
   • Publishing inaccurate or out-of-date content online, resulting in a high return rate?
   • Duplicating product data efforts across the company?
   • Taking up too much of your employees’ time, slowing them down?
   • Making employees and customers work harder to search and select products?
   • Difficult to scale, and costing your organization revenue and customers?
   • Do you care about leveraging endless aisle capabilities?
2. Is poor product visibility impacting sales?
3. Are employees spending too much time ensuring product data is properly formatted for multiple eCommerce channels & marketplaces?
4. Is your business able to turn around quickly in response to changing customer & market trends?
5. Does personalization & localization matter to your business?

If you found yourself relating to all these scenarios, considering a PIM early on is a good place to start.

What Are Some Benefits and Features of a PIM Solution?

Automation

Growing channel requirements for tailored data and rich media have proliferated the need for a PIM in marketing tech stacks. The bigger your catalog, the more complex your product data. PIM can save organizations immense amounts of time typically spent on product content creation, collaboration, and enrichment; optimization for multiple marketing & sales channels, and even on getting that data out to search and eCommerce platforms, marketplaces & other distribution channels.

As your business expands to sell more products, managing all that data efficiently and fast becomes challenging without a PIM tool. With PIM, you get a centralized repository of clean and structured product data including:

• Digital assets,
• Integration with data sources and destinations,
• Auto enrichment and bulk data management features,
• Product categorization, and
• Filtering mechanisms.

All these features make managing product data totally user-friendly and, most importantly, help alleviate manual and repetitive tasks.

MediaValet Note: To further optimize your product data, ask your customer whether the information and content are sufficient and adequate. A short feedback form on your product pages helps you get your customer’s perspective on the information you provide. Meaning you can improve based on what your customer want and need. Using a feedback tool like @mopinion can help you save even more time and lets you focus on the most important content.

Authoritative Product Data

Studies have shown that product data is recognized as a key driver of successful commerce experiences. Using an ERP, excel spreadsheets, a home-grown database, or eCommerce platforms to ensure ‘completeness’ of product data can end up becoming a recipe for bad customer experiences – product listings with no pictures, poor titles and descriptions, a poor brand image, low SEO, lower conversion and a high return rate.

Without a PIM system, it can take organizations months to classify and transform product data into multiple language, channel, and region-specific formats. A PIM tool radically simplifies product information management efforts on a daily basis. It also acts as a productivity tool by quickly identifying missing information across entire catalogs and fixing gaps that make it easy for customers to find what they need.

Collaboration

A PIM helps create a collaborative way of working for all the stakeholders involved in the business that use product information. Merchandising, eCommerce, mobile, print, creative studio, content teams, and customer service – everyone aligned on a solid foundation for product data that is always clean and accessible.

PIM makes marketing efforts customer-centric by bringing people, data, assets, analytics & governance together. Marketing teams won’t work in silos anymore but will leverage collaborative workflows sourced from one, single source of truth for all product information. All of this means:

• Less duplication,
• Less manual work,
• Streamlined processes,
• Increased productivity,
• More digitization, more flexibility,
• Fewer errors,
• Product data that is always up to date,
• Faster time to market, and
• Increase revenue & conversion rates.

Omnichannel Unlocked

To the question: How can businesses seize the potential of omnichannel strategies in order to stay ahead of the competition? The answer is PIM. It can enable a seamless and personalized cross-channel experience for the digital customer – over and over again. Customers today need information at their fingertips to make brand decisions easily.

Creating these meaningful experiences means delivering consistent product information, delivered in context, on the channel of the customer’s choosing. Moreover, according to Forrester, PIM solutions pair well with most of the ‘acronym alphabet soup’ within the eCommerce tech stack, especially Digital Asset Management (DAM), together forming the power couple for omnichannel content strategy.

True personalization can be achieved when companies reorient themselves away from siloed content creation and move towards an agile approach to data management. How does PIM figure in all this? PIM capabilities have a domino effect on all success metric-driving components in an eCommerce infrastructure that have a conclusive impact on bottom lines.

Convinced you need a PIM?

