10 trends in digital content for 2019: Management is vital to success

Today any organization working with content has a new responsibility – content accounting. As content has become the new currency, it’s not enough for companies to create content and forget about it. Instead, content has costs associated with it that must be assessed along with the benefits.

Indeed, content management has become a discipline, a vital job for any organization. And, as such, it needs to be treated rigorously, not only viewed through a creative lens.

Let’s drill down and examine the top 10 trends we believe will shape how organizations manage their digital content in 2019.

1. Content marketing moves beyond marketing for easier access

When content is viewed as an asset, it becomes costly to keep it tucked away in marketing. Instead, all parts of an organization – and its partners – need easy access. With 20 percent of every day on average spent looking for lost files, it’s essential to have an organizational digital asset management (DAM) system. Add to that the fact that the cost to replace a single digital asset can easily exceed $1,000 and a DAM system becomes a cost-saver. Other payoffs include enhanced collaboration, increased productivity, and in some cases additional revenue from the sale or licensing of content assets.

2. Growing video content leads to more metadata and automation

As video becomes a primary method of brand expression, organizations will contend with more and larger video files and with an order of magnitude increase in storage required for video formats such as 4K. This will have a direct impact on how content is stored and used. Metadata strategies and automation will come to the fore in content management.

3. Privacy and security grow more important along with cloud storage

It won’t be adequate for digital content to be stored just anywhere. To meet compliance standards, it will need to be stored in known and verifiable locations. Cloud storage will be seen as a critical step toward achieving data security and a catalyst for companies moving other operations to the cloud.

4. Old content becomes new again

As DAM systems decrease in cost, more companies will climb on the DAM wagon. A DAM solution will provide access to content users didn’t even know they had. Expect to see old content in such formats as cassettes reformatted and reintroduced.

5. Analytics become more important

The ever-increasing need to maximize the value of content is requiring new metrics to measure and evaluate it. Marketers will broaden their use of reporting from DAM systems to understand content ROI, including who is accessing content, what it’s being used for, its costs and its revenues. This will provide a new level of accountability.

6. Content is optimized for new uses

Evolving DAM systems will make content available for additional uses. Anyone who needs to access the content will be able to readily find, view and share it. For example, an archivist will be able to unearth and release a new set of Bob Dylan gospel recordings, as a client of ours did.

7. AI helps add context to enhance content

Useful contextual data exists everywhere, but it takes smart technology to know where to look for it and to detect patterns and relationships too complex for people to perceive. This year will see more organizations using AI to move beyond mere files and folders, creating metadata about each piece of content to make it intuitively findable. Benefits will include richer search, deeper digital content links, automatic elimination of duplicate content and automated content extraction.

8. Move to the cloud accelerates

With so many emerging opportunities to use and add value to digital content, the pace of migrating assets to the cloud will quicken. Data can be extracted and better used while content is uploaded to the cloud. And once it’s there, cloud storage will enable faster processing, remote access as needed and future possibilities only now being developed.

9. New high-value uses of digital content emerge

Every year brings new opportunities to engage with customers and the public in entirely new ways, and having digital content ready for those purposes provides a big advantage. We are seeing increasing experimentation with virtual reality, augmented reality and new methods for incorporating data outside mobile, desktop and big-screen platforms – think IoT.

10. Predictive asset management will improve bottom and top lines

In the next phase of digital content management, forward-thinking organizations will take full advantage of AI to learn behaviors around supporting and automating collaboration for various users and their unique content needs. Predictive asset management will create sustainable value for digital content so it can be used internally or shared externally – even sold – to drive new revenue.

This will be the year organizations reframe their content as an asset on a massive scale. Tapping the power of AI, cloud storage and other technologies, users will transform managing and optimizing their mushrooming content troves from a dreaded, overwhelming chore to lucrative discovery and revitalization. Best of luck as you mine your content assets to the fullest in the new year.