How 5 manufacturing companies streamline collaboration with Canto
| June 30, 2021
The manufacturing industry is highly competitive, so it’s important that companies have the right assets when they need them. Canto helps teams improve digital asset management and adopt a more flexible approach to content. This enables them to produce and share more sales-ready collateral, faster.
Here’s a look at how five manufacturing companies use Canto to streamline collaboration.
Nichiha
For two decades, builders and architects have turned to Nichiha for innovative fiber cement panels that imitate natural wood, stone and brick. Nichiha relies on photography and architectural drawings to interest prospective buyers. The marketing team needed to break down barriers that made it difficult to share imagery or technical details.
“In the past, our marketing department kept everything locked up – the sales team couldn’t even get to the content. Sales and marketing were completely separate. The only way the ‘easy to buy, easy to sell’ goal was going to work was for marketing and sales to be on the same page,” says Ivy, Nichiha’s Marketing Supervisor.
Nichiha now uses Canto to easily manage all of their product imagery, videos and brand assets in one place. Marketing and sales can share digital assets seamlessly, which in turn improves workflows and collaboration between teams. As their content library grows, the Nichiha team knows they can always find the most up-to-date photos, pre-packaged and ready to go in Canto.
“Canto is really the backbone of what the marketing department does. We use it for everything. Without it, everything would be slowed down.”
Falcon Structures
Falcon Structures creates custom modular container-based structures, which are suitable for endless applications. Visual assets are critical to how the company markets and sells the wide variety of structures they offer to prospective customers.
“We have a ton of projects that go through our team daily, weekly, monthly – and they all get photographed. When we started logging photos, things got even worse. Project photos are often critical to making the sale, so I needed a way to categorize them that was not only helpful for marketing, but also for the sales team,” says Krista, Marketing Director at Falcon Structures.
With Canto, sales enablement is a breeze for both the marketing and sales teams. The sales portal gives sales a central hub for files, resources and visual content. Best of all, they can access all of this from anywhere – even while meeting with prospects and on location.
“Our success with Canto has been defined by providing a streamlined, professional and collaborative experience for our customers, vendors and partners. Canto has taken the guesswork and stress out of digital asset management.”
Read the full Falcon Structures story.
SYNLawn
SYNLawn manufactures bio-based synthetic grass for clients ranging from luxury golf courses to homeowners. Photos of products and installations are essential to help distributors sell better. SYNLawn’s marketing team has collected tens of thousands of photos, but initially had no way to centralize and organize them.
“It was turning into a burden. We decided to look for a digital asset management system to try to free up bandwidth for other things and use our time more efficiently,” says Matthew, Digital Marketing Specialist at SYNLawn. “Having a digital asset library was a necessity not only for us internally, but for the individual distributors to be able to find what they needed on their own time.”
With Canto, SYNLawn has an organized, centralized hub for product imagery – making it easy for global distributors to access the vast library of marketing assets on-demand. Distributors are also empowered to upload their own photos. This ensures local campaigns feature up-to-date photos and assets, and gives other contributors access to an even larger pool of pre-approved media.
“Our distributors are the face of our brand,” says Matthew. “They’re the ones out in the field talking to customers, making sales and putting together the installations. We use Canto to give our distributors that ‘wow’ factor.
Boral North America
Boral North America’s family of five stone brands are some of the leading manufacturers of high-quality stone veneer. The marketing team at Boral’s Stone Division helps get the right product imagery into the hands of distributors, sales reps, architectural teams and marketing agencies.
“In terms of sharing, all the information we had was scattered, and we were using multiple platforms, so you can imagine how quickly it became chaotic,” says Alessandra Roqueta, Marketing Manager of the Stone Division at Boral.
The Boral sales and architectural teams frequently meet with clients around North America. With the help of Canto Portals, they can easily find and showcase any product – from anywhere. Canto also enables the marketing team to support sales reps with the up-to-date information they need in a way that is easy for them to navigate and access.
“Our PR and social media agencies also really love Canto! We were using Dropbox with them before, and Canto is more user-friendly,” Roqueta says. “It’s easy for them to resize or change image formats in case they need something for a certain media outlet: they can just identify the size and format they need and download it directly from Canto.”
Read the full Boral North America story.
Mitsubishi Electric
Mitsubishi Electric US has been a leader in home climate control for over 30 years, offering the latest and most innovative solutions for homes and small businesses. To help support sales, the small creative team at Mitsubishi Electric sends digital assets to thousands of external contractors.
With only an outdated server, the team found it increasingly difficult to meet the growing demand for high-quality assets from outside collaborators. Canto’s clean user interface and intuitive search function made it easy for them to navigate the catalog and provide secure access to requested assets.
“Ease of search and immediate downloads are great. Our large user base loves having this level of access to our digital assets. It’s a huge improvement over previous tools we’ve used,” says Lisa Graham, Creative Services Project and Fulfillment Manager.
Since implementing Canto, the creative team at Mitsubishi Electric has improved workflows, increased productivity and strengthened their brand.