Awareness around best-of-breed PIM solutions is growing steadily, as more and more companies are deploying PIM for digital commerce, and as more affordable PIM solutions are becoming available in the market. Learn more about how to take control of omnichannel product content with a fully integrated PIM & DAM solution here.

Events are very important for the success of your marketing team and ultimately, your entire organization. In fact, in a recent survey from Bizzabo, 95% of respondents shared that events can have a major impact on achieving their business goals. But, while the importance of events is evident, they can be a major undertaking for the events team managing an excess of deliverables and deadlines.

From booth decor and giveaways to PowerPoint slides and print materials, events require a large amount of content – which can be incredibly difficult to properly manage. With this in mind, a digital asset management system (DAM) can be extremely valuable for keeping your content organized while planning and executing events.

Throughout this post, we will discuss how using a DAM can significantly improve the efficiency of your event planning and boost the overall performance of your events from start to finish.

Using a DAM for Event Planning

As mentioned, organizing events can be a demanding job – pulling you in many directions at once. A DAM can be used during the planning process to help to ensure that all digital assets are in one place and accessible from anywhere; keeping you organized and ready to go.

Here are three major ways that DAM helps event organizers stay on track:

1. Access Event Files in Seconds

Breathe easy knowing that all your print-ready files for materials like brochures, order forms, business cards, etc., are accessible in seconds, from anywhere. Having easy access to already-produced collateral means you have the option to reuse these materials or quickly update them to reflect any new information — saving time and effort for the creative department.

2. Quickly Convert Files to the Required Format

A DAM enables you to convert your digital assets to other file types on-the-fly. This enables you to provide event organizers with logos, headshots, and other sponsor material in the specific size and format needed. For example, if your logo is stored in the DAM as a 1000-pixel PNG, you could share it as a 500-pixel JPG directly from within the platform, without going through the hassle of converting it yourself or making requests to your design team. You can even crop images directly within the platform – perfect for when organizers need a headshot with a 1:1 ratio.

3. Share Large Files with Ease

With a DAM, you no longer have to worry about getting large files to event coordinators, printers, or agencies before the event. This is because all large-format videos, print files, graphics, etc., can all be shared with ease from within the DAM. With multiple sharing options, ranging from a download link for an email to fully-branded Branded Portals, a DAM offers sharing options that fit any situation. Additionally, if you’re managing your own event, you can add and categorize sponsor content within the DAM to keep it organized.

Learn how Monumental Sports & Entertainment uses MediaValet’s Branded Portals to enable the game presentation team with in-arena content.

Using a DAM After an Event

Once events are over, there’s still work to do. A DAM becomes very useful during post-event activities, such as following up with attendees and archiving files to be referenced in the future. When event-specific digital assets are appropriately stored and organized, it allows for the materials to be discoverable for years to come, extending their life and opening the possibility for re-use.

A DAM helps post-event activities in three big ways:

1. Store Media from the Event

After an event, all the digital media pieces that support the event can be organized and managed within the DAM. Materials created during the event, such as day-of photography and recorded sessions (both in-person or online) can be added to the DAM, where they’ll be tagged and transcribed. You can also store final PowerPoint presentations, to be referenced and repurposed for future projects or events, not to mention, the DAM metadata and tagging help this media to be super easy to find in the future.

2. Share Follow-Up Content with Others

Once everything is organized in the DAM, you can share it with attendees. This means that as a host, you can share day-of photos and presentations from the event with others and as a sponsor of another event, you’re able to share follow-up content to entice leads and further engage those you spoke with. Additionally, using Branded Portals can help to share your content in an attractive, on-brand microsite — leaving an even better impression on clients and sponsors.

3. Organize Content for Future Reference

With a DAM, you can create specific categories to store all content that was used and created for a single event. This includes which signage decorated your booth, which content was used, which presentations were performed, and more. Taking advantage of this feature allows for a holistic view of each event’s related content and allows you to weigh on how each feature contributed to the overall event performance. In other words, when your content is categorized this way, it enables you to better analyze the event so you can make more informed decisions in future event planning. Additionally, you’re able to reference the complete suite of event content years from now by referencing the category, regardless of if you were involved in the original event (or new to the company entirely).

