This is a YouTube video titled "How to Set up Your Agency's Google Drive Folder System - #AgencyToolbox" created in October 2015. It features Gray MacKenzie hosting an instructional episode of the Agency Toolbox series, where he explains best practices for organizing Google Drive folders for agency use, including client files, resources, campaigns, and ongoing marketing materials. The content is a detailed solo presentation aimed at helping agencies improve their file management and onboarding processes.
Welcome back to episode number eight of Agency Toolbox. I'm your host, Gray MacKenzie. Thrilled to be with you today to talk about file structure best practices. In episode number seven, we talked through why Guavabox, our agency, uses Google Drive instead of Dropbox for file management. So today what I want to walk you through is how to set up the best Google Drive folder system for your agency. So here I've got pulled up the Guavabox Google Drive folder and, and we've got a good amount of information in here. There is a number of information. I just have to be a little bit careful as we're jumping through here. This is, this is one thing that I kind of didn't anticipate about putting together a video podcast is trying to think carefully through what information is okay to share and what information we need to be careful with. If it was me personally, I'm just kind of of the mindset of share everything, throw it out there and let's make the community better. But having clients complicates things because you have to think about what client information do I need to be careful of to protect the privacy of the clients that we have and the contacts that we have. Anyways, that's a tangent, but just something that I've had to learn about as we go through this process of building out this video podcast and sharing it with the community. So anyways, I've got our drive system pulled up here and what I have. So we've got this broken down into a parent folder, which is Guavabox client folders. We've also got Guava Box resources, courses, sales, operations, past customers. So back in the early days, 2011, 2012, 2013, we did an awful lot of WordPress website projects. That's still something that we do a little bit of, especially if it's something where there's going to be a HubSpot setup as well and then ongoing marketing. But, but that was something that we did a lot of and also did a good amount of website hosting. And so there, there is quite a backload of past customers who we've, you know, chosen not to work with moving forward. But this is kind of our structure now. This, I'm not going to recommend this to you. I am going to recommend, if you're using Drive, that you do have a client files folder, that you do have a past customers folder. Because we talked about selective sync in episode number seven. If you want to learn more, you can go listen to why that is important by heading back over to episode seven of Agency Toolbox but I am going to encourage you to have both of those things now. Resources, design and graphics. You need to have your own marketing stuff available. Now we just choose to use inside our client files. We treat Guava box just like a client. So we have our own folder inside of there as well. But for the things that wouldn't be covered under, you know, under some of our typical stuff we also have a resources folder. We put together some educational courses. So that's just kind of something that, that not everyone's going to run into. But everyone's going to have sales, everyone's going to have operations, everyone's going to have finance. And that stuff may or may not depending on your team structure and who handles what. I'll leave that decision to you to make. But inside our template client folder. So we land a new client, we immediately this is one of our onboarding tasks. We'll go in and set up their folders and basically we've got the contract, what's the contract they signed. So everyone's clear on what the deliverables are, what the expectations are from the beginning and the team members who are working on the project have access to that client submitted information. I mentioned in episode 7 how we intake a lot of information from our clients during the game plan process especially and the homework that they have. And so a lot of that information is going to get on, get sent in here and collaborated on in here. Number three is meetings. So this is where meeting notes, every single meeting is going to have an agenda. We have an established slide deck that we use for our meetings and so every meeting is going to have an agenda, notes taken on it and that's going to be in here. It's also going to be shared with clients so they have access to all the past meeting notes. Number four. Now we're getting into the kind of the sequence of our services. So if, if we broke our services down into four components as guavabox, the four step process that we take people through, the first step is going to be building their inbound marketing game plan. And so everything for that process is going to wind up here in the game plan, obviously culminating with a completed, you know, 40 to 50 page inbound marketing game plan. The second phase in that process would be building out the engine. So this is where we get their marketing automation system set up, get the lead nurturing in place, the content offers put. So we've got the conversion assets and nurturing sequences ready to, ready to take folks from visitors to leads. Number six is going to be the website and so obviously build the engine. That's where the resources that go into that are going to be stored in there. Number six is the website. So this doesn't happen if someone already has an awesome website and we've just built the engine. We might jump straight into marketing campaigns, but in a lot of cases, we are doing a website redesign or at least a website refresh. And so all of those files, documents, and everything else that goes along with the website are jumping into folder number six. Number seven, we're talking about ongoing inbound marketing campaigns. So there's going to be a ton of content in here. You've got blogs, you've got all the graphics that you're going to need, you've got landing page assets, you've got stuff related to emails, you've got content offers, all kinds of information inside of these folders. Number eight, social media. So what's the digital identity? So this is going to be profile pictures. Then it's also going to be what are the posts that you're sending out on a consistent basis and then other digital assets. In some cases, we'll have a video that's used in multiple places, or we've got an agency who has a podcast going, but for some reason it either is no longer ongoing, so it doesn't fit into a campaign, or maybe it is, or it's going to become something else. So that's number nine, what we have there. If you have any questions on the structure, shoot me an email@graydoinbound.com now. I want to take you down kind of one more level into what this looks like. So if we pop open campaigns, for example, you're going to see in this folder, I'm offline, so it's not loading. Oh, I'm back online. Okay, so I have blog post CTAs now, depending on the individual client and what's going to wind up happening here, we could have a number of different. We may pull folders from a couple other templates that we have for what are the different types of folders and files that we're going to need managed in here. But I think that's probably enough to give you a general idea of what this looks like for us and how we create this for client. I'd love to hear how you guys do this and any improvements that you have, send them over to me. Obviously, I would love to use them for our agency, Guavabox. So that's kind of the selfish motivation. But I'd also like to share that with the agency community at large and just help folks continue to refine their processes and accelerate the learning curve because all this stuff really does take a lot of work. And I can tell you from experience that the first client accounts that we started working with at Guavabox, this wasn't in place. And so I can't tell you how many times somebody would be working on something and have to go back to whoever initially sold the project or someone who worked on an early phase in the project timeline and say, well what happened here? Why can't I access this information? At that point it was lost. It was a whole digging through process. So this is definitely sped up our onboarding process and helped out the client relationship significantly by having this all centralized as well. So any questions on that, shoot them my way. Any feedback you have, I would love to hear it. And we'll see you next time. In episode number nine of Agency Toolbox.
