Get branding tips and expert advice delivered straight to your inbox.
With increasing demand on teams — both within and outside of marketing — to be in more places with more collateral than ever before, a fast-growing production category is emerging: content automation. Content automation refers to the use of technology to scale content output at speed, and, most importantly, on-brand. It cuts down the effort needed for iterative tasks, freeing up marketers and creatives for more strategic tasks.
Brandfolder Content Automation is leading the charge in this space and Brandfolder customers are reaping the benefits. With the recent acquisition of Outfit, Brandfolder has secured the world-leading content automation platform and developed it into an integral part of its offering. The world’s No. 1 digital asset management (DAM) platform coupled with the most advanced content automation software = a match made in marketing heaven.
What Is Content Automation and Why Care About It?
Brandfolder Content Automation is a new breed of online brand management. You can rest assured your brand will stay consistent no matter who on your team is creating assets for it. Content Automation empowers everyone — designers and non-designers alike — to create and deploy content, keeping it on-brand so that it not only remains effective but strengthens its value and increases ROI with every piece of content produced. We call this the law of increasing returns. Once an organization implements brand automation, they quickly see a measurable return. And the more the technology is used, the greater the rate of return.
Stay on-brand and compliant
All businesses are interested in brand control, but the need for guaranteed brand control and compliance is top of the list for financial institutions and government organizations. There are a few elements to brand control and the ways in which Content Automation supports it.
- Simply staying on-brand. Large distributed teams (including franchises, universities and banks) need tons of variations and high-volume branded content to display in their stores or branches. Before Content Automation, they either wait in a workflow queue or they go rogue and try to produce work themselves. Content Automation allows them to produce content, and because of template constraints, the marketing or brand team can rest easy.
- Compliance with rules and regulations. By automating and/or locking down disclaimers, font sizes, terms and conditions and other elements, Content Automation ensures users can be compliant and reduces the risk of human error.
- Visibility and approvals. Admin users have visibility over everything being produced. As well as viewing all activity, they can also set approval workflows and ensure they have oversight over what is important.
Respond to market conditions quickly
Moving quickly and nimbly in the market is crucial, particularly for retail customers, where rules and regulations change frequently. Content Automation helps users respond to market conditions with speed and efficiency. Users can update price points and offers through a self-serve model and get offers to market immediately. During COVID-19, when the rules were changing day to day, our franchise customers were able to produce updated, region-specific social distancing and mask rules instantly.
Scale big or go home
Automating one asset is nice — hugely helpful, even. But producing multiple documents at different sizes i.e., social content or multiple pieces of the same creative with variable data i.e., personalizing thousands of flyers using multi-edit and CSV file input? Game-changing. The ability to easily localize content across different geographies for distributed teams means Content Automation also allows for go-to-market coordination and brand consistency.
Empower everyone to create on-brand content
The benefit of empowering your organization with a tool like Content Automation is a gift that keeps on giving. By enabling your marketers, designers and brand managers to focus on the work they’re great at by offloading time consuming content requests to distributed teams, they can spend their time on far more valuable and impactful projects. And at the same time, teams across the organization are empowered to produce on-brand content themselves without bogging down the design team but needing little to no design skills of their own. This allows for more content that is readily available to support ongoing initiatives all while reducing the backlog of requests and reliance on agencies.
Content Automation Tools: The Whole Is Truly Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
By bringing together Smartsheet’s collaborative work management platform, our award-winning DAM and now best-in-class content automation and templating, we can truly offer an end-to-end solution to support your content life cycle. With Content Automation on board, we cement our position as the world’s leading DAM. Brandfolder by Smartsheet allows users to scale content and respond to the market at lightning speed, superseding what any one function can do on its own. By marrying digital asset and work management with the power of content automation, backed by Smartsheet’s mission to change the way the world works, the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.