Learn how ACAMS plans to use DAM and Audio/Video Intelligence to manage hundreds of hours of tradeshow videos.

DAM Makes Your Events Better

A DAM makes your events better by providing one central location for all your event content to be organized, managed, and stored. In a nutshell, a DAM helps you:

• Deliver content more easily to partners,
• Track content use across events,
• Preserve event assets for re-use, and
• Provide customers with a better post-event experience.

All in all, a DAM helps your events to run as smoothly as possible and ensures you achieve better overall results—from attendee satisfaction to developing positive relationships with sponsors and future clients. Are you ready to optimize the performance of your events with a DAM? To learn more about how a DAM can help you make the most out of your events, book a demo today!

“This time it will be different.”

You’ve set your major milestones, allocated tasks efficiently across your team, and made tweaks to address any hiccups you experienced during prior projects. It should be smooth sailing from here. Yet time and time again, bottlenecks and unexpected circumstances cause your team to miss deadlines. It’s a common problem, so much so, that a study done by PMI found that only 49% of organizations across the United States complete their major projects on time.

There are plenty of project management templates available to help you get started with any given project. With this post, however, we wanted to share some out-of-the-box tips, specifically to address working with your team. Here are 4 of our top tips to help your team meet deadlines:

1. Set Expectations for Communication

While there’s no doubt that it’s important to communicate with your team, it’s equally as important to ensure you set clear expectations for how and when you communicate. This can include who to contact, what tools to use and the various milestones to notify on.

For example, with a project management system, you can set expectations for when someone receives the final edits of campaign photographs, ensuring they attach them to a new task and assign it to the appropriate designer.

The impact of this is two-fold:

1. It prevents your employees from disrupting each other’s workflows. While sometimes talking in person is easier, it can often be more disruptive than other forms of communication. A study performed by the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that as little as one minute of interruption can wipe your short-term memory, halting your entire work process. When communication is left to each person’s discretion it can cause over-communication, with teammates disrupting each other’s creative flow.
2. It ensures that everyone remains accountable to each other. 29% of US workers stated that accountability was their team’s largest obstacle to achieving success. When communication expectations are set, it reduces the possibility of a “he said, she said” about who’s to blame if the project goes sideways – everyone is on the same page about where, when, and how they can expect to be notified.

2. Add a Buffer for Deadlines

Only 37% of teams complete projects on time, more often than not. This is because, despite vigorous planning, small hiccups add up and cause projects to quickly fall behind. When planning out the various milestones and deadlines for a team project, it’s ideal to leave a buffer of 1 or 2 days for smaller milestones and a week for any major deadlines.

A great trick from Cal Newport is to span the deadline for the entire week in your calendar. Adding a visual cue that your deadline is coming up can prevent your team from attending unnecessary meetings and give them the opportunity to re-schedule lower-priority projects. Simply put, it adds visibility to any potential conflicts that could impact meeting that week’s deadline.

3. Plan for When Your Team is Most Efficient

Meetings, while sometimes necessary, can often be the downfall of hitting project deadlines. Office workers are now spending between 5 and 11 hours per week in meetings, 46% more often than the year before.

But, while you can do your best to avoid unnecessary meetings, sometimes they’re inevitable. In these cases, try to schedule meetings when your team is the least productive. Most people know when they’re most productive and when their creativity begins to fade. Examples of this are the “Night Owl” and the “Early Riser”, where someone feels more productive in the morning or at night. Take the time to analyze how each of your team members works, and do your best to find meeting times that cause minimal disruptions, allowing the team to be the most efficient.

4. Ensure Continuity of Projects

When your team is interconnected, it’s easier to stay productive. In fact, a study by the McKinsey Global Institute found that it can improve productivity by 20-25%. To ensure the continuity of your projects, have systems and processes in place to keep all work-in-progress projects available in a central location, rather than stored on someone’s local drive. This ensures that if unexpected circumstances arise, like an unexpected illness or trip, the project can easily be picked up by another team member.

If you’re using a project management solution, finding a central digital asset library (like a DAM or other file storage solution) that connects with it can help streamline continuity. It gives you the ability to quickly publish and pull digital files while staying in your workflow.

