Blog

DAM Best Practices: Opening Your Digital Stores

Implementing your Brand Portals is similar to how I’d imagine a supermarket might open for business. This blog explores this analogy to provide best practices and considerations around opening your digital stores for business.

So, you’ve made your decision on the infrastructure (technology) that will support your digital store. The location is prime, the pipes and plumbing are all ready to go. The next consideration is what strategy to put in place to ensure your customers are successful so that your products sell. Your first consideration is your customer: what will they expect; how will you delight them in order to provide an experience that guarantees they return? Quality of product is essential of course (and I’ll come back to this later) but first customers need to find what they came for and getting this right is the most important step.

Defining the Shopping Experience
Building a plan around how your customers expect to find content is the most critical step and will guarantee the future success of your digital store. If you think about the experience when walking into a supermarket, you can browse for broad categories such as spices, flour, and dairy, pick up the product you are looking for, read the ingredients on the label, make the right choice and put in your basket. The supermarket built a strategy around you and made it simple for you to find the right product.

Planning your Digital Shelves
Defining your digital shelves means defining a data model for your products, your tactics, and the components (or ingredients) used to create them. The digital framework that supports your products are Categories (document types), Metadata (fields) and Taxonomies (classifications). Getting this right not only ensures that the customer can find the correct products but also defines what they can do with them. Can they access the source content immediately or is there a process that explains how they get this? Do they have permission to access this content? Give this part of the process the most consideration – your fields, permissions, visibility; getting this right early on allows your digital store to scale, don’t take shortcuts or it will hurt you later as your store grows in popularity.

Seasonal Promotions
When you walk into your local supermarket during the warm summer months, you might see some promotions appropriate to the time of year, items for a BBQ, garden furniture, holiday décor, or other items driving customers to specific purchases.

This experience is similar to your Brand Portal home page, a place to drive users to the right content. It’s great that they can find what they need in the store with a well-defined data model, but typically they are looking for items relevant to a particular campaign or product launch. Why make your customers work for this? When logging into your digital store, customers should find exactly what they need without even searching for it.

Improving access to campaign materials by promoting toolkits on the home page, surfacing pertinent assets, and high-value global tactics that are only a click away from initiating a local version for their market.
The shopping experience for your customers is crucial to ensure they keep coming back. But first you need product, how you get the source content into your digital stores might seem straightforward, but don’t overlook the important details.

Interested in learning more about how Veeva can help?