Both large and small businesses are turning to Adobe® to manage their customer-facing websites and other marketing efforts. A key Adobe product for website deployment is Adobe Experience Manager® (AEM), which provides powerful tools to perform the dual functions of site content management and digital asset management.

AEM’s powerful features not only provide simple content and digital asset management, but also support:

• A common marketing message across all channels, including channels managed by both AEM and by third parties
• An up-to-date marketing message, provided by full governance of all digital asset edits, approvals, and deliveries
• A rapid delivery of marketing messages, via automation of key content and digital asset tasks  

To fully take advantage of AEM’s power, be sure to use these three proven ways to get the most out of AEM.

Create an omnichannel experience with AEM

Your best customers consume information on a myriad of platforms, ranging from emails to voice assistants. These omnichannel customers are a profitable niche; a 2017 study showed that omnichannel customers spent 10% more online than single-channel customers. But it is costly to provide marketing information across all channels.

AEM can manage content for all channels in a single location, even for third-party channels and non-formatted (headless) channels.

AEM uses experience fragments to support omnichannel marketing. In AEM, an experience fragment is a group of components that can be referenced within pages. When the experience fragment is edited, that edit is carried over to all locations in which the experience fragment is used. Experience fragments can be used both on formatted pages managed directly by AEM, and on non-formatted headless content managed by third-party applications. This ensures that you can provide a common marketing message on your web pages, emails, chatbots, and all content.

Fully manage all your digital assets with AEM

Any marketing program requires a robust Digital Assets Management (DAM) system. Ideally the DAM system must store and deliver the digital assets, and must also allow for management of any edits, manage licensing and digital rights permissions, expand as customer demands increase, and perform other necessary functions to get the content to your customers quickly. If a DAM cannot meet a business’ demands, it will become a repository for stale content.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets is a dynamic, cloud-based DAM that fully supports your needs to store, find, edit, manage, and deliver up-to-date assets. All assets are stored in a single source, rather than being siloed in multiple locations.

AEM supports asset features such as digital rights management, which reduces legal risk by ensuring that digital rights have not expired. AEM’s Adobe Asset Link allows creators to use Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign to directly edit assets within AEM.

Use the automation and artificial intelligence capabilities of AEM

Even with the best tools, management of content and digital assets requires a lot of work to make sure that everything is managed correctly, and that nothing is lost. AEM automates much of this work by using workflows and artificial intelligence to reduce the manual steps.

AEM’s content management and digital asset management workflows can govern your team’s tasks to plan, design, review, approve, and publish both your web pages and your digital assets. Existing AEM workflows can be extended to meet the specific needs of your business. Tasks can be added to a workflow and assigned to a person or a group.

When a person receives a task, AEM can automate many of the required steps. For example, the smart tags tool can automatically apply business-specific tags to images and video. There are similar tools to perform a smart crop of an image, and to auto-summarize text in content fragments to fit within smaller form factors.

A fourth proven way to get the most out of AEM

These three proven ways to get the most out of AEM will not work if they are not implemented properly. There is a fourth way to ensure that your Adobe implementation is stellar: select an experienced Adobe consultant to manage your complete AEM process, including discovery, architecture, and implementation.

KBWEB Consult specializes in customizing and integrating the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Platform. You can also check our post on Lean Onboarding of Adobe AEM Assets. Contact us for a free consultation.