Introduction

We, pilots of the Showpad Rocket are on a mission to provide the best buyer experience.

One of the key parts of that mission is to make sure that we help sellers with the struggle for organized content. As Professional Services Consultants we play a key role in making sure content gets organized. The struggle is real.

Every customer is different, with their own sales story to tell and different ways of how they want to advocate their message to their prospects. You, as a Marketing Admin, have to make sure the content is organized well enough so Sales can go in there and kick ass. Therefore, the Showpad Professional Services team has some tips and tricks we’d like to share with you.

How do you want your team to sell?

One of the first key questions we ask is: how do you want your team to sell? Typically, this is where we pull in sales as well so we can come to a consensus as to how marketing wants to structure the content. Some clients have it all figured out even before PS comes to play, others need us to challenge them. There are many ways to go about this question (Believe me, I can write an entire book on that topic as well) but in the long run, we want to make sure we are not just copying a product-oriented folder structure from their website, if they actually need a solution-based sales process.

Keep it simple – for real.

Classic, right? But you wouldn’t believe how many admins like to over complicate content structures. During our Content Structure consultation sessions, we typically pull up a file we work with the client (such as an Excel file) to make sure there’s no big no-no’s such as too many clicks, or folders with 1 piece of content tucked away. If we need to centralize a lot of content in one place, we can help clients utilize pages and smart folders, promoting cross sales and ease of use. We always try to keep a helicopter perspective and go back to the essential mission; create a better buyer experience by keeping things simple.

Tagging content will save your life

A good tagging structure is essential for scaling, especially when you start uploading+1000 pieces of content.. We promote tagging because of:

• The governance benefit it delivers
• The auto-population of Smart Folders
• The benefits it has for integrations such as Smart Recommendations in Salesforce
• The time you can save by getting this in place, right off the bat

A popular tagging structure we use here is to ‘follow the path’. You basically lead the content the way as to where it’s supposed to appear. Let’s take a look at an example of a Content Structure file of our fictive company:

If we want to make sure that our 50 Brochures for Product C are visible in the Product C folder, then we can follow the path:

Company Information > References > Project 1 > Products Used > Product C

In this case we will want to add all of the above as Tags. By then enabling these tags on the smart folders, the documents will appear in that smart folder. So our tag list would then look like this:

We can now set up our smart folder with these tags and this in return will yield the correct results:

The above is of course a simple example and there is much more to it such as languages, product codes, lettering and numbering etc. For all of these situations, we guide clients through the process to make the right decision when setting up a tagging structure.

When dealing with different languages for example, we typically add a language tag such as:

FR, NL, EN,… When dealing with a very large number of tags on different levels we put a

system in the tags we create so we can make it easy for Admins to maintain the overview

and assign tags.

This is an example from a fictitious tech company:

They put a 5-level coding into place, so Admins know they need to have tags 1 through 5 in order to populate their folder.

Not only do we think about the above for folders, we also apply the same concepts for Pages!

Make your structure scalable

Some of our clients sell a lot of stuff, surprise! They sell products worldwide in different regions, and some of the sales material they use is very similar to each other, others are totally not. Maintaining a structure that can be used worldwide is made easy by using Divisions and by using built-in options such a Duplicating channels and Editing Contained Smart Folders.

One of the main questions asked throughout onboarding is: where does your content live and how will it be dispersed?

Our rule of thumb: if the content is created in one place (for example the Marketing Office in Chicago) and is used by the rest of the world in the same manner, then we are good with one division only. If not, then we should start to use Divisions.

Divisions will allow us to push content from one Global Division on to Local Divisions. This way we have multiple Content Libraries, allowing Admins to populate with both Global and Local collateral. So, as you can guess, it’s important to get the Global Division right so we can duplicate the channels to other divisions.

By using Duplication and Editing of Contained Smart Folders we can make sure this goes smoothly:

In the case above we want to add a tag for the UK and switch our Business Unit from Tech to Health. See how easy that is?

As you can tell, there’s many different factors influencing a content structure, and every client has another experience to offer to their prospects and clients. Your Professional Services Consultants are here  to make sure we guide you on your content journey and help you create the best buyer experience.

I hope this article gave you some insights, if you have any questions or feedback then please reach out to me or any of my dear colleagues on the Professional Services team.