Evolution of drum sales: how Pearl streamlined content marketing with Canto DAM
| September 20, 2018
Look at a picture of a drum set inside a catalog and you’ll see so much more than just an instrument. The image represents hopes and dreams – the tool of an aspiring artist. Designs illuminate the photo, provoking imagination to take you on stage, playing a gig in front of cheering crowds.
Pearl, the world’s largest drum manufacturer, understood the marketing principle of capturing imaginations when it began printing drum catalogs. The folks at Pearl recognized the importance of its product, and the impact images and details of drum sets could have for potential buyers. Pearl Drums inspired its customers through detailed images in printed catalogs during the sixties and seventies – and this hasn’t wavered since moving into the digital content marketing era. With the help of digital asset management (DAM) best practices, Pearl has maintained dominance in the digital age and helped artists reach their musical dreams.
How Pearl used Canto to thrive in the age of content marketing
Canto helped support a company that sells a tangible product like drums and enabled it to sell in the digital environment. Canto addressed the specific needs of Pearl Drums, as they do with all their customers. With Canto, Pearl successfully organized photos and important drum set details into a cloud-based digital asset management system.
Canto listened to the needs and concerns of Pearl, and squashed any reservations it had with a few trial runs. In watching Canto’s webinar, it shows a demo of how how Derek Wolfford, Marketing Manager of Integrated Media at Pearl, has adapted the system to meet the company’s various needs – from uploading field photography to professionally sharing content with nearly 2,000 distributors.
Derek explains the beginnings of Pearl’s need for data storage, and the epiphany he reached in deciding it needed a concrete, organized system for images and other content:
“The digital revolution happened. The content, photos, and videos, and we would get things from artists on tour, so there became a need to create a database for not only first name, last name, but also what band did they play with, what drums do they play with, what sizes, how long have they been with this band, a picture of the kit front and back and other affiliations, simple companies, big companies, lots of information to dig into, so I created the first artist database.”
Derek had to bring this content together not just for himself but for his sales staff and the Pearl distributors across the United States. The sales team needed access to crucial information about drum kits, artists and affiliations to present to clients. Pearl dealers needed similar information and photos so individual branches could thrive.
Using digital asset management, the sales staff could instantly locate necessary images or specifications from Pearl’s content library. The dealers built their websites using images and details from the database as well. These crucial changes helped Pearl’s teams continue as the drum kings of the digital era.
Boosting Pearl’s content marketing success without increasing the workload of its IT team
Derek emphatically stated that one of the most important aspects of trusting Pearl’s digital content to Canto was the limited involvement from its own IT department. He recalled having to choose between Canto and another DAM, and credits Canto’s ability to ease pressure off the IT team as one of the features that won Pearl over.
His explanation of potential problems for IT demonstrates confidence in Canto’s ability to manage hangups in the transition to digital:
“Pre-Canto, some of the hi-res images our sales staff [and] marketing staff would try to send to a dealer would just completely jam our email servers and you know, a constant nightmare for our IT guys being pulled off of a project to fix something as simple as an email server thing so this has completely taken the IT guys out of the equation, which they appreciate and everything is simply done through Canto.”
With minimal IT involvement, Pearl Drums is able to continue its progress as elite instrument producers in a digital market.
Due to the efforts of Derek Wolfford, his team and support from Canto’s digital asset management software, Pearl Drums took the ultimate step into the content marketing age. Though the print catalogs may be changed to a digital format, unchanged are the dreams Pearl delivers to aspiring drummers hoping to find the perfect drum set to bring their ambitions to life.