Companies need to stay competitive amidst increasing market saturation. Find out how you can give your company a competitive edge with the images, videos, and music API trusted by the biggest brands in the world.
In the last two years, the marketing technology industry has doubled in size. This means almost five new companies entering the industry every day.
Maximizing long-term viability in a fiercely competitive industry involves preempting technological changes, establishing meaningful differentiation beyond product features, and retaining existing users with meaningful results.
For martech companies looking to secure long-term growth, the Shutterstock API meets all three criteria. Thus, it’s unsurprising that many of the biggest names in martech (including Google, Facebook, IBM, and Wix) have already integrated.
Here are a few best practices distilled from our experience working with martech leaders to help you stand amongst your competitors.
Technological Foresight for Long-Term Sustainability
We live in an exciting time of rapid technological change. While not all emerging technology is here to stay, some will transform entire industries faster than many would assume. When that happens, you want your company to be on the right side of history.
The top emerging trends for 2018 include the rise the internet of things, blockchain technology, and rapid API adoption. Deloitte attributes the growth of APIs to the fact that APIs are becoming a strategic mandate for companies.
From the Google Maps API, to the Twitter API, to the Bloomberg API, consumers now expect API-based functionalities from their favorite applications (though most would not phrase it in these exact terms).
In the martech space, the Shutterstock API is already changing how platforms support their users in their creative processes. Instead of ejecting users off-platform to find multimedia assets, our API delivers the images, videos clips, and music tracks users are looking for, when they need it, where they need it.
Make Your Platform “Sticky”
By 2020, customer experience will be the key brand differentiator, beating both price and product. Thus, creating a “sticky” platform is not about packing your solution with a laundry list of features. Rather, it’s about preemptively addressing your users’ needs at every step of their creative processes to create the ideal user experience.
A major barrier marketers face is the “Insert Images or Video” prompt. For most platforms, this button pushes users out of their workflow and sends them on a hunt across the Wild Wild Web to search for assets, check for usage rights, download, edit as necessary, and then return to upload. This process alone adds at least five steps and an estimated 30 minutes to their creative processes (granted that they don’t get distracted by pictures of puppies in sweaters).
Instead of pushing users away, you can make your platform stickier by offloading as many tasks from users as possible. Having high-quality assets directly available in your creative interface eliminates a time-consuming task for users, which translates to increased engagement, retention, and net promoter score.
Ultimately, optimizing your user experience boosts revenue growth. The Interaction Design Foundation discovered that the 10-year stock price growth for companies that prioritize user experience design outperformed the S&P index by 228%.
Retain Existing Users by Ensuring User Success
For martech companies whose user base include marketers and business owners, delivering MROI is the best argument you can make to keep them loyal to your platform.
A proven way to maximize marketing success is to provide your users with high-quality multimedia assets that form the “building blocks” of powerful content.
In fact, articles interspersed with images saw double the number of social shares and 70% of people that see a video ad online sometimes or often visit a company’s website. Moreover, 73% of video ad creators use stock assets to complement their existing content.
Immediately after integration, our partners can deliver over 200 million images, video clips, and music tracks natively in their platforms. With more than 400,000 contributors adding a million new assets per week, we can offer our partners fresh content of the highest caliber.
Conclusion
Long-term success is not accidental. By proactively improving your product, accelerating user workflow, and providing the foundations for user success, you can join the ranks of top martech companies and propel your business ahead of the curve.
Together with our partners, Shutterstock is building the future of content creation that is intuitive, integrated, and optimized for how people want to work.
Cover image by Panchenko Vladimir.
