EBSCO
faster to upload and tag assets
new assets added each week by content authors
marketing, sales and product managers self-registered with brand portal
Highlights
With an expanding marketing department and a need for more content on its sites, EBSCO’s scaling was hindered by a disorganized digital landscape with assets scattered in too many locations.
The scattered assets resulted in outdated branding, lack of cohesive metadata, and inefficiencies when creating duplicates of lost assets and posting one asset in multiple systems.
EBSCO needed a simple way to serve assets to multiple interfaces all from a single source file. Acquia DAM seamlessly connected to Drupal 8 positioning it to power all of the marketing sites and give sales and marketing control.
- 3 times faster uploading and tagging of assets
- Single sign-on and mobile access cut down on password requests and support tickets
- Content authors were freed up to add 10-20 new assets every week
- Over 500 marketing, sales, and product managers self-registered with the brand portal front end of DAM
The Client
EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is a leading provider of digital research material to libraries, hospitals and medical institutions, and corporations around the world. EBSCO provides content, including research databases, books and e-books, archives, point-of-care medical reference, and corporate learning tools and serves millions of end users at tens of thousands of institutions.
EBSCO has partnered with libraries and other institutions to improve research for more than 70 years. Its online research platform attracts more than 100 million page views per day.
The Situation
As EBSCO’s marketing department tripled in size over the last couple of years, it encountered problems keeping their digital assets organized. The team’s content was stored and archived on Microsoft Sharepoint, network drives, local hard drives, email attachments, desktops, and Google Drive. Securely storing and updating passwords and permissions for these various systems presented its own significant challenges, but identifying the proper assets to publish was even more daunting.
Relying on the unorganized, scattered assets to power EBSCO’s marketing websites, internal sales portal, support site, and Marketo led to a disjointed, inefficient workflow when it came to identifying the right digital assets to use. With no standardized asset metadata and no clear labeling or historic versioning recorded in their ecosystem, EBSCO’s marketing and sales teams were often unable to identify the most recent approved versions of assets.
The Challenge
The owners of ebsco.com were scrambling to keep up with the growth of the marketing team and the increasing content needs of the site. The scattered assets resulted in:
- Outdated branding
- Lack of a cohesive system of tagging or metadata
- Not be able to find certain assets at all
- Wasted time and money creating duplicates of lost assets
- Inefficiently posting and maintaining one asset in multiple systems
Like 80 percent of the respondents from the 2018 Acquia DAM survey, EBSCO considered brand consistency to be crucial and they recognized the need for a searchable system of records for all assets, with rich metadata around it. To avoid workflow inefficiencies and redundancies, EBSCO needed a simple way to serve assets to multiple interfaces all from a single source file.
EBSCO’s team had been piling onto its martech stack without redesigning it to fit their rapid scaling, and after working with Drupal and Acquia Cloud Site Factory for about a year, they discovered how Acquia’s Digital Asset Manager (DAM) could help them.
The Solution
After identifying seven vendors from the Gartner Magic Quadrant, EBSCO narrowed its options to three contenders. Already having invested in Drupal and Acquia Cloud Site Factory, it quickly determined that Acquia DAM was the perfect expansion for them to resolve its digital asset chaos.
EBSCO seamlessly connected DAM to Drupal 8 and their Acquia Cloud CMS, easily positioning it to power all of their marketing sites. Single sign-on (SSO) integration and mobile-friendly design makes it easy for EBSCO’s marketing, sales, and product management teams to self-register with the brand portal front end of DAM. This streamlined the process of locating and uploading assets they need, and managing their own projects more efficiently without dependency on the internal IT teams.
The Results
Integrating Acquia DAM into EBSCO’s tech stack fostered collaboration between departments, helped position the company for international scaling, increased productivity and efficiency, and put the marketing team in a position to lead the site without relying as heavily on developers.
DAM has helped EBSCO streamline their workflows. The sales team can now find assets it needs, and field representatives can quickly locate materials like flyers or PowerPoints on the go. Designers are free to move forward on new projects instead of having to redo work or help team members locate assets.
After using DAM for five months and Brand Portal for one month, EBSCO noted the following results:
- Drag-and-drop uploading and tagging assets in DAM is 3x faster than it was in the old system. Most of the time spent using DAM was just adding keywords.
- DAM’s SSO and mobile access cut down on password requests and technical support tickets,
- Content authors were freed up to help EBSCO scale internationally, adding 10-20 new assets every week, and using metadata to tag for 17 languages.
- Over 500 marketing, sales, and product managers self-registered with the brand portal front end of DAM,
- Assets only have to be updated once in DAM to update on EBSCO.com, cutting down tasks surrounding updating their website.
- There was drastically higher visibility of all assets across the design team.
Learn more about how Acquia DAM and Acquia Cloud Site Factory can free up your team to spend more time creating, driving leads, and scaling your site. For more about what Acquia does for Drupal sites, learn more here.