How DAM Streamlines Content Workflows and Helps Deliver Omnichannel Experiences

June 14, 2021 5 minute read

See how New Balance and Fanatics are using digital asset management to support their content production process.

Every year comes with more digital touchpoints, new product content demands, and an increasingly complex omnichannel customer experience. At the same time, e-commerce is growing faster and faster — customers spent $861.12 billion online with U.S. merchants in 2020 (up 44.0% year over year). It’s never been so important to deliver personalized content at every step of the customer journey or so difficult to orchestrate.

While some brands are struggling to keep up, others use a digital asset management (DAM) solution to streamline their content workflow and deliver an omnichannel customer experience. New Balance and Fanatics have both stepped up to the challenge to deliver omnichannel customer experiences that are consistent, positive, and personalized. Here’s how they’re doing it.

New Balance builds consistent brand experiences using DAM technology

With over 470k digital assets (13 TB data) to manage for thousands of products, New Balance relies on its DAM system as a central source of truth to store, manage, and publish its digital assets. They’ve got 2,900 users across 80 roles and 7,000 retailers in 120 countries. Their DAM solution makes it possible to effectively and accurately distribute their content across these teams and get it all to the right channels.

One of New Balance’s most powerful tools is a feature in their DAM software called Portals. Portals give them the ability to share curated bundles of assets for product launches, campaigns, channels, brands, departments, and retailers. Whenever they launch a new running shoe or kick off a global sale, they can create a portal and give their team and partners access to an approved set of assets.

With Portals, they ensure that the right people have access to the latest brand assets and product content to build a consistent omnichannel customer experience across all stores and regions.

Here are a few of the other ways that New Balance supports their omnichannel digital strategy with DAM tools:

Kick off creative work requests or creative briefs for new content
Route new creative assets for review and approval workflows
Release final assets for on-demand access from a central library
Streamline workflows by giving global teams self-serve access to the content they need

With so much creative and product content to produce, it’s important that a DAM system also helps streamline workflows and increase efficiency in content production. Fanatics is a top 50 internet retailer and a leader in selling sports licensed apparel online. They manage three million digital assets for thousands of products from 1080+ vendors. To keep up with their own 30% year-over-year growth in e-commerce sales, they use their DAM platform as an e-commerce product content engine to help them achieve their content goals.

What does product content have to do with omnichannel experience?

You need your products to be at your customers’ fingertips anytime, anywhere, on any device, and at exactly the right time. To make that possible, your product content has to be produced, stored, and published in a way that makes that possible — which is no small task.

Sports fans and their loved ones expect an easy, consistent brand experience at every moment of interaction with products. Fanatics has to manage millions of digital assets for thousands of products across 300 stores. That sounds like an impossible amount of content to manage, but it’s possible with the right technology stack.

Here are some of the ways their DAM system helps them meet their content goals.

Four ways that a DAM system helps Fanatics streamline content production

E-commerce product content management. Centralized cloud storage and distribution for e-commerce product content syndication — from studio shot to the web experience.
Product image automation. Automation is used to capture and create, centralize and curate, and publish and deliver product images.
Web experience management. A DAM platform houses and distributes all the product images used across the 300+ Fanatics online shopping portals.
Reuse images to save costs and improve speed. Images are reused hundreds of times to save on product-photography costs and work through logistical challenges.

Fanatics has the unique challenge of their sales being tied to demand-driven events — like the win or loss of a football game. Before the big game, they need to make sure product images are carefully reviewed, approved, enriched, and published. That way, no matter which team wins or which quarterback breaks a new record, they have the right jerseys ready for sale.

Their DAM platform helps them centralize storage, automate image creation, manage web experiences, and reuse images. That makes it easier for Fanatics to publish content right on time and capitalize on revenue swings that come from wins and losses.

Learn more about how DAM can help you deliver an omnichannel customer experience

Both New Balance and Fanatics use Acquia DAM (Widen) as their DAM platform in order to streamline product content production and deliver omnichannel customer experiences. To learn more about how they achieve their content goals, check out this on-demand webinar.

If you want to build a seamless, personalized shopping experience across any device, app, or location, you’re going to need the right technology, too. At Acquia, we help hundreds of influential brands like Laura Mercier, Hootsuite, and Crayola with the software that they use to build their customer experiences.