Hitting project deadlines can be a challenge, especially when there’s a large team involved. With interdependent tasks and limited time, it takes vigorous planning and fool-proof processes to stay on target.

While these 4 tips may not be the holy grail to nailing your deadlines, we hope they can take you one step further toward improving your existing processes. If you’re looking for some more quick tips, check out our DAM Trends report to learn how a DAM can help boost team productivity.

At the heart of every successful company is a strong, consistent brand. But, building positive brand association from a single voice across touchpoints is no easy task. It requires meticulous planning, thoughtful coordination, and vigorous training to ensure every person understands and is able to represent the brand. Enter the brand manager.

As the guardian of the brand, this role has become crucial for large organizations hoping to achieve brand loyalty. This post will answer the questions:

• What is a brand manager?
• What do they do?
• How do you become a brand manager?
• Who needs a brand manager?

What is a Brand Manager?

According to The Branding Journal, brand managers “are responsible for ensuring that the products, services, and product lines that fall under their brand resonate with current and potential customers.”

The role is ideal for any passionate marketing or creative professional who understands the power of a consistent brand and how important it is to the strength and longevity of a company. Brand managers have the important job of making sure brand assets are readily available and all brand activities are tied together with the same vision in mind. As we’ve learned in other posts, inconsistent brand activations can lead to brand dilution and customer confusion.

What Does a Brand Manager Do?

A huge part of the brand manager’s role is, as expected, in marketing. But, we describe them as “guardians” of the brand, because they protect all areas – from product development to communications. One of the most important jobs of a brand manager is training. They are usually part of the orientation and onboarding for any new hire. Effective brand training creates passionate employees at every level of an organization. Employees who truly understand the brand vision and aim to communicate the brand values in everything they do. Everything an organization does should send the same brand messaging.

Other day-to-day tasks of a brand manager, according to MediaBistro, include:

• Researching the marketplace,
• Analyzing competitive positioning,
• Developing marketing strategies,
• Helping create templates for content,
• Overseeing promotional activities, and
• Evaluating how the brand can appeal to other audiences.

Depending on organizational structure, a brand manager usually works directly under a top-level leadership role in the marketing department. Someone such as the VP or director of marketing, or even directly under a president or founder of a company. Working underneath the brand manager are typically roles like brand, content, or social media coordinator.

How Do You Become a Brand Manager?

According to Indeed, the core skills a brand manager needs to have include:

• Communication,
• Creative strategy,
• Data analysis and
• Flexibility.

As with most marketing roles, brand managers need to have stellar writing skills and endless creativity. Writing for both long-form (think blogs and eBooks), as well as short-form content (think social media posts or ad copy) that conveys the brand voice and tone is a must-have skill. Research and analytical skills are also important to the role, in order to stay up-to-date with marketing trends and technologies, plus being able to define what’s working and what’s not in a branding strategy.

The educational background typically includes a bachelor’s degree in marketing, communications, business, or advertising. It’s also possible to have an education in other areas and still have the skills to do the job. Individuals can undertake training or work their way up through the ranks in a company from an entry-level position. There are some specific certifications out there, including a certified brand manager (CBM) program or certified product manager (CPM) that can help one become a brand manager.

In order to become a brand manager, earning specialized certifications on top of a relevant bachelor’s degree would be a great first step. Pursuing entry-level positions like brand coordinator, communications, PR, content or social media coordinator are a great way to get into the department and work your way up.

Who Needs a Brand Manager?

Almost any kind of company could benefit from employing a brand manager, but it’s not realistic for very small organizations or certain industries. Companies that have creative teams and marketing departments creating a large amount of content definitely need brand managers. Especially if they want to achieve consistency across all departments and within marketing initiatives.

Acting as the guardian of a brand is an extremely important role, as it impacts how the public views a company, what customers think about a company, and how employees understand the vision and goals of the company they work for. Providing easy access to brand assets can be key to better marketing initiatives, cohesive communications efforts, employee satisfaction, and even the longevity of a company. See how MediaValet’s Branded Portals can help brand managers distribute important brand assets.

