Folder structure for effective marketing collaboration

The success of the marketing team is dependent on how well they collaborate for the campaign execution. If the folder structure is standardized and made available at the central location then time spent in information discovery is reduced to a great extent. Also, it gives confidence to a newly inducted team member as this person can refer to past content and understand the campaign needs in a better way.

I have created the folder structure that is logical and minimal making it easy for everybody in the marketing team to traverse through for quickly getting the information they are looking for.

For effective utilization of this structure if team members also follow the standardized file naming convention then it helps tremendously to other members of the team. The easiest way for meaningful file names is to follow these two simple rules - (a) Have the YYMMDD embedded in the filename, either as prefix or suffix (b) Be as elaborate as possible.

Let's dive into the folder structure.

• Brand and Assets
  • Collateral - This folder stores different kind of marketing and sales collateral
    • Presentation Decks - This folder stores different presentations such as corporate presentations, competency presentations, product presentations, service offerings presentations, etc.
    • Case studies - This folder stores the final case studies in editable and PDF format including the print files for quick printing in urgent situations.
    • Long-form Content - This folder stores the various form of long-form content such as whitepapers, playbooks, e-books, manuals, guides, etc.
    • Pages and Posts - This folder stores the content that goes through the various review phases and gets published to the website as pages (content and landing pages) or blog posts.
  • Images - This folder stores different kind of marketing images
    • Website - This folder stores the images that have been used on the website such as banners, thumbnails, etc.
    • Leadership Teams - This folder stores the images of the leadership team of the organization
    • Employees - This folder stores the images of the employees
  • Logos - This folder stores the logo files of variations in different format and sizes
  • Social Media - This folder stores the graphics files and content for social media posts
  • Templates - This folder stores the template files for a variety of the things that the marketing team works on including the templates for presentation, various graphics, social media posts, employee work anniversary graphics, employee joining graphics, business cards, letterhead, envelope, reporting documents, etc.
  • Videos - This folder stores the various videos that the marketing team has created
• Campaigns - This folder stores the information related to different campaigns undertaken by the marketing team. This information may be present in the form of planning spreadsheets and presentations, meeting minutes, photos, graphics, content (landing pages, blog posts and website pages), email scripts, stall designs, budget sheets, etc.
• Meetings and Reports
  • Strategy and Planning - This folder stores the information related to meeting minutes of strategic discussions, management presentations, high-level planning documents, etc.
  • Review Meetings - This folder stores the information related to weekly, monthly and quarterly review meetings
  • Reports - This folder stores the various marketing reports that the team has prepared for management's review
• Partnerships and Agreements
  • Business Partnerships - This folder stores information related to the business partnerships forged by the organization. The information such as signed agreements, certifications, partner logos, photographs, etc.
  • Technical Partnerships - This folder stores information related to the technical partnerships signed by the organization. The information such as signed agreements, certificates, partnership logos, do's and don'ts presentations, photographs, etc.
  • Vendors - This folder stores information about marketing vendors such as agreements, presentations, reports shared by them, etc.
• Databases - This folder stores the different databases that the organization has acquired or built over the period.
• Competition - This folder stores information related to competition such as its presentations, pricing sheets, list of customers, etc.
• Resources - This folder stores the research reports, presentations related to market insights, general information resources, etc.

This is a very minimal structure. If your marketing team is more than 20 people then you would need a deeper folder hierarchy so you would need to make necessary changes to this folder structure. Additionally, you may want to put permission rights to the folder as not every information should be available to all in a bigger marketing setup.