Digital marketing practices have evolved drastically over the last 20 years. Before the turn of the century, banner advertising was highly prevalent. Search engine marketing was in its infancy, so it was difficult for marketers to reach targeted customers with search PPC ads. Video technology was not advanced enough to make video marketing an option.
The proliferation of new digital media sharing platforms has changed things considerably. This has led to the widespread use of rich media to connect with potential customers.
The shift towards using rich media arguably begin in 2005, when YouTube was first released to the online world. Critics from Gawker and a number of other technology publications were skeptical that YouTube would last. However, YouTube proved them wrong by becoming one of the most popular social networking sites in the world.
The success of YouTube has led to the development of a number of other rich media platforms, such as Pinterest. These mediums have proven to be remarkably effective for online brand and performance marketing, as well as SEO.
However, there are still some challenges that digital marketers face with rich media content. They need to know how to organize it properly to get optimal results. You should consider using digital asset management software. Some other important guidelines are listed below.
Ensure that you have enough storage space to handle your rich media creatives
Rich media creatives are highly valuable for digital marketers. They are more engaging and tend to offer a higher ROI then standard creatives.
Unfortunately, they come with some trade-offs. One of the trade-offs is that they cost more to develop. Another issue is that they require a lot more storage space.
To put things in perspective, most standard creatives have file sizes under 200KB. According to Google, rich media is usually defined as having at least a 200KB file size.
This binary cut off might not sound very compelling. However, you will see the vast difference in file sizes after looking at specific types of creatives. It is not at all uncommon for a simple image to have a file size of around 2KB, while videos and many other rich media creatives can easily exceed 1MB. Many videos have file sizes of at least 10MB.
You need to make sure that you have enough storage capacity to retain all of your rich media creatives. You also need to have a backup storage option that can handle your data needs.
Google Drive offers 15 MB of storage for free. This might sound like a lot, but you can easily exceed it if you create a lot of rich media creatives. You can consider upgrading to a premium Google Drive account to get an additional 100 MB of storage for $1.99 a month. There are other cloud storage options that you might want to consider as well.
Make sure that file names contain carefully chosen keywords
Some marketing agencies use rather odd nomenclature practices for coming up with file names. They might contain final names with a lot of abbreviations.
These in-house practices might make sense to you and your colleagues. Unfortunately, they might create a lot of issues down the road. You might have difficulty locating particular videos when you need to search the database. Also, these files probably won’t be well optimized for SEO purposes.
Instead, you should make sure that files are named with appropriate keywords. This will improve the reach of your marketing efforts and make it easier to find files in question when they need to be edited or uploaded.
Use the most logical folder hierarchical systems
Folder structures are the most important aspect of organizing any content. Rich media content is no exception.
You need to make sure that you use enough subfolders to effectively organize your creatives. You might be tempted to store all of them in a single folder and just filter by media type of leader. Unfortunately, this can still create a ton of headaches, especially if you have subordinates that are not familiar with your file names or the filters in your operating system.
It just makes a lot more sense to have individual folders for projects and then subfolders for specific objectives, which have additional subfolders for creation dates.