Pics.io’s 2019 Year in Review and Plans for 2020

It’s great when hard work, a commitment to excellence, and a passion for people all pay off. Especially when you’re having fun doing it! As we look back over the past year, we can see all the ways that our company, our customers, and the Pics.io community have grown. What an exceptional year we had in 2019!

At the top of the list is the success our customers have enjoyed. Pics.io’s service is the key to the prosperity of our customers. This level of service exemplified by our highly responsive and knowledgeable customer success and support, has paid off in a big way for a great many of our users. In particular, these organizations had remarkable stories to tell this year:

• RocketBrand, a creative and advertising agency, managed to really make better use of their digital assets, better unlocking the potential of its work and leverage the power of Google Drive storage

• Plastic Bank, an environmental services company, saved a lot of admin time through Google Drive integration with Pics.io and streamlined the process of sharing new media assets with partners and social media teams.

• Bruno Creative, the marketing consulting agency, streamlined its operational workflow through: Adobe CC integration for designers, a public site to publish assets in an easily accessible area; the ability to use Google Drive storage, which is perfect if you’d like to also utilize the desktop folders and have the files downloaded; the simple interface and great mobile site access.

• Lokyatha, e-learning company, managed its content workflow through the auto keywords feature that generates keywords for meta management and the features that allow you to edit, rework and approve with appropriate security authorisations

2019 was a really a growth year for us. 1,8 million users used our services in 2019 and about 150 000 users enjoyed our services each month, which is a really big number increasing each day.

In particular in 2019 we experienced the substantial growth of video assets in our database and nothing is going to stop this trend, because research shows that by 2021 video will form 90% of the companies’ online content.

Exciting Features Upgrades Added Through the Year

Our internal research showed that 100% of our users marked our support team as a first rate, being very responsive and ready to help with any technical issue. Our ability to add new features following clients’ requests significantly improved their user experience.

For example, only a couple of months ago we launched the Map View feature following the request of RocketBrand, which wanted to have a ‘global map’, that they could zoom around like on google maps, which shows clusters of geo-tagged images and video clips as well as other media geo-tagged nearby. RocketBrand is a branding agency that accumulates content from numerous contributors. So, being able to easily find assets in numerous locations is one of the priorities for them and we helped in realization of this feature.

Have a look at other features we’ve enhanced in 2019:

1. Integrations

In 2019 our team has done a great job and worked on the integrations with third-party tools to improve your experience in using Pics.io service in your daily workflow.

• Zapier. The service allows you to connect Pics.io with any application and get up-to-date notifications about the events happening in your Pics.io library.

• G Suite. Helps to add images to your Docs, Slides, Sheets or Forms using Pics.io add-on.

• Adobe Creative Cloud. One of the most usable integrations which helps you to get access to your assets rapidly without leaving your Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects or Premiere Pro app. Just login to Pics.io extension, select the necessary files and continue working on them in your Adobe tool.

• Webhooks. Configure more technical integrations with other apps you’re working with using webhooks.

2. Auto-sync

With this feature changes made in your Pics.io digital library are automatically synchronized to your Google Drive account. Depending on your billing plan you may take advantage of auto-sync feature. If you upload or update files in your Google Drive folder connected to Pics.io, your Google Drive storage will be automatically synchronized with your Pics.io repository at regular intervals.

3. Notification Center

Helps to check the latest activities performed in your Pics.io account by you and your teammates right in the app using our Notification Center. And stay tuned for recent Pics.io news, not to miss the info about released features.

4. Map view

One of the functionalities we’re really proud of. Our Map view mode allows you to see the geographical location of your photos and videos across the world. It’s a really great tool to have for visualization and navigation through your assets.

5. Team and granular permissions

This feature allows you to create multiple roles with different scope of the permissions depending on your teammate position in the company. As well, you may give the necessary permissions on any level of the collections hierarchy or limit access to some private folders.

6. Account switcher

With this feature, there is no need to log in and out every time you need to change the working account. Using this feature you may easily switch between multiple accounts connected to different teams in no time.

7. Trashed assets

With this feature, you don’t have to go to your Google Drive account every time you remove files by mistake. We’ve implemented Pics.io trash bin which allows you to restore or delete your assets forever.

