SharePoint Marketing Asset Search Optimization

Our client Hatfield Consultants is an international environmental and social consulting firm delivering work across water, land, and community-focused services. They operate from multiple offices across Western Canada and maintain international operations, supporting multidisciplinary project teams that produce a high volume of proposals, reports, and communications materials.

Their marketing group supports the business by managing a large, growing library of approved photos and brand assets that need to be easy for staff to find and reuse without creating bottlenecks or constant “can you send me that photo” requests.

Profile Highlights

  • Industry: Environmental and social consulting services
  • Scale: 250+ employees
  • Geographic footprint: Multiple offices across Western Canada with international operations
  • Business priority: Faster self-serve access to approved marketing photos and brand assets

Key Challenges

  • Search results were inconsistent and hard to trust day-to-day
  • Filters didn’t match how staff actually describe and look for assets
  • Users spent too much time browsing, guessing keywords, or opening multiple files to validate results
  • Requests shifted back to marketing for manual fulfillment instead of self-serve reuse
  • The experience became difficult to maintain without specialized technical support

Problem

The marketing team relied on a SharePoint-based photo library that used PnP Modern Search to help staff find images quickly. Over time, the experience became harder to use and less predictable, which reduced adoption and increased friction across proposals and communications workflows.

Solution

West X treated this as a findability and adoption problem, not just a “search web part” problem. The work focused on aligning how users search with how assets are described, tagged, and surfaced then simplifying the experience so marketing could maintain it.

What We Delivered

  • Validated real search scenarios with the marketing team to reflect how staff actually request and reuse images
  • Tightened the metadata approach so filtering and narrowing results worked reliably
  • Refined the PnP Modern Search configuration to improve relevance and consistency
  • Updated the search page layout and filter design to support fast narrowing using business-friendly attributes
  • Simplified administration so marketing could manage the library without ongoing technical involvement

Technology Used:

SharePoint business solutions for enterprise collaboration and document management.
SharePoint Online
SharePoint business solutions for enterprise collaboration and document management.
PnP Modern Search

The Results

The marketing photo library became easier to use, more predictable, and far less dependent on marketing staff to manually fulfill requests. Teams could find and reuse approved assets faster, which reduced duplicate storage and “lost asset” scenarios and improved consistency across proposals and communications.

Outcomes

  • Faster self-serve access to approved photos and brand assets
  • Reduced reliance on marketing for routine asset requests
  • More consistent search results and filtering aligned to real user behaviour
  • Lower duplication and fewer “recreated because we couldn’t find it” assets
  • A maintainable library experience owned by marketing, not IT

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