How A Crisis shines a light on Marketing Content Creation

COVID-19, How A Crisis shines a light on Marketing Content Creation

The current Covid-19 situation is forcing every organisation to review its marketing and advertising plans. What has started as an urgent short-term challenge with specific, but known business impacts, is likely to become the start of something much harder to forecast in the longer term.  

Before this crisis, every marketing or procurement team’s goal was finding better, cheaper and faster ways of getting their content produced. What about now? With markets being so volatile, brand owners must take so much more care over their content. That might include immediate and large reductions in media spend, or switching to a softer, less direct mix of messaging and channels. The bottom line is that for a brand to survive in a new uncertain future they still need to be visible and relevant to their customers. 

The best are already prepared with marketing technology at the centre of content creation, supported by clear process and high user adoption. This helps them produce and distribute efficiently to multiple channels with agility, consistency and speed with clear ROI benefits. 

So what are the keys to make this work? We thought this would be a great time to share some industry insight and provide support in these unprecedented times. 

• Think about what you will be using the content for even before it’s been created by your agency partners.  Thinking this through early in the process saves so much time and money down the line.  The deliverables list must be comprehensive for large scale production in a wide variety of sizes and formats. 
• Creative agencies need to deliver content in formats and specifications that are optimal for large scale production and “re-usability” across different channels. Prevents wasted time and money later on. 

• Keep your content modular and avoid duplication. Individual assets that form part of an artwork for example (e.g. the key visual, the logo, the packshot) can be used for different purposes. Make sure those are available independently and establish rules and dependencies for greater creative control.  Asset management with modular content can deliver so much more to the organisation for the same initial investment. 
• Leverage your marketing technologies (like a DAM and a PIM) and their capabilities to distribute your content with the right information to the right audience: IP rights information, specs, as well as the type of channels the content is suited for. Technology is key as it can deliver assets and the necessary accompanying information at scale to your marketing eco-system. 
• Search in the DAM first. Incentivise your marketers and your production partner to search for available assets and/or assets that could be re-utilised to create new and more relevant content. 
• Leverage your partners capabilities to create new content from existing. This will lead to a more cost-effective production of your content globally, across all markets and delivered to all channels. 

The way to approach effective content creation isn’t any different today than it always has been. The Covid-19 crisis has simply made best practice even more important! 

Technology is a wonderful starting point as the home for all content, but that counts for very little if the right people cannot find the right content quickly when they need it. So, those companies who have been able to marry the people and process to the technology will be in the best position to thrive in the difficult times.

ICP has been supporting its clients for many years since the early days of DAM, and we are now seeing more interest than ever in how to drive up user adoption and have a well governed approach to asset management. It will help both in the good times and the difficult times!