BrandIn is a tool that can save your brand and your time, but BrandIn really comes to the fore when you use it as a team. Serving up your best branded assets through one centralised source can be hugely powerful, and so it’s worth making sure you have alignment in all the right places to get your team fuelled up and ready to go. Think of this as your pre-flight checklist.

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Who will use BrandIn?

Like we said, BrandIn works best when it’s used collaboratively. When everyone can access the same centralised library of brand assets, you kiss goodbye to outdated, off-brand content, and hello to consistency and efficiency.

Here are your pre-flight user questions:

Who are your content creators? Think through who in your team creates content in PowerPoint or Word – you might want to divide the list in regular and occasional users. You might want to consider trialling BrandIn with your regular users first. BrandIn is free for up-to 4 users, and priced per user thereafter. You can estimate annual cost with our calculator for small business here, and enterprise here.

Who are your administrators? Consider who will manage your BrandIn account. The first user to sign up will hold admin privileges – this can be edited at a later date. Admins will set up and typically manage the SharePoint asset libraries; they will also be the main contact for billing purposes.

What is the skill level of your team? There’s little-to-no learning curve with BrandIn because it’s all natively built into PowerPoint and Word. You don’t need to learn a new piece of software, it’s as simple as navigating a folder structure. Even the most extreme technophobes should be able to pick it up in a few minutes. Having said that, you might want to schedule a quick intro call to show users how BrandIn works and where to find content. And you might want to have a smaller group of adopters to begin with.

How will I get it?

BrandIn is available here on the Microsoft app store. Depending on the way your IT infrastructure is set up, however, you might need some help from your IT department to get it enabled.

Here are your pre-flight IT questions:

Do I have the ‘Add-ins’ button enabled? The simplest way to get BrandIn is to click ‘add-ins’ from the ‘Home’ tab in PowerPoint or Word. From here you can search for BrandIn and click ‘Add’. If you have this button enabled, check this one off and move to the next question.

If you don’t, you can still get BrandIn, you’ll need to contact your IT department. They can either enable the ‘Add-ins’ button, or add BrandIn manually as an admin-managed add-in. The full details for your IT administrators are linked here.

Can I build centralised libraries on SharePoint? BrandIn creates a link between PowerPoint and Word and your nominated SharePoint site. This means you don’t have to share potentially sensitive content with third parties, or wait for libraries to be updated. Your nominated BrandIn administrator will need to have the ability to edit folders on your SharePoint site. If that’s true for you, you’re all set!

If not, contact your IT department. They can either update your account to give you edit privileges, or you can provide them with the content that will populate your BrandIn account and they can upload it to a SharePoint destination for you.

How do I set it up?

BrandIn provides you with a way to bring all of your great content into the Microsoft 365 Office app you’re using without needing to search through libraries or online, so it’s worth spending a little time building a full brand kit to give your team access to everything they might need when building slides and documents.

Here are your pre-flight steps for building your content library:

Collate: Begin by collating your best content. Ask your team to provide you with links to the content they use regularly, or any ‘best examples’ they’ve created. Some examples are: slides, images, icons, logos.

Curate: Once you have your content you can begin to curate your library to be the ‘best of the best’. Not only will this be a good opportunity to see any inconsistencies in what your team has been using, but it allows you to level set and approve only your best content.

Here’s our recommended starting list:

  • PowerPoint template: Every company has one, but not every company has a good one. This article should help you run a little template diagnostic to make sure yours is helping not hindering. If you need help giving your template an overhaul pre-BrandIn, take a look at our bespoke Templates and Toolkit service.
  • Word template: Not every company has one, but if you do, make sure it’s included.
  • Model slides: This will be everything from slides that look beautiful, to slides that your team use a lot. Remember, they can be fully-templated with simple text edit capabilities, or they can be layouts that allow for more freedom in content creation. We think it’s best to have a mix. If the slides your team uses a lot aren’t that beautiful, we can help you there too. You can download our free PowerPoint toolkit that will give you a few layouts to start with, you can also get our help building bespoke slides from scratch, or refreshing what you have.
  • Logos and brand-specific files: Include any branded collateral. Top tip – make sure you name files as you add them in. If you have logos or graphics for specific purposes, add a reference in the file name (e.g. event-only) or you can create sub-folders (e.g. Event assets) or use a dedicated workspace.
  • Icons: If you have a specific icon library that you use, upload your individual SVGs or PNGs. If you want added efficiency down the line, label each icon so that users can search for specific icons from a wider library. Alternatively, you can create sub-folders in your icon library and group icons into themes to help users navigate your content more easily.
  • Images and illustrations: You can take the same approach with images and illustrations. For images, if you don’t want to rename your files, BrandIn will leverage the AI-generated metadata, enabling simple search functionality.

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