Media optimization is critical to success in today’s visual economy.
Digital transformation has been underway for years, but accelerated dramatically in 2020.
Brands had already been moving parts of their business online and utilizing omnichannel models to address users. Then the entire global economy suddenly moved online in order to facilitate social distancing and remote work in the face of a global pandemic.
The customer journey moved online as well. Brands had to syndicate a huge volume of media assets to promote their services and products across multiple channels.
But to capitalize on this new digital-first customer experience, brands need infrastructure. Developing a consistent digital customer experience is not possible without a well-structured system for managing digital assets.
Digital asset management (DAM) became the face of this hyper-charged migration to the cloud-enabled user experience. Branded assets, including video and audio, had to gain new functionalities in order to play a value-generating role in the new digital marketing landscape.
DAM Solutions Improve Project Management for Digital Marketing Initiatives
Cloud-based DAM systems allow organizations to enjoy unprecedented scalability and flexibility. Once the customer journey became almost entirely digital, the ability to track, measure, and improve the performance of digital media assets became a business-critical value.
For high-growth companies with constantly escalating asset management needs, the problem is clear. Keeping track of multiple versions of the same video or audio file, personalized for individual customers, and making that content available to the right people at the right time takes time and resources.
At a certain level of growth, managing all of that media manually simply isn’t possible. Brands need an automated solution for tagging and categorizing assets based on analytics derived from user engagement. They need to automate the review and approval process for branded assets and capitalize on them quickly.
DAM technology enables measurable performance gains for video and audio content, but its capabilities for rich-media content are where it truly shines.
What is Rich Media?
Any kind of digital content that includes multiple elements – like video and audio – that encourage user interaction. The ability for users to actively engage with content is what separates rich media from passive media.
Rich media enables marketers and advertisers to generate sophisticated ads that trigger an immediate user response. Importantly, they can also capture and analyze user engagement and generate insights for further improving ad performance over time.
This kind of approach offers brands the possibility to present their messages in an impactful, believable way. It opens up the potential to personalize multimedia banners that take advantage of mobile device specifics.
Compared to standard content, rich-media content is:
- Larger in terms of file size.
- More flexible towards user preferences.
- Programmed with HTML, JavaScript, or other technologies.
- Highly interactive in multiple ways.
These characteristics are not exclusive to banner ads. They can be incorporated into nearly any kind of media that people consume online. Rich-media videos, webinars, and live streams are just a few examples of formats that enterprising marketers are beginning to use.
Optimize Rich-Media Content By Measuring Performance
Rich-media content enables brands to leverage unprecedented creativity when crafting new content for users. In order to make the most of that freedom, brands have to adopt a data-driven approach to creating rich-media content, and continually work towards optimizing that content.
This requires extensive analytics. Not all DAM platforms and video hosting solutions offer advanced analytics to users. Most simply capture view counts, impressions, and reach across all platforms, without allowing content creators to segment audiences or implement personalized strategies.
An analytics-ready DAM enables best-in-class rich-media content performance by capturing the data brands need to inform their overall strategy. It allows marketers and advertisers to transform media assets into data capture touch points that gently nudge viewers down a well-crafted sales funnel.
Some of the key performance indicators that brands can use to optimize rich-media content include:
- Display Time. This metric shows the average amount of the time the media is visible on the web page. It’s especially important for ads that may pop up or disappear on dynamic pages.
- Interaction Time. This is the amount of time the audience spends interacting with the ad. A high-quality DAM platform should allow brands to analyze interaction time on an individual basis, rather than offering an audience-wide average.
- Interaction Rate. This metric shows the percentage of users who interact with the content. This is useful for determining the overall engagement rate and success of a media-rich ad.
- Dwell Rate. This reflects the amount of time users remain exposed to content after intentionally engaging with it by tapping, touching, or clicking.
- Expansion Rate. This compares the number of ad expansions to the total number of ad impressions, expressed as a ratio.
- Mutes, Rewinds, and Pauses. Measuring the number of mutes, rewinds, and pauses in video content helps brands identify the highest value elements of their videos. This information may be displayed as an engagement heat map that shows individual user actions as well.
- This metric reflects the number of viewers who consumed video or audio content entirely to the end.
- This metric reflects the number of viewers who took a specific action after seeing your rich-media content. It could be signing up for a newsletter, downloading a PDF file, or simply following you on social media.
Without access to this kind of data on a granular, viewer-by-viewer basis, optimizing media-rich content to achieve high-impact performance is not possible. Deploying a DAM solution that supports rich-media analytics is critical to digital marketing success.
Best Practices for Optimizing Rich-Media Content
Capturing viewer engagement analytics is the first step towards optimizing rich-media content effectively. The way you use the insights you gain from viewer’s actions will determine whether your rich-media content campaign is a success or not.
1. Provide Text Versions of Rich-Media Pages
If you plan on incorporating rich-media content onto your own website, you should create a text-only version of the page and link to it. Your website’s human visitors will be understandably excited to click on your rich-media content, but automated search crawlers may not be.
Rich-media content has an overall positive effect on SEO because it keeps website visitors engaged and increases the value your website offers them. However, if a Googlebot crawler cannot navigate your website because it does not know how to interact with rich-media content, your ranking could suffer in the short term.
2. Verify Responsive Image Breakpoints
If you are planning on delivering rich-media content to mobile users, your content will have to display correctly on a huge number of different devices. Every device has its own optimal resolution and size stepping capabilities. These will dramatically impact the way your content looks when displayed on those screens.
You can use a tool like Responsive Breakpoints to verify the breakpoints of specific images you use. You can even automate the generation of responsive breakpoints in order to guarantee your content is optimally responsive. You can upload video thumbnail images as well.
3. Test Your Content in Microbrowsers
Microbrowsers are becoming an increasingly important part of digital marketing and advertising. These are the lightweight, small-scale browsers that open up inside of apps like Slack, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Whenever someone sends a link to a friend through one of these apps, there is a chance it opens up in the app’s own microbrowser.
Microbrowsers are not always compatible with dynamic content the way that Google Chrome is. GetSocial estimates that 77.5% of e-commerce link shares occur through microbrowser-enabled apps, meaning a huge number of users interact with content through these channels. A good DAM solution ensures rich-media content displays correctly in these environments.
Make the Most of Your Rich-Media Content
Deploying a fully featured, analytics-ready DAM solution is the first step towards making sure your rich-media content performs. High-quality image and video hosting makes it possible for brands and content creators to turn their content into valuable, entertaining media in a way that static video and ad content simply cannot match.
Cincopa is a video hosting platform and DAM solution that enhances rich-media capabilities for brands and content creators. Find out how to use our technology to augment the customer journey online
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