As all marketers know, visual content creation can be a long and expensive process. Photo and video shoots require a big investment in time and budget and the end result may be just a single asset or a few shots for you to use. Stock footage and photography exists, but they don’t always quite fit the bill when you are wanting to create powerful, on-brand digital experiences. With growing customer expectations around personalization, the ability to create effective, individualized visual content quickly and with limited expense is more important than ever.
Synthetic content – imagery and video created using graphic arts tools and software – is a valuable tool in the race to personalize. The ability to reuse and manipulate a single graphic to fit many situations enables marketing teams to increase their content output exponentially, providing the assets required to both achieve effective personalization at scale and react quickly to evolving market trends and campaign needs.
For example, let’s say you sell pickup trucks. Your target customers may include consumers, farming operations of various sizes, construction companies, and other fleet operators, each with a unique and specific use case in mind for your product. If you start with a simple image or video clip of the truck, the advanced graphic tools available today can enable you to place that truck in hundreds of different settings. You can also customize details like the color of the product, person driving, and environment – creating thousands of possible permutations without requiring an unfeasible number of conventional photo shoots.
The level of customization and granularity available with today’s graphic arts tools and methods enables you to create and deliver video and imagery that speaks to each customer on an individual level, showing your product in a setting they will connect with. As you learn more about their unique needs and preferences through marketing and sales interactions – things like intended product use, location, preferred color and desired customizations – you can add that information to the customer’s profile, further refining their experiences with customized content, and then nurture them toward purchasing.
The ability to create these highly individualized experiences is not only possible through synthetic visual content creation, but worth the minor investment.
How to Get There
You may be thinking, “My team already has the tools and skill needed to create customized visual content.” And you might be right. Synthetic content creation is a natural byproduct of the creative methods and the technology available to us today.
However, in order to achieve and sustain this level of truly individualized digital experience, you’ll have to do more than just create a lot of content. Your digital strategy, creative process, and technology will need to be able to handle that volume of content, effectively sort through it, and deliver relevant experiences to the right individuals at the right time.
Put the right roadmap and platforms in place to prepare. Your roadmap should consider:
- Planning for content proliferation. Typically, you may need to shift team composition to effectively increase a team’s output to keep up with marketing’s desire to find the right content that converts the highest on their goals.
- A robust content management system (CMS) or digital experience platform (DXP) that integrates with design tools so that the assets created can be easily used as inputs into the overall all experience creation process. This DXP should also allow you to easily measure how well your new synthetic experiences are converting. This should be a top priority.
- Utilizing CMS and digital asset management (DAM) systems equipped with artificial intelligence capabilities such as smart tagging, dynamic imaging, and dynamic renditioning will enable you to both handle and make the most of your synthetic content. These platforms are making great strides in AI – automatically evaluating and tagging assets so they can be retrieved and used easily and effectively for personalization and campaign creation.
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