How AI can be used to streamline marketing workflows
It wasn’t too long ago that artificial intelligence (AI) technology was merely a concept from science fiction movies. But today, AI is changing the status quo of entire industries, including marketing technology (martech).
When it comes to leveraging AI capabilities in martech tools, it can range from chatbots to personalised content to social media management. So how can AI be used to streamline digital asset management (DAM) workflows?
Image recognition functionality
DAM systems help teams organise, find, distribute, and analyse digital content. In order to be effective, DAM software relies on metadata, or descriptive information about each piece of content, to provide structure and information to make digital assets findable. Metadata is crucial to a system’s success but can often be time consuming to add and is prone to error without a clear process.
Metadata fields are used to answer different questions about each asset including identifiers like: filename, photography type, description, and usage rights. A system of metadata fields is called a metadata schema. Creating a schema with fields relevant to a specific company improves the search experience and helps ensure that metadata is added accurately.
With the help of image recognition software, AI has a valuable and growing role in system management through its ability to automatically tag assets with relevant metadata during the upload process.
Employing AI to automate part of the image-tagging process can improve categorisation, power the accuracy of related assets, and offer advanced searching options for users. Not to mention, saving hours of manual tagging efforts.
The ability to automatically categorise and tag images extends to a range of scenarios. It can recognise faces or demographics — including the age, ethnicity, or gender of persons in the image. It can also apply keywords for specific industries, such as travel, food, and apparel.
Further, image recognition software includes security features that allow DAM administrators to:
- Moderate assets and automatically delete or hide uploads with inappropriate content
- Enable auto-tagging functionality for specific upload profiles or metadata fields
- Influence how the controls for strength, relevance, and variety are configured
Together, these flexible capabilities and features can accommodate unique content needs and business goals.
Benefits of using image recognition software
Adding the power of image recognition to a DAM system makes metadata creation simpler, faster, and most importantly, better. Image recognition software can reduce human errors and inconsistencies, and avoid assets being uploaded into the DAM system without any metadata.
Further, AI can make searching more effective as thorough metadata allows search tools to return accurate results, quickly.
Automating a manual process reduces the time needed to tag assets, meaning workflows can be better streamlined. All of these efficiencies translate to business cost savings. After all, less time spent tagging and searching means more time for creative and strategic work.
What does the future hold?
Although technology is helping all kinds of companies work with greater efficiency and speed, it is also clear that humans are still needed. Technology alone is not able to fix an organisation’s problems. A strategy must be in place to align the workforce, processes, and technology — such as AI — in order to achieve the desired marketing outcomes.
Tools like image recognition require a balance between automation and human touch. While it can free up time and resources for other value-driven projects, the workforce is still needed to inform and guide both the technology and its users.
In 2021, we will see the partnership between AI and the human workforce grow more important to marketing teams. Not only to streamline and scale DAM workflows but to successfully create cost savings, too.
By Jake Athey, VP Marketing and Customer Experience at Widen
