If you’re a great lover of books, you may know that the Library of Congress is the most extensive public library in the world, with over 173 million physical items. Imagine the amount of time and research involved in categorizing and tracking each item in such a collection.

Now consider that 4.6 billion pieces of digital content are created daily. Though a different medium, digital content requires categorization, classification, and storage, much like the physical content of a library. In an increasingly digital age, businesses are rapidly converting to cloud-based SaaS solutions to manage their digital assets and store their content. In 2019, Forbes estimated the value of DAM platforms at over $ 1 billion. A year later, it was $3.88 billion. And the digital asset management (DAM) software market share is forecasted to grow to around $8.2 billion by 2030.

Digital asset management is becoming an essential element of business, bringing many opportunities and benefits. Here are five trends I see emerging in the digital asset management market.

1. Customer experience

Content operations is the heartbeat of digital evolution. You can’t have a successful business without a content operations system that contains, maintains, and organizes your digital assets. As the demand for integrations across e-commerce platforms and social media continues to rise, the need for DAM (digital asset management) as a foundational technology — with its ability to protect and provide cogent brand messaging across multiple channels — grows with it.

Before the pandemic, enterprises spent nearly $20 billion on third party data acquisition tools. The intention was to engage customers with more personalized content, but many customers found the marketing tactic invasive. Now, marketers are looking hard at their overall macro-brand experience as it translates across the customer journey, which means the content strategies businesses employ need to work in concert with their customer strategies.

For content to adequately meet customers where they are at, it must be channel, category, and tech agnostic and adhere to best practices and fundamentals of content operations to get ahead. This is where DAM comes in: DAM can combine valuable intelligence data and first party data to build content models that create frictionless and engaging customer experiences.

 2. Employee experience/Work-life balance 

An astonishing 68% of Americans prefer to be remote in their jobs. The phenomenal success of Airbnb and similar businesses further enable a more-or-less permanent “Work from Anywhere” option for these workers. These facts illustrate that flexibility in the working environment has fast become a central value for many people. DAM supports both organizational efficiency and individual autonomy. The cloud-based structure has no geographic boundaries, allowing not only easy access by users at all levels of the organization but also advanced collaboration tools for every stage of the content lifecycle.

DAM enables a productive workflow by streamlining the search for—and distribution of—a company’s most critical digital assets. By reducing time-consuming, menial, and (formerly) in-person “busy work,” DAMS will provide greater flexibility in how and where employees focus their energies. Self-management and self-registration, other standard DAM features, will also increase a sense of autonomy and ease of use.

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3. Generative AI

During the early phases of digitization, the main goal was to capture and store data — not unlike a static library. But as technology has evolved, digitization has become far more dynamic. Cloud-based systems allow nimble interaction between systems, unlocking myriad uses for acquired data, including specialized content creation. Forrester predicts that at least 10% of businesses will spend money on AI-supported digital content creation in 2023 to keep up with consumer appetite for tailored content.

GPT-3 is an example of the ways AI is revolutionizing the content world. While not perfect, it’s a game-changer for content creators and displays some of the immense potential inherent in AI. In the DAM space, automated decision making is already well underway. AI enriches search functionality to understand and respond to user queries in a more human way. Continued automation assists in asset tagging, a core aspect of content personalization, and reduces manual/rote tasks. Anomaly detection, actionable insights, improvements in the accuracy of data classification, improving voice recognition to understand context and intent, and user controllable alerting are a few other digitization-adjacent benefits DAM will provide organizations.

4. Sustainability 

Yvon Chouinard recently decided to transfer ownership of Patagonia (a company valued at roughly $3 billion) to a nonprofit organization. The decision ensures that all the company’s profits go toward combating climate change and serves as a clarion call to start taking the question of sustainability seriously, something that will look different depending on the industry. The former CEO’s actions have prompted necessary conversations that have moved past the green implications behind the word “sustainability” to talks about how organizations can implement structural changes to get more intentional with the content they plan, produce, manage, distribute, analyze, and archive.

DAM’s modularized approach reduces wasteful and unhelpful content and allows core messaging to resonate in an organized, concentric manner, as opposed to the helter-skelter “random acts of marketing” approach. The proper organization and use of data is key to reducing wasted time and content, and it also allows for more targeted marketing. Brands that not only talk the talk of sustainability but actually implement it in their content operations approach will reap the benefits of increased customer trust and more effective processes.

5. Composability

Composability has been around for a while, but it’s become top-of-mind as it relates to foundational software. Brands are streamlining content production through tech stacks primed for business fit in order to operate at max efficiency, maintain flexibility, and ensure cohesive experiences for users. Content is created, dispersed, measured, and reused within a connective framework that pulls from a variety of sources. This best-of-breed, or best-for-me, approach to building composable content stacks is increasingly being adopted rather than going with all-in-one monolithic platform vendors.

Going forward, cloud-native software will continue to become more malleable, and data will become more portable, enabling businesses and individuals to easily compose tailored solutions on the fly. Businesses with consistent messaging — website, SEO, email, social, digital ads, community management, and reputation management — will always come out ahead of their competition. DAMs can act as a single repository of truth from which organizations can build consistent brand messaging and styling. They’ll provide customizable workflows that make collaboration efficient and effective. Approval workflows, brand guidelines, and automated version control tools will keep work streamlined and updated, reinforcing an external perception of integration, consistency, and identity.

DAMs: Providing the methods that impart meaningful messaging

Not long ago, libraries were the first stop in one’s quest for information and inspiration. Now, our archival systems have expanded beyond the limits of physical space. Instead of hundreds of millions of miles in shelving materials (as in the case of the Library of Congress!), DAMs can provide a lightweight, dynamic archival system for businesses with digital assets. Properly used digital assets enable positive user experiences, consistent brand messaging on a global scale, and the responsible creation and distribution of content.

As our landscape becomes increasingly connected on the digital plane, only our lack of proper methods will hold us back from making the most of the opportunities presented through technology. DAMs will create the methods, creative teams will create the meaning, and together they’ll create the fine-tuned messaging that separates good businesses from excellent ones.

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