The 2017 Content Management & Strategy Survey produced by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) has exposed two of the biggest challenges facing content marketers. The first challenge is access to the right technology tools. The second is then using those tools to their full potential. Marketing professionals mostly likely face either a technology gap in their organization, a training gap on the technology available to them, or worse, both!
Do you feel your organization has the right technology in place to manage its content marketing efforts?
The Technology Gap
Consider this – according to the CMI survey, only 18% of respondents feel their organization has the right technology in place to manage their content marketing efforts. Translate that into brands and that means that fewer than 1 in 5 brands are using the right technology. If you read the right technology to mean tools that work (and work well), then the major pain point for the 82% of respondents who don’t feel they have the right technology in place is a loss of time.
The Need for DAM
One of the most important tools that content marketers are lacking is digital asset management (DAM). CMI reports that only 26% of respondents use a DAM to manage content marketing efforts. This is similar to 2015 research by the CMO Council and Libris by PhotoShelter, which found that 27 percent of senior marketing executives have a process in place to aggregate, organize and manage the visual assets being used across marketing (and even non-marketing) teams.
Which types of digital content marketing technologies does your organization use to manage its content marketing efforts?
Digital asset management tools are built to help your team find the right content at the right time (and 46% of survey respondents say they always prioritize providing the right content to the right person at the right time).
If you use sub-par technology or a technology built for another purpose, like an email marketing platform or a content management system, to manage your digital assets, you could be sacrificing data, searchability, time and even the goodwill of your peers (who are frustrated from wasting time searching for assets).
Our estimates suggest that the average content marketing team may waste around 667 hours per year when they’re not using a digital asset management system. CMI’s 1 in 4 respondents who use a DAM are saving this time.
Where Is That File?
In addition to the general lack of DAM technology in content marketing, only 14% of respondents said their organizations have any kind of taxonomies. For a content marketer, this translates to the all-too-familiar question, “where is that file saved?”
Without a proper taxonomy (for example, keywords embedded in your files), you run the risk of not being able to find a file when you need to use it, recreating work you’ve already done, and incorrectly crediting the photographer, videographer or author of the content. Now we are talking about a loss of time and a loss of data.
What are your greatest educational needs regarding managing content?
The Training Gap
But let’s imagine that you feel you do have the right technology in place. It turns out that even if you are using the right technology tools, you probably feel like you are not using them to their full potential.
CMI reports that 45% of respondents say they have technology tools, but aren’t using them to their potential. That means just under half of content marketers feel like they need better training on the tools they already have!
Check out this observation from the survey:
“When respondents were asked about their greatest educational needs regarding managing content, 66% indicated ‘how to better use technology to manage content as a business asset.’”
This means content marketers are facing a serious training gap.
Training can and should come from a few places. Before you even consider what technology to adopt, you have to make sure it is super user-friendly and intuitive. Then, you have to establish a level of introductory training for your colleagues. You can do this through lunch and learns, recorded videos, formal training or gamifying usage. Get creative and encourage them to dive in so they see how the technology can help them early on.
You can provide another level of training for your peers by working with your technology provider. Are they able to send a customer success pro in to help your team? If you are using a technology to help your content marketing, push for your provider to deliver support. After all, the truth is that your technology providers want you to be successful using their tools.
The Takeaway
With only 26% of content marketers using DAM technology, the majority of content marketers are missing a huge opportunity to do their jobs more efficiently. When you consider that visual content – specifically video and images – is going to continue to grow in importance for content marketers in the coming years, teams that are not using DAM technology will be making their workflow much more difficult.
Teams that add DAM to their workflow will save time and money, and ensure that they don’t lose valuable assets, like images, videos and infographics. Teams that close the training gap will go one step further, helping them get the most out of their tools and their content.
Cover image source: 2017 Content Management & Strategy Survey.
