Canto helps Ferronordic share branded assets with a global audience

With operations spread across three countries, Ferronordic engages in multichannel marketing along with organizing social media events and targeted email campaigns. Much of the company’s advertising consists of customer testimonials that showcase people sharing how they use equipment manufactured by Ferronordic’s brands on a regular basis. Filming and photographing these popular “job stories” generated a lot of content that needed to be stored for review and future production.

Unfortunately, the company’s approach to asset management made this task incredibly difficult for the marketing team. Ceren Wende recognized this almost as soon as she started in her role as Marketing and Communications Director.

“It was a mess, basically,” she recalls. “Just a bunch of folders on a server somewhere. We had to have someone go and dig through these folders. They were difficult to access because a server might be in Russia, but the person looking for something was sitting in Germany or in Sweden, and no one knew what was what.”

Not only were assets difficult to find, but they were also not being used to their full potential. Without a centralized system in place to organize and view content, a huge portion of images that cost a lot of money to produce were simply going to waste.

“Photos were being taken and just dumped into a folder,” Wende says. “They were being used once somewhere on social media and then completely forgotten about. We just did the whole thing over and over again.”

The company made the decision to invest in a digital asset management (DAM) platform to consolidate and organize its growing library of assets. Some of the key features Wende knew her team would need included link sharing, the ability upload and tag large numbers of assets, and support for multiple users in multiple languages.

After reviewing multiple providers available on the market, Ferronordic made the decision to adopt Canto, which provided an ideal combination of functionality and usability that was well-suited to the company’s multinational operation.

Gathering and Organizing Assets for Multilingual Users

The first step toward getting a better handle on Ferronordic’s assets involved transferring content from existing servers into the Canto library. Much of the work was done manually, with a member of the marketing team going through each folder to identify what needed to be tagged and uploaded into Canto. As files were transferred, the team created a new organizational and metadata structure that started with identifying files by country, then broke other categories such as project name, location of photo shoot, and equipment models. All content was also translated into three languages: English, Russian, and German.

“For the marketing team, we use it in English,” Wende says. “But we considered that some people in Russia, or in Germany for that matter, might not speak English as well. We wanted to make sure that everybody was able to use it.”

Once the structure was in place for easier access and searching, the team provided access to people throughout the company so they could locate and retrieve assets as they were needed. Thanks to Canto’s intuitive interface and the well-organized library, there was no need to provide extensive training on how to use it.

“We just launched it and gave out the instructions,” Wende recalls. “We have about a hundred users and people seem to be using it. For us, it was more important that the marketing team was able to better manage our assets.”

Sharing and Accessing Content with Ease

Consolidating assets into Canto allowed the marketing team to better manage approval workflows for photos and videos related to promotional projects. Whereas in the past, files were placed in unorganized folders without going through any kind of review process, now the team can preview assets and upload only approved content to help streamline searching, file management, and production in the future.

Sharing those assets was also made much easier using Canto Portals. In addition to the general portal, the marketing team now uses a dedicated portal for uploading social media assets each month to share them with a third-party agency. Assets can also be distributed to suppliers via link sharing or by permitting them to register to access the general portal.

Since some of Ferronordic’s suppliers also utilized Canto, the marketing team has the ability to share assets with them or retrieve content without duplicating any files. “Our suppliers have their own portals,” Wende explains. “We don’t reupload their assets into our own portal because we can always go back there and download it. We don’t want to flood the portal with tons of assets that already exist somewhere else.”

Establishing and Reinforcing Brand Identity

Prior to adopting Canto, Ferronordic didn’t have brand guidelines to ensure that content remained consistent across multiple channels. Consolidating assets into Canto provided an excellent opportunity for Wende to establish more control over the company’s brand identity.

“Before I joined, we didn’t have brand guidelines, so I wrote them,” Wende says. “That was the first step. The next step was to get a platform where people can access assets and then put the guidelines in there. Now you always have a point of reference, people use the same material, and you know where the guidelines are.”

Implementing a single source of truth for the Ferronordic brand proved helpful when the company launched a new website. Not only could people working on the site find photos for different pages more easily, but they could also easily reference the brand guidelines to ensure that everything remained aligned with the company’s identity. Canto’s branded portals also ensure that Ferronordic provides a consistent user experience, both for internal employees and external partners.

Canto’s DAM features provided Ferronordic with the tools it needed to take better control over its content, streamline production, and get more value out of its assets. Consolidating the company’s photos and videos into a single source of truth has allowed the marketing team to work smarter and spend less time searching for the content they need to create compelling multimedia campaigns.

“If you have more than one or two people in a marketing team and you sit in different locations, you need to have a system like this,” Wende says. “Otherwise, it’s just a mess. I feel like I have a much better grip over the assets in our team.”

With Canto in place to connect Ferronordic’s creative projects across multiple countries, the marketing team can now focus on taking its promotional efforts to a whole new level.