The Giant Bicycles UK team regularly works with retailers throughout the region. With over 300 retailers and a small marketing team, they needed a way to automate the process so that retailers could easily peruse and download approved brand content.
“One of the key things has always been how do we elevate our brand among retailers? So I think one of the things that we’ve identified over the last five years is how we can help elevate how the brand is communicated,” says Ricki.
Ricki wanted to create a simple workflow for retailers to access important imagery and product information. His goal was to make it easier for retailers to work with Giant Bicycles UK by providing a seamless and more enjoyable experience.
”A lot of these retailers are dealing with three, four, maybe five brands. If we provide retailers with the easiest place to get graphics or whatever they need for their shops, they will hopefully come to us rather than a competitor brand,” says Ricki.
With Giant’s extensive retailer list, getting everyone on the same page with products and branding was a challenge. Before Canto, the team relied on Google Drive for digital asset storage, but the team needed a better way to uphold consistency for their own brand while providing easy access for retailers.
“The solution we used just wasn’t quite good enough or secure enough. We had a lot of feedback from our retailers that the way that we were doing asset management before wasn’t making it easy for them to find what they needed,” says Ricki.
The Giant Bicycles UK team now stores images, videos and technical PDFs for each product in their Canto library. Ricki decided to use Canto because of the supportive team, ease of use and feature options.
“Canto is simple and user friendly. The features are what we were wanting, and the Portal is key because we have different levels of content that we want different retailers to access,” says Ricki.
Sharing with Portals
Giant Bicycles UK is able to deliver brand-approved content in a self-service method with Portals. In the retail Portal, retailers can go in, add their account number and download all the assets they need.
“When retailers land on the Portal, it’s nicely laid out. A lot of feedback we got was that it’s one of the best looking asset portals,” says Ricki.
They also have a Portal for media that excludes the pricing and technical sheets in the retailer Portal. Since this Portal is so easy to use and widely available, their images are being used more and are helping accentuate the brand.
“We keep imagery and product launch information in the media Portal, so that if the media want to access images without contacting us, they can. We’ve seen an upturn in our imagery being used in articles, which is great,” says Ricki.
Easy-to-understand analytics
In the analytics dashboard the team can see content data in Canto. The dashboard allows them to see what retailers are accessing and downloading, and gives them an idea of what’s most popular.
“One of the best things is being able to see what’s being accessed and see the data behind it. The data indicates where the trend is moving or what the retailers are really liking,” says Ricki.
These analytics are helping the team build their digital asset strategy. They’re able to make data-driven decisions on creating the most useful assets for retailers.
“We supply social assets for retailers, and before Canto we would just send it out and hope that they would use it. Now we can actually see the download rates on them. Some of the assets hardly anybody uses so we can go, ‘right, that’s not working.’ Some of them are used loads so we know we’ve got a really good piece of content,” says Ricki.
Brand ambassador uploading
Giant Bicycles UK works with cyclists who advocate for and promote the brand. Before Canto, ambassadors would send photos straight to Ricki’s colleagues, but after changes within the company, these photos were getting lost. With upload links, ambassadors upload their own action photos right into Giant’s Canto library.
“With upload links, ambassadors always have somewhere they can put their content. There’s also always somewhere that we can go and access it. It’s now a very stable process,” says Ricki.
