The Essential Role of Intranet Management in Marketing Orchestration

Summary

Effective intranet management is crucial for enhancing marketing orchestration and operational excellence. Without a well-organized intranet, marketing teams can struggle with productivity and workflow inefficiencies. Discover how standardizing your intranet practices can transform your team's operations and lay the foundation for scalable success.

By Brittany Lieu, Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing

Through our experience helping enterprises reengineer their approach to how their marketing teams get work done or create scalable marketing orchestration, one foundational aspect always gets overlooked.

Long before the Slack channels of our disappeared working world, intranet sites like Sharepoint or Google Drive have been the real digital ground zero for every modern organization. Yet, despite their importance, navigating these intranets to find essential documents can often feel like a treasure hunt, hindering rather than aiding productivity.

To achieve operational excellence and streamline efficiency, it’s imperative to revisit your data governance policies and intranet management practices. By establishing clear “housekeeping rules,” you can eliminate operational silos and foster ownership of file management across all marketing teams.

Here are some best practices to kickstart your journey toward a well-organized intranet:

Define Clear Folder and File Architecture:

• Organize your site structure with well-defined folders, sub-folders and files to match your organization’s needs.
• Create a top-level folder for each year with each team folder. For example, folders “2023,” “2022,” “2021,” and so on. These year folders will serve as the primary containers for content/asset/files created in their respective years.
• Avoid “deep nesting” or limit subfolders to ensure easy navigation for users. For example, instead of having multiple levels of sub-folders, keep the structure shallow and intuitive.

Example Folder Structure:

>Parent Folder: Marketing Intranet Homepage

>>Sub Folders:(one for each team)

• Product Marketing
  • 2024
  • 2023
  • 2022
  • 2021
  • z_Archive
• Integrated Marketing
• Field Marketing
• Brand and Creative
• Corporate Comms

Ownership and Accountability:

• With team-specific folders, designate team leads to manage folder organization, file archiving, and consistent naming conventions within their respective folder(s). For example, appoint a Marketing Manager to oversee the Marketing Team folder and ensure all files are properly organized and named.
• Assign specific team members as owners of individual campaign or project folders to ensure accountability for organization and upkeep.

File and Folder Recovery:

• Work with IT to set up a “Recycle Bin” to store all deleted files and/or folders as a holding tank in case file recovery is needed. For example, configure SharePoint to automatically move deleted files to a Recycle Bin where they can be restored if necessary.
• Implement regular backups of critical files and folders to prevent data loss in case of system failures or accidental deletions.

Consistent Naming Conventions:

• Establish a naming convention that everyone on your team can follow consistently. This helps with organization and searchability. 
• Choose file names that accurately describe the content of the document. Think about what you would search to find that document and use those terms to name the file. 
• Consider including relevant date information in the file name, such as “BudgetProposal_20231107.xlsx” to help with version control and sorting.
•  If you need to manage multiple versions of a document,  add a version number to the file name, such as “Proposal_V1.docx” or “Proposal_V2.docx.”

Regularly Review and Purge Old Content:

• Conduct quarterly reviews of the marketing team’s folders to identify and archive or delete outdated or redundant files.
• Move outdated campaign folders or assets older than five years to an archive folder “z_Archive”  within the respective campaign year folder. (Adding the “z” will put the folder last)

Wrapping It Up

At the core of successful marketing orchestration lies standardization. Before embarking on the journey to streamline your planning-to-execution processes, establishing guidelines for intranet usage and organization is one of the most important steps. These guidelines not only ensure maximum productivity but also lay the foundation for seamless scalability as your business evolves.

Have unanswered questioned about Marketing Orchestration? Reach out for a free brainstorm call here.