Pics.io is continually improving its platform to make digital asset management the hub for brand management, while also adding new tools that allow users to be more creative and productive. And our priority is to do the best to meet our clients’ needs, therefore we plan to focus on the realization of other users requests within our roadmap and improve our product further in 2020.

Partnerships Opened the New Road for Company’s Development

Nowadays, each company’s workflow includes quite a number of tools and solutions to cover communication and organization within the team. In order to follow the market trends in 2019 Pics.io started building a comprehensive partners network that includes solution and technology partners, resellers and marketing integrations.

Our aim is to make Pics.io a complex solution easily used along with other tools to establish the entire company’s workflow. Successful strategic partnerships are also a way to establish presence all over the globe. Our new partners in the US and Germany are helping us to find new clients from various industries and popularize our product worldwide. We believe that this valuable sales & marketing channel will streamline our future growth and will strengthen Pics.io’s brand.

Communication with Our Users

2019 was the year of social media marketing for Pics.io. We rapidly expanded our online presence and developed our accounts in social media. Facebook became one of the main platforms for communication with our target audience, as well as the effective marketing channel helping to promote our product.

The growth of social media marketing was the natural consequence of our blog popularity growth. In 2019 Pics.io’s blog experienced 100% growth of unique daily visitors and some of the most popular posts received more than 2000 views. We presented interesting and versatile content for our readers and plan to deliver new types of content in 2020.

Get acquainted with our most popular blog posts in 2019:

• Three best apps for file comparison
• How to survive in a new era of digital mess
• Does Google Photos for business exist?
• How to organize project files in a creative agency?
• Map-Based Storytelling for Your Clients
• Google Drive vs Digital Asset Management
• Best Asset Management Tools for Video Production Agencies

More Coming in 2020!

As we begin the new year — and a new decade — we can expect many more changes and trends to emerge, shaping digital asset management best practices. Being the fast-growing company we definitely plan to follow the new trends and incorporate them within our business practices. So what new trends can we expect from DAM this coming year?

• Integration — a new trend in digital asset management will oversee developments in the UI/UX of DAM platforms, transitioning DAM from a destination mostly for marketers, to an experience for all users. Eventually integrating DAM within your organization’s tools, such as Microsoft Office, InDesign or emailing service, it will be much easier and quicker for designers, creatives and sales teams to edit and finalize content from their preferred tools.
• Personalization — today, “achieving personalized marketing across channels at scale” is a top priority. Dynamic assets are a key way to achieve this. They allow you to generate multiple renditions and adaptations of assets, so that you’re able to deliver the right asset at the right time for the right channel. Personalization across all possible customer touchpoints is extremely important today. The customized websites and branded user interfaces with DAM solution will become the trend of the year.
• In addition to auto-tagging — If process automation on a DAM platform was trending in 2019, industry demand in 2020 calls for more than auto-tagging as artificial intelligence is becoming prevalent in the DAM industry and can help with tasks such as speech transcription. , recognition of emotions in facial or speech images, detection of various conditions in images, identity verification, signaling errors in legal documents and lip reading. IA is the spotlight.
• Cloud is a priority — Two important pieces of information show this trend. According to a survey commissioned by Oracle 85% of all industry work will be transferred to the Cloud and most likely these industries will also move their media files in this movement. By 2025 80% of industries will have migrated from their local data centers to the cloud. If the cost of processing and storage technology increases as digital asset production volumes increase (from all formats) then this account will not close.
• Usability over everything — 97% of business customers mention ‘ease of use’ as the most important quality for apps. Usability is a vital part of customer service. If your product is difficult to use, it means that you are providing poor customer service and people won’t hang around. However, it’s not just about ease of use of your product or service; usability should also be taken into account during the whole customer journey — from the moment people search for your product, to reaching out to you again after using the product for getting support. The whole experience should be done as easily and smoothly and possible. In this context the role of customer support at each step of the production cycle in DAM solutions becomes more important than ever.

While some of these trends are not entirely new to Digital Asset Management and have been consolidating for some time they reveal big technological advances centered around today’s changing digital marketing landscape. With personalization and omnichannel marketing now at the forefront of marketing priorities, these 5 DAM trends will give companies the necessary capabilities, tools and data to put their ideas into practice and successfully compete in 2020. If you were thinking about investment in DAM in 2019 — the 2020 is your year to start with Pics.io.