Have you had photo organizing on the to-do list for months… maybe even years? You’re not alone. This seemingly daunting task is important now more than ever, with studies showing that over 1.4 trillion digital photos alone were expected to be taken in 2020. However, with a few steps, tips and tricks along the way, there’s no reason to put off organizing your photos any longer.

We’ll walk you through the basics on organizing your photos, including:

• Storing
• Locating
• Categorizing
• Naming
• Editing
• Backing Up.

Storing Photos

There are two key factors to consider before you start organizing photos:

1. Where will you store your photos?

Depending on your storage needs (how many photos you have) you’ll likely need either an external hard drive or a cloud-based solution (or both). Check out the storage available on the solution that you want to use to make sure it’s capable of taking on your entire photo collection before you start.

2. Where will I back up my photos?

It’s best practice to not rely on a single storage space for your photos (unless that space has a dedicated back-up feature). Backing up your images is a top priority, as electronics can have a chance of failure.

Locating Photos

To start, it’s worth noting that you probably have print photos you’d like to organize with your digital photos. This means you’ll have to find and digitize these photos. Physically locate all your treasured photos, and reach out to friends or family for additional photos you’d like to have in your collection.

Once the photos are digitized (in as high resolution as possible) it’s time to locate your other digital photos. These steps are time-consuming as they require going through all your devices and hard drives to find the photos you want to organize. Don’t worry, it will be worth the effort!

Here are the steps we recommend:

1. Create a local folder on your desktop.
2. Digitize printed photos and transfer them to the folder.
3. Find photos on your computer(s) and move them to the folder.
4. Go through your mobile devices, copy photos onto your computer and into the folder.
5. Find your photos on the internet (such as email and social media) and save those to the folder.

Categorizing Photos

Folder structure plays a huge role in designing an easy-to-use photo organizer. Organizing photos by the year, month and event name, for example, is a great way to do this. If you can’t remember the year a photo was taken, remember that kind of metadata is stored in the photo file itself. To view this metadata (on a PC), right-click on the image and select “Properties” then “Details” and you’ll see the date it was taken.

Naming Photos

Since it’s not practical to navigate image files using the numeric file names that most cameras generate, you’ll need to rename your photos. This may sound like a lot of work, but in the long run, you’ll be able to find your photos so much easier. You can batch rename photos to save time on this process. Here’s how to rename files on Windows and a Mac.

Editing Photos

Vetting photos is an important step to get the most out of your storage device. During this step, you can delete duplicates or photos that you no longer want to keep. Once you have the collection you’re happy with, taking some time to quickly edit your favourite photos can take them from “great” to “fantastic”. This article from REI shares some helpful tips for editing your photos.

Backing Up Photos

The biggest question most people have is how often they should be backing up their images. One easy rule of thumb to follow is to simply do a new backup every time you add new photos, or when you complete a round of editing or other work. Make sure as soon as you’ve finished organizing your photos for the first time, you immediately do your first backup.

Organizing Photos to Scale

While for individuals, the process above can work well for years to come, many organizations find that they outgrow the type of photo organizing solution. Digital asset management (DAM) solutions, like MediaValet, are built to scale, designed for the purpose of offering a smart, easy way to manage photos that grow with you.

It’s Time to Get Organized!

While photo organization seems like a big undertaking, that’s only the case before you’ve gotten started. Once you have the right photo organization solution in place, it’s easy to stay on top of storing new photos and doing regular backups. Look at it as a necessary project that you’ll thank yourself for in the long run!

Most people have experienced brand dilution at one point or another. You find a brand you know and love, but over time, it grows in a direction that no longer aligns with your needs or values.

As organizations grow, they commonly take on new product lines, trust more people to represent the brand or even acquire other businesses. With this comes a risk that the original promises, values, and quality the brand represented become less and less prominent.

In this post, we cover:

• what is brand dilution?
• what causes brand dilution, and
• examples of brand dilution from susceptible industries.

What is Brand Dilution?

According to Hubspot, “Brand dilution is when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.”

When a company unsuccessfully extends its brand, it dilutes the power of its original brand story and existing associations with the brand. Typically, this happens when a once-strong brand name is attached to a new, lower-quality product or a product that’s extremely different from the core brand (which leads to confusion and the brand losing customer trust).

