Picture the scene: You started working in your company's marketing department four months ago. It is Monday morning, you haven't finished your coffee. You get your first chat message in Microsoft Teams:

Hey Robert, can you send me the company boilerplate in Portuguese?

It happens once in a while that a coworker asks for a text snippet in a specific language. These text snippets are important, must be accurate and approved by your management, and require proper translation. From personal experience though, the marketing text snippets are often not organized or stored centrally. Sometimes you have to find the person who used them last and get it from her. In an ideal world the following things are defined and clear:

1. Management: Where do we store marketing snippets like a company boilerplate?
2. Maintenance: How are marketing text snippets maintained? Who is responsible?
3. Translation: How is the boilerplate translated? How are marketing text snippets translated?
4. Permission: Where and how do we use which snippet?

These small text snippets should be part of your overall content strategy.

What are Common Marketing Text Snippets?

tl,dr: company boilerplate, testimonials, newsletter footers, and many more

In Marketing, you manage and organize various text snippets:

• Company Boilerplate
• Social Media Profile Bio / Slogan
  
• Key-Value Proposition
  
• Customer Testimonials
  
• Newsletter Footer
• Legal Company Info
• Out-of-Office Message
• you name it

Where to Store Marketing Text Snippets?

tl,dr: in a Digital Asset Management System (DAM) that can store text without files.

Let us look at the company boilerplate as an example. A company boilerplate is crucial and used on partner pages, integrations, and several other areas. Internal and external stakeholders need to have this information. Still, you don't need it for your everyday work. The boilerplate must be accurate and approved by the management. The company boilerplate is not necessarily an image or a document.

1. You should have this information available to all employees (internal) and to various stakeholders (external).
2. You need to search for the boilerplate text. You need it sporadically, so you may forget its file location after ~1 year.
3. You need to see that it is approved and may request review & approval.
4. Different parties have different access like management can update but employees can only view it.

An intranet is usually not accessible to external parties. A local file server requires to save it as a document. You cannot set granular people permissions yourself, this is usually done via IT. You cannot run validation workflows for local files.

The best place to store marketing text snippets is a Digital Asset Management System (DAM) - like Picturepark.

Picturepark can store text blocks without a file format - this is called a Virtual Type. Virtual Types enable you to create content inside Picturepark that adheres to a defined structure without worrying about the output format of the content. Common to each of these (and other) Virtual Types is a defined structure:

• News Item (Structure: Headline, Subhead, Body)
  
• Company Boilerplate (Structure: Company, Boilerplate, Product Description, Screenshots, Logo)
• Social Media Profile (Name, Slogan, Keywords)

Why Store all Marketing Text Snippets in a DAM?

tl,dr: a single source of truth, search and automation

There are several benefits of having this information inside your Digital Asset Management (DAM):

• You find the boilerplate among your marketing and product material.
• You can apply the guidelines (e.g. approval, archival, translation) from your overall content strategy.
• You can decide who can use or edit the boilerplate with permissions.
• You can search for the boilerplate text and all its metadata like date, content type, or usage.
• You can create update or validation tasks when the DAM publishes new products (product launch), somebody updates screenshots or logos, or Corp Com publishes a recent press release.

How To Maintain Marketing Text Snippets?

tl,dr: Link Items & Add Validation Automation

Your DAM should have the possibility to link files and run workflows. Automation will remember to update the boilerplate when linked logo or screenshot files change.

1. Link Boilerplate Item to Logo and Screenshots.
2. Create Automation that requests boilerplate validation when a linked item changes.

See the Picturepark Boilerplate including all Screenshots distributed from the Picturepark marketing instance.

How to Translate Marketing Text Snippets?

tl,dr: with Picturepark & DeepL (the best translation system currently available)

Picturepark integrates with DeepL via the DeepL connector. This solution achieves automatic translation for every text you manage in your DAM - this includes all metadata, product descriptions, copyright notices, and keywords with synonyms for searching the DAM.

1. Create a virtual type in Picturepark and add your company boilerplate in a single language — usually your native tongue.
2. Add as many other marketing texts as virtual types - these texts are really small. Just bits and bytes. You don't need to worry about File Storage costs.
3. Start DeepL Translation by selecting the required languages. DeepL translates and you validate the translation. You will retain control over your data — you can check and assess the values with a native speaker, ensuring total accuracy without the workload associated with manual translation.
4. Request validation using Picturepark automation from your managers who will need to sign off on the information in a final review.

This automated process for translation and notification is the best solution. It removes any points of friction or operational inefficiencies.

How to Permit Marketing Text Snippets?

Every DAM will offer comprehensive permissions. In Picturepark you apply Content Permission Sets very easily. You can add this as a step to your translation-validation-automation and make the boilerplate available after final review.

You can also apply multiple permission sets for your different stakeholders.

1. Permission set for internal employees to view.
2. Permission set for internal managers to edit and approve.
3. Permission set for external stakeholders to view.
4. Permission set for integrations (your website) to embed. (Tipp: direct embedding from the DAM simplifies updates, as you just update 1x in the DAM. )