First: Know Your DAM Customer
When embarking on a DAM initiative – and I’ll say this a little tongue and cheek, but not entirely – know your DAM customer! Meaning, be very clear about the specific target audience that will use your DAM, and focus your DAM development approach on meeting their specific needs.
And frankly, there’s no better way to think about target customers than by applying Geoffrey Moore’s classic entrepreneurial framework, namely “crossing the chasm”, which identifies three distinct categories of target audiences.
- When we’re introducing a new product into the marketplace, first we need to focus on innovators and early adopters, who are effectively our beachhead.
- But these early adopters tend to be quite different in nature than our next target audiences, the early and late majority, which results in the “chasm” we must cross in order to successfully serve that majority.
- Finally, after we successfully cross that chasm, we can focus on laggards, who come last in line.
So let’s follow Geoffrey Moore’s advice and ask ourselves: In our world of DAM, who are these audiences?
- Early on we’ll need to target content creators and content contributors, people who are going to create assets and populate the DAM.
- Then we cross the chasm to serve large numbers of mainstream users, first internal consumers within our own organization, then external consumers outside of our organization, such as partners, dealers, or independent sales reps.
- And after that, we’ll actually face a 2nd chasm, where we go from targeting mainstream users to serving systems and platforms, namely properties we own, such as our website or online store, to placements on platforms we don’t own, such as social media, 3rd party sites or syndication channels.
But wait a minute, we forgot somebody: who are those people way over there on the left, the core team? These are the organization’s DAM innovators. They’re the ones who are going to carry the DAM initiative forward.
Making sure we have the right core team in place, with the right skills, knowledge and leadership abilities, is absolutely critical for success. The core team should have a deep understanding of target audience needs – within the particular context of each audience’s activities and processes.
The core team should also have a deep hands-on understanding of all functional aspects of the DAM platform itself, which will be leveraged to meet the needs of each target audience.
Then: Deliver on Key Factors That Drive Success for Each Audience
When taken together within the frame for our new model, these 7 target audiences are in effect the levels of proficiency that we must strive to achieve.
The 7 target audiences are by definition sequential in nature, as each audience will require increasing levels of capability and sophistication from our DAM system, a successful outcome for one audience being a prerequisite for the next audience.
So how do we build success for each of these target audiences? We’ll need to focus our attention on 10 dimensions of factors across 3 categories.
- First, we build our DAM Foundation, which spans 4 dimensions of factors
- Then, we build our DAM Solution, which spans another 4 dimensions
- And finally, we build DAM Conformity, which spans the last 2 dimension of factors
Closing Thoughts
Basically, to deliver DAM success, we identify the key factors for success (KFS) – defined as an Operational System of Record and Adoption – for each target audience.
That’s an important point to keep in mind as you go along your DAM journey: when deciding what to do, and when, think about which audience you’re targeting, because their KFS will likely be different than other audiences. Also consider the order in which you target your audiences, because one is likely a prerequisite for success to the next.
In short: context matters! And, sequence matters too!
Next Steps
“DAM Perspectives” is a series of posts that came from the work we did to develop a new DAM maturity framework. So, as a next step, we invite you to check out some of the other posts in this series:
- DAM Perspectives (Part 1): The Need for a New Approach
- DAM Perspectives (Part 2): The Two Key Outcomes
- DAM Perspectives (Part 3): The Target Audiences
- DAM Perspectives (Part 4): Building the Foundation
- DAM Perspectives (Part 5): Building the Solution
- DAM Perspectives (Part 6): Building Conformity
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