Feel the love
We always love to hear which features different clients like best about their uniquely customised Brand Management Software. But then one of our guys said, why don’t we ask our own internal teams about their favourite features of the inhouse Brandworkz system? After all, we face the same challenges that all brands have to tackle in managing their brand and digital assets – and our version of Brandworkz is an indispensable element of the martech stack that we rely on every day.
So we did a quick poll of our own team members to see which five features of Brandworkz they love the best. And the result is…
Insights
High in the Brandworkz team’s love-it top five is the Insights tab, developed to give administrators a penetrating overview of where and how their digital assets are actually being used all around the web – whether correctly or incorrectly. It’s certainly been a game-changer for our own marketing team, providing a monitoring capability that makes managing the brand even easier.
Insight also gives us a direct link to any site on the internet that’s using our content. With that comes a useful level of control – requesting a backlink, for example, or asking for particular content to be removed if we aren’t happy with its location. Similarly, Brandworkz assets appearing in documents and applications can be found via our integrations, so we can see whether an image is being used in Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Word, PowerPoint or Outlook files.
Smart Image Embed
Another favourite of our marketing team is the new Smart Image Embed that enables us to embed images dynamically in our external website.
Interestingly, the iconic footwear and clothing brand, Dr Martens, uses this feature to its own particular advantage by accessing and managing all the images on its e-commerce website direct from a single source in Brandworkz. That’s how the marketing team can ensure that every image variable for every product is replicated on the e-commerce site in exactly the right size and resolution, while images updated in the brand hub are automatically updated in the end-location.
With just a single master image for each product shot held centrally in the brand hub, Dr Marten’s brand experience consistency has been improved on a global scale because there’s now so little opportunity for human error – and no more silos of replicated information.
XML Integrations
Another cool feature added recently to Brandworkz is XML Integration. With this you can pull text content from a website or third party data source, straight into the Web-to-Publish module – exceptionally useful if you want to create print documents from digital content.
Our client The University of Greenwich has demonstrated just how brilliantly XML Integration can be deployed. They needed to put production of course materials in the hands of the non-design based teams that run the courses – without compromising brand consistency or course standards regulations. The solution was to connect the university’s own Content Management System (Squizz) and written content platform (Banner) and pull all the details about the hundreds of courses they offer straight into Brandworkz.
Now their users can select the relevant course from a dropdown, pull in the approved prospectus text from Banner and the entrance requirements from Squizz and the system will auto-fill the pages of the appropriate template. They can then shape the pages, adjust the layout, choose from approved course images and send the artwork to print – all in a few minutes, rather than days. That’s countless hours saved by not having to recreate documents offline with the bonus of improved consistency by linking digital presence and written content.
Reporting
A recent upgrade to the brand reporting software in Brandworkz now presents all information about the Digital Asset Management System in a more meaningful and visual way. We marketers have to devote much time to harvesting and analysing data in order to optimise operations and find out what’s working and what’s not.
So this enhanced analytics feature that can draw in data from multiple sources and display it via interactive dashboards makes a huge difference in monitoring system performance and how assets are being used. All data in the reports is now interactive too, so you can click on any part of any chart or diagram and instantly drill down into the information.
MS Office Document Management
We love the MS Office Document Management module chiefly because it increases productivity and saves us bags of time – as well as keeping documents consistent in tone, look and feel. It’s powered by Templafy and ensures that every document used by our team is accurate and on-brand.
Users no longer have to recreate presentations, proposals, pricing sheets, letters, info sheets and so on, because all available on-brand compliant materials are readily accessible and can dynamically populate areas of a document with the individual’s personal and company details. The system also reports on who is using what materials, letting you know which of your materials are the most significant and which are performing best.
But that’s only the top five…
Brandworkz is chock full of helpful and intuitive features that make it easy for marketers to manage their digital assets, ensure brand consistency and build a stronger brand. Here we’ve looked at some of the favourites, but if you would like to see more of Brandworkz please get in touch with Neil Monahan at neil.monahan@brandworkz.com