Another situation where a brand can become diluted is when the company tries to grow and the team becomes too big, too fast. This causes dilution in two ways: the first is that the team is stretched too thin, which results in lower-quality work; the second is that they lose control of the brand due to a lack of brand standards.

What Causes Brand Dilution?

Here, we’ll expand on the top three reasons behind brand dilution:

1. Stretching Capacity Too Thin
2. Introducing Unrelated Services or Products
3. Losing Control of the Brand

1. Stretching Capacity Too Thin

When organizations take on new product lines or services, they can require teams to work beyond their capacities. When teams are stretched thin, standards can be diminished, resulting in a lower-quality message or product. For example, asking a creative team to now work on the messaging for a brand extension along with the existing brand will likely result in disrupted workflows, unreasonable deadlines, and inconsistencies.

2. Introducing Unrelated Services or Products

A company taking on new products or services that don’t align with the existing brand values or messaging is often a recipe for disaster. Not only can it confuse your supporters, but it can also deteriorate the perceived value of the overall brand.

One famous example among marketing professionals is the Cadbury instant mashed potatoes story. In the 1960s, Cadbury launched a product called Smash, which was instant mashed potatoes. The product sold well but at the expense of Cadbury’s overarching reputation as a premium chocolate brand. Due to extreme brand dilution, Cadbury sold Smash in 1986 despite being popular.

3. Losing Control of the Brand

The more people can represent a brand, the higher the risk for dilution of that brand. For example, imagine a brand with complete control of any marketing messaging; then, to grow the brand, they open up offices across the country where dozens or even hundreds of team members can send out messaging on behalf of the brand. This is where the dilution can happen – outdated logos, slogans, or images; activities that are not on-brand; social media messaging that doesn’t match the official vision of the brand. This dilution can be just as harmful as a failed brand extension.

Learn how ACAMS effectively manages a global brand with a MediaValet DAM

Four Ways to Prevent Brand Dilution

While there are several ways to prevent brand dilution, there are 4 we recommend:

1. Prioritize the Core Brand
2. Introduce New Products Slowly
3. Communicate the Brand Clearly
4. Provide Access to Approved Brand Material

1. Prioritize the Core Brand

It is highly important to hold on to earned, loyal customers and fight for the brand associations you’ve worked hard for. Brands should be selective when choosing how and where to expand products or services. Always look at expansion through the lens of protecting the core brand, which is important for the company’s longevity. Ensure that any new ventures won’t contradict the messaging or reputation of the existing brand.

2. Introduce New Products with Care

Provide the necessary space and time to introduce new products with care and thoughtfulness without diminishing quality. New product development and roll-out processes deserve a place in the brand strategy.

3. Communicate the Brand Clearly

Ensure that every person who can represent your brand understands the brand messaging, values and expectations. These brand standards allow these individuals to provide the same messaging and level of service aligned with the brand.

4. Provide Access to Approved Brand Material

Ensure that everyone who is representing the brand is set up for success. This means providing the team with easy access to brand assets, such as logos, images, graphics for social media, etc. It’s vital to standardize brand messaging and collateral as part of an overall brand strategy and make it accessible.

Brand Dilution Examples by Industry

Franchises

The most notorious industry for being impacted by brand dilution in the franchise industry. This is mainly due to the free rein that franchisees are granted when it comes to creating and distributing marketing collateral or messaging. It’s almost impossible to maintain control of the brand when multiple franchise owners are providing different service levels and not adhering to any specific set of brand standards.

Consumer Products

The consumer product industry is typically the most susceptible to failed product extensions. One example would be the documented failure of Colgate Kitchen Entrees—when the well-known oral hygiene brand tried to take advantage of the take-home meal market in 1982. This confusing move to link toothpaste and frozen meals threatened to dilute the brand. It can be hard to evaluate when a brand extension is too far out there—but this one should have been obvious.

Technology

The problem in the tech industry is that things move so fast because of the highly competitive environment that it can cause brands to release new features or products at a speedy rate—too fast to get things right. Tech companies need to be meticulous in planning releases to prevent stretching the team too thin and not doing the brand justice, thus causing brand dilution.

