Broxap creates curb appeal with a searchable image library

Broxap’s clients include local governments, the National Health Service, the UK Ministry of Defence, schools and universities, construction sector clients, and many other commercial and private organizations.

As a 75-year-old business with such a wide range of projects, Broxap has a huge archive of images, many a testament to the durability of their products. Before Canto, their images and digital assets were stored in a restricted access library, which only the graphics team could access or knew how to navigate.

Over time, employees with this knowledge left the business. The remaining team members had the challenge of locating images and files through trawling the many folders and subfolders.

Enhancing Broxap’s website and e-commerce offering is a high priority for the team. It was important for Michael to find a solution that saved the team time, unleashed their image archive and fit in with Magento and the rest of Broxap’s tech stack.

“We’ve always seen technology to be at the forefront for Broxap – streamlining and making the company’s valuable assets more available. We want to ensure we move with the times and we have the latest and the best technology and solutions available to us,” explains Michael.

Broxap wanted to centralize digital assets, so sales, marketing and purchasing teams can all use them. Although a PIM came into consideration, it was clear that Canto digital asset management was a better fit for their needs.

“We’ve got all these images that are only accessible to the old graphics team and nobody understood their filing,” comments Michael. “We are going through lots of changes now. Tech is at the forefront for us. We chose Canto as one of the solutions to take us on the journey.”

Broxap’s marketing team uses images in their email marketing, websites and product promotion. Having a central place to source, share, edit and download digital content is more efficient, meaning the marketing team can excel.

“Being able to locate images for marketing has become more streamlined and in turn saves us time. Using the tags, we are able to search via name, location, SKU and more. This makes it easy to find the image you are looking for without knowing the exact name of the file,” comments Jordzhah.

It’s now easy for Jordzhah to find and use all the images and documents needed for marketing projects like case studies.

Jordzhah explains, “Canto has made it quicker and simpler to access files and update the website images. It’s been a more fluid process since we began using Canto.”

Bringing out the best photography

Broxap invests in their own photography to show off products in real-life settings. Each freelance photographer has access to their own Portal, so their photos go straight into Canto.

“Why bring all the images and store them on a flat file system? It wasn’t right. Why would you put your best assets in a cupboard?” says Michael. “We provision each freelancer their own Portal so they can upload, but only see their own area. Photos get put into the folder structure that we’ve created and that works really well.”

Broxap has also created Portals to equip resellers of their outdoor gym equipment with a branded asset database.

Going beyond cloud storage and file transfer sites

Broxap’s marketing and sales teams have both saved time because of the features in Canto that go far beyond cloud storage.

“Canto has allowed us to share images without the use of other third-party applications such as Dropbox, or WeTransfer. Having the ability to send a link to an image to a colleague has made the process much more streamlined. Combined with the easy-to-use filing system and meta tags, Canto saves us time,” says Jordzhah

For downloading assets, Broxap has set up various user profiles for different business functions. This streamlines the workflow for sales, product and marketing staff. They can download an image in the right shape and size for a web banner, social post or presentation slide with a few clicks.

“We use different user profiles for sales and marketing with prefixed sizes so sales can download images that are a suitable size for the job, email banner or other, and at the right resolution,” says Michael.

Enabling sales with a media library

Michael understood that different teams would have different needs when it came to metadata strategy. He consulted leaders of the sales and marketing teams to identify the minimum criteria for each function. This allowed the teams to feel the benefits from the word go and left room for the project to grow and mature.

The Broxap team adds detailed tags to images as they add them to Canto. Now salespeople can run broad or specific searches for the images they need. Having a huge product photo archive available to the sales team is creating a competitive advantage for Broxap: Competitors often rely on CGI and 3D models and can’t show the product in-situ.

“That’s where the power of the tag indexing comes in. They can see this is the finished product installed in a certain location. We’re showing that we’ve manufactured it before and can deliver quality,” explains Michael.

Now the sales team can have the latest versions of branded assets and the marketing team can be confident about brand consistency.

“Canto helps get brand consistency throughout the business. If someone needs a logo or the latest letterhead I don’t have to worry anymore, they can get it, it’s in Canto,” commented Michael.

With Canto in place, the days of time-consuming searches and asset requests from sales are long gone. Now, Michael and the marketing team can quickly and easily find the images they want and get them to where they need to be.

“With Canto, we’re empowering our members of staff across the business to be able to utilize our assets again, rather than being served with a single photo from a graphics team. We’ve reduced the number of hours that the marketing team would trawl through the old file system. Now it’s a quick search. You know what you’ve got in front of you,” says Michael.

Speaking as an IT Manager, Michael concludes, “From an IT perspective. I don’t need to worry about the backups. I know it’s secure no matter what happens, it’s always available in the cloud. Safe and secure.”