Why Use Reach Forms & Campaigns

If you're using Brandle (or thinking about using it), you probably have a fairly large presence on the web and the daily management of it may be distributed across teams spread out across the country or the world. Trying to build, maintain, and govern your corporate inventory of this web presence (including other vital information like which country, region, language does it serve, which brand or brands it represents, and which team members or agencies are managing it) can be hard if not nearly impossible to do. This is where Reach Forms and Campaigns come to the rescue.

Reach Forms and Campaigns are a great way to identify the POPs (points-of-presence) and information about those POPs you need to monitor including websites, social media pages/accounts, blogs, domain names, and even micro-pages on industry networks). This process augments your Brandle Discovery and it has the added benefit of having other people apply the Tags and Contacts needed for accurate and detailed monitoring, reporting, and analysis. Many hands make light work.

The key reasons that our customers use Reach Forms include:

• Have employees, contractors, and agencies submit all corporate-owned POPs that exist globally to have a single-source and complete inventory and ensure they are appropriately tagged.
• Have employees (e.g mortgage loan officers, registered investment advisors, etc.) submit the websites, blogs, social accounts, and pages on vertical networks they use to promote their business. This is critical for regulated businesses.
• Create a standard "New Account Form"  for employees, contractors, agencies, etc. to submit POPs they create in the course of their work. Pairing a "New Account Form" with a standard Inventory Search page (also a Brandle Feature) reduces the chances that people create duplicate accounts, saving wasted the time and effort.
• Create a standard "Suspicious Account Form" for people in your organization to submit POPs that appear like they may be infringing on a brand or trade name. Pairing the submission form with a standard Inventory Search page allows your colleagues to verify if the POP is already known property before submitting it, reducing your workload and allowing your team to focus on the appropriate remediation.
• Assign the correct tags and contacts to POPs. The governance team might know that certain accounts exist, but might need people from the teams who actually manage the accounts on a daily basis to apply the appropriate tags and contacts to ensure accuracy (and distribute the workload).
• Collect POP information from partners and other 3rd-parties. Perhaps your company has a certified professional program or authorized dealer program, and you would like to monitor the POPs of the professionals who associate with your brand to ensure that they are following certification and branding guidelines. 

You can send forms to your target audience via a Campaign or you can provide a link (URL) to your intended audience. A person does not need to have an account in the Brandle Presence Manager to submit information via a Reach Form (or use the Inventory Search Page). Many companies place links to the these forms (and the Inventory Search Page) on their company intranet for their Global team to access from a well-known location.

So when do you choose to send a Campaign? The most common customer scenarios are when you need to collect POP data :

• from a large target audience (such as your sales department, customer service department, certified professionals, etc.)
• from an audience that may not be responsive and you want the ability to track who has responded and resend the campaign to non-respondents (until total audience response is achieved).
• by a deadline (such as a deadline for an internal brand audit or regulatory audit, deadline for delivering detailed reports to upper management, legal department deadline for an acquisition or divestiture, etc.)

One of the best reasons to use Campaigns is that the Form you are sending will self-populate with the correct contact name and email address that you already have in your Brandle Contacts. Then when the recipient completes the form, the data comes in with the POP already associated with a Contact and email address, making it easy for Brandle to show you a list of all the web presence owned or managed by a specific person.

The major benefit of Forms and Campaigns is that they allow the Brandle Presence Manager to do the majority of work for you — collecting all of the POPs that associate with your brand, applying contacts and tags to these POPs, and sharing response data with you so you can stay on top of your web presence governance.