Keep Your Brand in Tip-Top Shape

A robust and well-represented brand starts with consistency. A consistent brand not only improves brand awareness and recognition but it’s also linked to an increase in revenue. A digital asset management solution helps organizations stay on-brand by providing seamless access to your approved, high-quality assets – from anywhere in the world. Learn more about digital asset management and its benefits.

Take the self-guided MediaValet tour to see how a DAM can help you organize your brand assets.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.

Manufacturing is experiencing a shift from traditional marketing methods to tactics that provide clearer visibility in today’s cluttered manufacturing landscape. With so many options for customers to choose from, it’s easy to become lost in the noise.

To combat this, many manufacturers are turning to digital marketing. When done well, digital marketing nurtures potential customers from discovery to sale and can even help in getting future referrals. The most effective way to do this is to map your marketing content to the buyer’s journey, as outlined below.

Here, we share your buyer’s mindset at each stage of the journey and how your marketing can address their needs in four steps;

1. Attract: Turn Strangers into Visitors
2. Convert: Turn Visitors into Leads
3. Close: Turn Leads into Customers
4. Delight: Turn Customers into Promoters

1. Attract: Turn Strangers into Visitors

Very rarely do potential buyers come across your brand by chance, especially when they don’t even know you exist! This is because, the majority of the time, your potential customers aren’t looking to be sold to, rather, they’re looking for solutions to their problems. Purchasing managers and engineers aren’t looking for product lists and prices, they’re looking for buyer’s journeys and solutions for their pain points – and most of the time, they’re looking for these solutions online.

The strategy at this early stage is simply to get found by the right people and help them get to know your brand. You want to prove to your visitors that your company is a trusted source that understands their business, pain points, and goals. It’s the first step towards building important relationships and trust while increasing brand recognition.

2. Convert: Turn Visitors into Leads

Next, is when your prospects are ready to buy. They’ve clearly defined their product needs and are now looking to find the right supplier. And where are they looking? You guessed it – online. A study by Gartner found that when buyers are considering a purchase, 27% of that time is spent independently researching online. That means that over a quarter of your buyers’ decision-making is done before you even meet them. They’re doing their own analysis to understand what’s available to them on the market and make their supplier shortlists.

Your goal here is two-fold: To identify your prospective buyers and ensure that they have enough information to understand if you’ll fit their needs. The strategy at this stage is to show the value of your products and services, and why your brand does it best. It’s important to be accurate and honest about what you can offer – overpromising will only result in a lost sales deal or an unhappy customer down the line.

3. Close: Turn Leads into Customers

The decision-making stage is when most of the one-to-one interactions will happen with the potential buyer. They’ve done their homework, and now they’re ready to commit. This is when they’re looking for hard numbers and comparisons, but don’t forget they’re also making decisions based on things like accessibility, open communication, trust, the value of service, and partnerships—things that make dealing with a manufacturer easy on a daily basis.

This is your time to sell – to reinforce why your brand, services, and products are better than your competitors, and why the buyer should choose you. Don’t be afraid to compare yourself directly against a specific competitor, especially when you have third-party statistics and reviews that are in your favor. The right kinds of sales conversations paired with the right kinds of marketing close deals.

4. Delight: Turn Customers into Promoters

Once the deal is closed, happy clients are in a position to become advocates for your brand. Satisfied customers will not only continue working with your company, but they’ll also be more willing to give referrals, testimonials, and online reviews.

This is the time to nurture relationships carefully and create long-lasting partnerships. After all, it’s less expensive to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. Not only that – a study from Bain & Company found that increasing your customer retention rates by 5%, can also lead to a 25-95% increase in profits! Brand loyalty, retention, and advocacy are the main goals at this phase, so connecting with your clients in a genuine way should be part of the focus.

Adding Value with Content
Creating content that informs, educates, helps solve problems, and even sparks curiosity is vital in driving traffic at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Not only is content extremely valuable to your target market, but it’s also a great way to increase your search engine optimization (SEO) and communicate your product offerings in an engaging way. It is vital, however, that you use the right type of content to address your buyer’s mindset.

In our latest eBook, we do a deep dive into the best type of content to use at each stage of the buyer’s journey. You can download the full version here.