Episode Two: Megastructures

Following this guide will take about 90 minutes. If you have a lot of content to upload, it can take an additional coffee or two.

Thinking about the optimal content structure for your organization

The next step is important when starting with Showpad. It's always possible to go back and make changes, but doing this right from the beginning helps you a lot in the future.

Read the following article about structuring content if you want to see some ideas and best practices.

 

Configure your content blueprint

When developing your Showpad environment, you can think of it like you're building a house. Before you take out any tools or buy materials, you draft a blueprint. When presenting to prospects, you want your sales reps to be able to quickly switch product or services categories. We already mentioned Classic Experiences where you upload and organize your assets. To get started you want to create your Classic Experiences like you would create building plans.

Classic Experiences allow you to organize your content and distribute it to the relevant users and user groups in Showpad. In each Classic Experience, you can set up a folder structure to organize your content exactly the way you want it. This allows your users to find the information they need and focusing on their conversations or tasks at hand. Once your blueprint is in a good state, it's time to start buying those materials. Continue on to learn about uploading content.

 

Walk through the process on how to create a Classic Experience here.

Now that you set up your Classic Experiences, you can start creating folders so you can move your assets into the correct location once you've uploaded content.

Learn how to create folders in your Experiences.

Ready, set, upload!

Getting your content into Showpad is easy. We integrate with many platforms (Google Drive, SharePoint Online, Dropbox,…) which allow you to import your assets into Showpad directly. Dragging and dropping is supported as well. When uploading assets, you can add the tags you would like in bulk.  You can also assign a content author to specific assets. Learn more about tagging next.

 

Read the article about uploading your assets to the content library.

Read how to move your content to the right place.

Label your items so they don't get lost

It's possible that you will upload a lot of files in the next few moments. Let's use the comparison with the house. How great would it be that you only have to move your items in the house and they automatically walk to their rooms (Classic Experiences), straight into the correct closets (folders)? You can achieve this by tagging your items (assets). Tagging is a way to pull up relevant and related content quickly. This means you can also use tags as a way to quickly find content to add to courses and tests for Showpad Coach as well. To make finding content easier, you have the option to organize your tags into categories. If you don't they will sort alphabetically by default. This will be explored more in-depth in a future episode.

See the article about tagging to understand what it does.

Setting the right permissions

With your content online, you want to ensure the permission settings are correct for sharing these assets. Can prospects download and share your pricing information? Do you really want your sales colleagues to annotate your holiday pictures? Well...do you really want to upload your holiday pictures to Showpad in the first place? The important lesson here is that you decide if assets can be shared, downloaded, or annotated. The option to make assets able to be annotated or downloaded from within a course can be configured in the course setup section for Showpad Coach.

Read all about changing the permissions for your uploaded assets.

Automate your content organization process

But wait, you can work smarter, not harder. Remember all that talk about tags at the beginning of this episode? This is where our intelligent smart folders can be extremely useful. Once your smart folders are configured, see how your assets are automatically added to the right place.

Read how tags help you with creating smart folders.

 

On the next episode...

Now that uploaded your marketing content and structured it into experiences, you’re ready to learn about branding your environment to take it to the next level. Follow the next guide or go back to the onboarding index.