How to Keep Your Marketing and Business Collateral Files Organised

It’s not just businesses that build up significant quantities of marketing and business collateral and files over the years. Non-profits, government agencies, libraries, museums, industry institutes, consulting firms, think tanks and virtually any other type of organisation can generate a diverse array of administrative and marketing documents and resources.

Keeping these documents organised isn’t necessarily easy, especially for:

• Businesses that run a lot of marketing campaigns of varying types
• Older organisations that might have collateral dating back decades
• Institutions that have not maintained consistent organisational practices over the years
• Businesses that rely on a mix of physical and digital records
• Any business or organisation that must keep and organise invoices, contracts or maintain other paper trails for tax purposes, general record keeping, performance tracking or bookkeeping

The organisation of these databases can be a nightmare, especially if employees or members aren’t on the same page about the naming convention, metadata creation, file storage or other key organisational variables.

File formats may also complicate your business’s organisational methods. Storing and safeguarding photos and videos separate from documents and PDFs or using an entirely different filing structure can result in lost resources or needlessly duplicated work because some collateral can’t be easily found or is overlooked.

Why Is Soutron the Better Option?

Centralisation, collaboration and consistency. Soutron offers collaborative features that enable people with different roles or those located in different offices to easily collaborate on organisational efforts.

Consensus can be reached over metadata or hierarchical organisation. Then it’s just a matter of ensuring current and future employees are familiar with the proper categorisations for various collateral and file types. A team can use standardised naming conventions and metadata formatting to make the organisation of all kinds of records easy and virtually foolproof.

If questions arise about an invoice generated by a past employee five years ago, current employees can locate it using Soutron search in a matter of seconds as long as consistent labelling and metadata were used when the invoice was initially indexed.

Does a sales manager want to use some slides from a deck they vaguely remember compiling in 2019? Video, photos and design files organised in a Soutron database using a rationally designed hierarchical structure can be quickly found and downloaded from within the platform or from third-party hosting or storage.

These types of organisational solutions can be applied to a virtually limitless number of potential business use cases or scenarios.

Establishing Internal Marketing or Sales Collateral Organisational Best Practices

Standardised Naming Convention

Businesses can find success with significantly varied approaches to organisation, especially with a platform as flexible and customisable as Soutron’s Library and Archive Management solutions.

One of the few constants that every organisational effort must enforce is standardisation. All your files and assets should maintain a standardised naming convention.

Target Audiences

Both sales and marketing collateral can be further organised based on target audiences or buyer personas. You can add metadata tags regarding targeted ages, income levels, interests or however else your organisation designs or builds out various sales or marketing collateral.

Funnel Stage

Messaging of sales and marketing collateral is frequently tailored to consumers at specific stages of the buyer’s journey. The differentiators you highlight or talking points you use will likely be different for someone who:

• Is trying to decide whether they even need your product or service
• Is actively researching the products or services you offer
• Is going to acquire the product or service you offer and are now simply determining the provider from whom they will be making their purchase

Businesses can establish a hierarchical relationship between collateral based on where targeted consumers are in their purchasing decision-making process.

Age and Version Number

Not every organisation holds onto design and copy drafts, old marketing collateral or sales material, but if you do, there should be clear and easily understood naming conventions and organisation to enforce version discipline. The last thing any business wants is to spend money to produce packaging that uses an outdated logo or present an outdated sales deck with inaccurate product specifications to potential buyers.

Finding the Right Marketing Materials Management Tool for Your Organisation

Soutron’s database solutions offer unparalleled functionality and organisational power combined with an eminently customisable, lightning-fast search. Soutron Library Management Systems and Archives can equip your organisation with all the tools needed to solve your file and asset organisation needs today and far into the future. The Soutron Review feature can also provide a fully automated peer review tool, with version control for documents and articles submitted from teams, globally.

You’ll also receive assistance from experts in database organisation who have built hundreds of similar databases in the past. We’ve rebuilt databases that didn’t work and crafted new databases to replace antiquated organisational systems that were ready to move to a 21st Century solution.

Leverage our experience by contacting our team today. We would be happy to walk you through a demonstration and show you what our technology can do for your business.

Learn More About Soutron

Are you ready to see Soutron’s Information Management System in action? Request a demonstration and speak with our team about the many benefits of our digitised database solutions.

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