A visually stunning e-commerce experience sets you apart from your competitors. Fresh, surprising content engages your customers’ emotions and creates an opportunity to build a brand identity. The best way to craft a loyal follower base is by staying ahead of digital trends — a challenging endeavor in an industry where user expectations can change overnight.
Creating and managing a steady flow of high-quality content across all your channels introduces new technical challenges as your business expands. Customers expect easy-to-navigate online shopping experiences that look great on all devices, all the time, everywhere they have a connection.
In this article, we’ll explore how to put programmable media to work to keep your brand ahead of the tech trend curve. We’ll cover everything you need to know to deliver personalized content that draws attention no matter where it’s viewed.
Keeping a brand statement consistent across sales channels is no longer optional. Consumers expect content to look great on various viewing devices under all conditions, but trying to meet demand by generating new digital assets alone is impractical. As your e-commerce platform grows, sustainably innovating means extracting new value from your asset portfolio.
Asset optimization alone is a logistic hurdle. It’s challenging to consistently serve video, audio, images, and even the platform itself at any resolution or bandwidth. Adding the task of tailoring your media to offer personalized experiences pushes the workload from “challenging” to “infeasible.”
Modern e-commerce matches the global marketplace with a worldwide audience of online shoppers who can choose whichever e-commerce experience is most appealing. Capturing a piece of the audience means going toe to toe with the strongest contenders on an international stage. Then, maintaining your foothold will demand your creative team’s commitment to generating an unending stream of asset variants for every device your customers use. For most emerging markets, you’ll also need to optimize for a wide range of network infrastructure.
Tasks like image cropping, tagging, and conversion to multiple formats and resolutions are tedious and simple. Generally undesirable work for creative professionals, these tasks are perfect for automation.
Programmable media plugs into your development pipeline through an API, making it an excellent fit for headless CMS, on-demand asset generation, and AI-powered workflows.
Using programmable media, you can deliver personalized content that looks its best on every device. The ability to programmatically transform your existing media removes much of the optimization burden and shifts what’s left into the developer domain.
Providing an API empowers your developers to optimize without involving your designers. Even if you don’t automate these changes or use AI assistance, manually editing code is faster than editing with media design tools. Programmatic editing accelerates your content production timeline and opens up optimization possibilities that generally cost more overhead than the value they return. Advanced personalization and a dozen or more variants for each asset are no longer infeasible — they’re almost effortless.
Let’s explore each of these benefits individually.
- Produce content more efficiently. Use programmable media to minimize time spent on repetitive tasks like resizing, applying filters, and optimizing images using automation.
- Increase content quality. You can use programmable media to improve the quality of your digital content by performing the editing tasks outlined above to ensure your content is visually clear. Programmable media automatically customizes and optimizes digital assets for every device. An optimally formatted image or video will look the same on a desktop and a mobile phone or tablet. Using programmable media saves you time by minimizing manual labor, so your assets work harder with less effort.
- Personalize media content. With programmable media, you can ensure every user has a personalized experience. Personalizations include providing the audio and text in a relevant language, using time zones that align with the user’s location, maintaining customer preferences for communication, and so on.
Programmable media uses automation to help scale these tasks. Your content maintains its quality and timeliness when you’re working at scale.
Programmable media is necessary to keep up with the e-commerce industry’s demands. But how can you reuse your assets while maintaining the brand feel?
First, you can use programmable media to adjust media files depending on your users’ devices. You can scale down images to avoid compromising performance and add overlays to increase personal engagement. On a more technical level, you can add metadata to image files for advanced searching and browsing functionalities.
Programmable media is especially beneficial for companies looking to expand. As companies grow and workload increases, leveraging tools and techniques that handle repetitive tasks and reducing research and development (R&D) costs are essential for effective time management.
While programmable media can benefit your e-commerce businesses, creating all the necessary functionalities and APIs yourself isn’t feasible and would defeat the purpose of saving time.
Enter Cloudinary Programmable Media. Programmable Media offers powerful media APIs, widgets, and software development kits (SDKs), so creating or transforming new and existing content for various integrations is easy.
Programmable Media boasts many features for better digital asset management (DAM):
- Automatic object detection and AI-based workflows. Cloudinary helps you analyze the uploaded media using artificial intelligence (AI) and assign relevant tags. It can also support advanced search and browsing functionalities.
- Content-aware cropping. Cloudinary uses advanced AI to identify the focus of the digital asset and adjust the media to ensure a great user experience regardless of the device.
- Performant media format. Cloudinary lets you generate next-generation formats from the old generation. Traditional formats are less performant and consume more data, affecting the user experience in regions where the internet is slow. (For example, the next-gen WebP format is more efficient than PNG.) Cloudinary also helps you identify performance-related optimization opportunities, like generating a low-quality image to save the data bandwidth to display thumbnails or avatar images.
- Extensive APIs, widgets, and range SDKs. Cloudinary’s available widgets help you set up automation and AI-based workloads, significantly reducing the development time needed to get the most out of your programmable media.
While e-commerce has made online shopping convenient, it’s put a lot of strain on the people working behind the scenes. With so many digital assets and platforms to manage and so much competition, your business must either constantly create fresh content or risk becoming irrelevant. Programmable media empowers you to create consistent, personalized, and high-quality visual content at scale.
If your business struggles to keep up, an expansion can seem more trouble than it’s worth. Programmable media can help you work smarter, not harder. The ability to customize and reuse assets to suit different devices allows you to save time and focus on your creative process.
Cloudinary Programmable Media makes it easy to get started. Smplify content management for different applications, and use its collection of APIs to seamlessly integrate with your team’s existing technology stack. Check out Cloudinary Programmable Media and try it yourself!
