How to Organize Your Marketing Materials In One Place

Every marketer knows the pain of trying to keep your shared folders organized only for them to become a mess over time to the point where no one can easily find important items such as the latest version of your logo.

The solution is to create one place where your marketing team can go to easily find any file, regardless of where it's stored on which platform it was created.

In this post, we'll show you how to organize all of your marketing materials in one place just like we have done for ourselves at Neatly.

Step 1: Organize your marketing activities

Step 2. Create a list of all storage sources of marketing materials & assets

Step 3. Set up your marketing collateral hub and categorize your assets in Neatly

Step 4. Assign editing and viewing roles

Step 5. Rinse and repeat for other teams

How should you organize your marketing materials?

Organizing your marketing materials is the process of placing and categorizing all of your digital assets media, Google Docs, Dropbox files, Figma files, bookmarks, etc.) in a repository. It’s important for your team’s productivity because it allows you to spend more time marketing and less time searching for your files.

For example, let’s say you’re working on a website redesign. How does your freelance graphic designer know where to find your brand guide, how does your copywriter know what to write for your executive bios or which keywords your seo consultant recommended to focus on?

Everyone will easily find the relevant files by placing all your assets in one, organized place. This requires 1) finding the right platform to store everything 2) building a file structure that’s easy for everyone to navigate.

Now that you understand the need to organize all files in one place, it’s time for me to explain how exactly to organize your assets.

Steps to get all of your marketing assets in one place

Organize your marketing activities

Your first step with organizing your marketing materials in one place is to map out all of your marketing activities.

Think about your different activities, such as seo, trade shows, advertising, social media, etc. and the different teams or managers responsible for each activity.

This will give you an idea as to what type of organizational structure you need, who are the stakeholders that will be involved and will make the next steps much easier.

Create a list of all storage sources of marketing materials & assets

First, create a list of all storage sources of marketing materials & assets.Limit it to materials that you use most often.These include files in Google Drive, Dropbox, Canva, Figma, OneDrive and any other online platform.

Next, break the list up into categories. Think about which categories will be most self-explanatory. You want your marketing team members to easily guess which types of files can be found in each category.

You should end up with something like this:

Category: Brand

• Style guide document (Dropbox)
• Positioning document (Google Doc)
• Variations of the company logo file (Google Drive files)
• Boilerplate (Google Doc)

Category: PR & Mentions

• Media mentions (bookmarks)
• Testimonials (Google Doc)
• Links to social media media mentions (bookmark)

Category: Reports

• Links to CRM Reports (bookmark)
• Links to Analytics Reports (bookmark)
• Various Spreadsheets (Google Sheet)
• Budgeting Sheet (Google Sheet)

Category: Product Marketing

• Product screenshots (Google Drive files)
• Testimonials (Google Doc)

Category: Tools

• Link to CRM (bookmark)
• Link to marketing automation tool (bookmark)
• Link to website analytics (bookmark)
• Link to project management tool (bookmark)

At this point you have a useful list of all of your team’s most important marketing materials. Next, we’ll set up our marketing repository in Neatly.

Set up your marketing collateral hub in Neatly

Once you sign up for Neatly, you’ll need to set up your first category. We’ll create a “Marketing” category since we’re organizing our marketing materials.

Next, we’ll create a section within the Marketing category called “Brand.”

We’ll now add our brand related materials, such as logos, style/brand guide, positioning document, etc., to our Brand section. You have several options to choose from:

• Insert from Google Drive
• Upload from your computer
• Create a new Google Doc, Sheet, or Slide
• Add a link from a different platform like Dropbox, One Drive,Canva, or Figma

Be sure to add descriptions to each file to make it easier for coworkers to understand what each file is.

We’ll repeat this process for each section of the Marketing category. So we’ll create sections for PR & Mentions, Reports, Product Marketing, Tools and any other category that represents your marketing team’s activities.

Now, you have all of the files your team needs for its day-to-day work at their fingertips. Next, we’ll invite others to join and set up permissions.

Assign editing and viewing roles

There are two basic permission types in Neatly: viewer and editor.

A viewer has permission to open and view files in the specific category in which they were given viewing permission.

A category editor can upload, update and edit any files within a category. An editor can also invite other users to view or edit their category.

It’s recommended that only 1-2 people on your team be given editor access to keep the category up to date.

You can invite more users to your Neatly account by clicking on the “Settings'' link in the upper right corner and then clicking on the “User List” tab. From there, click on the “Invite user” button and add the user’s email address to the dialog, as well as the viewing or editing permissions.

Organizing marketing materials for other departments

It’s probably important to you as well that other departments such as Sales or groups like your board of directors have easy access to certain marketing materials and reports.

You can simply repeat the process for them by creating a “Sales” or “Board” category and populating it with files and links.

Adding the same file to two places in Neatly won’t create duplicates in Google Drive, so you don’t need to worry. Additionally, users will only see the categories shared with them. So if you have ten categories but a user only has access to one, that’s all they’ll see when they log in, keeping everything nice and simple.

Conclusion

Now you have everything you need to get started with organizing your marketing materials.

You can sign up here to try Neatly for free.