Why we built a DAM - that Blogs

Why Brandkit merges Digital Asset Management, a self-service Brand Portal and a Blog into a single centralized Brand/Media Centre. 

What is Brandkit?

Brandkit’s unique approach incorporates:

• an AI driven Content Database and Search Engine
• Brand Management
• Digital Asset Management
• an Image & Video Library
• a public Brand Portal or Media Centre 

… into a single unified solution available from a single URL.

Brands, for instance, can store and organize all their images, videos, artwork, and written content, such as press releases, in one place. Providing brands with a single source of truth.

Among the numerous benefits of this approach - helping employees and partners to stay on brand, and helping the media get your story straight, are compelling.

Learn more about Brandkit® here.

B2B - not B2C

Many brands have two audiences broadly defined as B2C (end-user customer) and B2B (staff/trade/media).

Over time, these Brands typically need two separate websites, that each serves the different audiences and purposes.

For example, a Destination Marketing brand like <em>Tourism New Zealand</em> operates multiple web sites. One that promotes New Zealand as a place to visit which is aimed at prospective tourists and separate sites for the trade (e.g. inbound travel companies, Airlines, etc) and Media (e.g. Newspapers, Travel Magazines, etc).

Brandkit serves the latter B2B audience, rather than<em> the B2C audience.</em>

Brands use Brandkit to create a <em>Brand or Media Center</em> dedicated to serving their B2B Staff/Trade/Media audience. These users are then invited to access and use the Brand’s official content, rather than say an image found on Google, to share and tell the Brand’s story, in an authentic way.

Why Brandkit?

Brandkit saves Marketing Teams a lot of time and extra work by:

• Automating a lot of the curation and management of Brand content.
• Engaging storytellers with fast access to official brand content to match their storytelling needs.
• Communicating accurate terms of use, licensing and usage without additional work. 
• Removing the need to deal with simple requests for content with a [https://www.brandkit.io/pages/brand-portal](self-service portal) and time-saving automation.

Why blog functionality?

A blog is just a technical term for chronologically ordered content.  

The keyword in the above statement is <em>”content”</em>.So if we accept that a blog post (or a press release, or announcement, story idea, etc) is “brand content”, then we can also consider that each <em>post</em> can be considered a <em>brand asset </em>that should be curated, managed, shared and reused.

It has become common practice in Content Marketing circles, to <em>republish</em> previously published articles, and posts, particularly the posts that historically performed best in terms of search engine traffic, clicks and shares. For brands that practice Content Marketing, this collection of Posts can grow exponentially. 

In fact, a priority for many marketing teams is to grow inbound traffic and leads through content marketing - whether that be, a visual content post on Instagram or a written content post on LinkedIn. So there is plenty of both visual and written content being created and published.

Lost in translation

Over time, as the content is published out in the wild, gets linked-to, shared, copied and reposted, the brand story can start to get pretty loose and off message. The is exacerbated with staff turnover or when new team members, new partners join in the fun.

For anyone in the team, let alone a new team member, it’s hard to see the full picture of what content came before, or is available for use right now - leading to missteps and sometimes unnecessary work recreating previously held content. 

Often, past content can (and should) be regurgitated with minor edits instead.Brandkit excels in surfacing all that content, whether a digital asset such as the latest product image, or a written asset such as last years press release, saving everyone time and reducing inertia.

Think of a Brandkit blog as a way to:

• Gather, centralize and curate the Brand's written content.
• Easily find your written content even if it's published in many places. 
• Update staff, trade partners, resellers and the media on what's new.
• Talk about what content or campaign you'd like them to focus on. 
• Keep your marketing team and partners engaged with your content
• Help encourage the use of your brand content resources, the way you'd like them to be used.
• Share story ideas to help energize storytelling.

How it works

• Publish new articles as Posts in the Brandkit blog using the built-in editor.
• Copy and paste in articles created and published elsewhere.
• Import Posts in bulk from other systems using the csv importer.
• Tag your Posts with Tags from your approved Tags list in your Brandkit account - this ensures that Assets such as images, can be found with the same tag.
• The same Tags are used in Posts and Assets - so you can tightly integrate Assets with Posts.

Once you’ve got your posts into Brandkit, our search engine indexes the posts and makes them searchable via Title,Tag, Summary, and Author.

Right now we offer a <em>Posts</em> search page and search results arranged much like Assets. Plus a Posts Feed widget which can be placed in any Portal page and links to the Blog page (see example below).

In the future, we’ll be offering a unified search result.

And like many things in Brandkit®, the Blog is optional and customizable.

Talk to your Brandkit account manager about configuring the Blog feature for your own Brandkit.