PandaDoc Content Library: a Breakdown and Best Practices
Personalizing your templates with relevant content — like case studies, testimonials, or pre-approved legal clauses — is a great way to stand out from your competition.
The PandaDoc Content Library is the perfect way to store reusable content to use "ad-hoc" in your documents and templates. Not every customer is the same, so having a basic template with your core message is great, but when you need to personalize documents for specific needs, creating a library of "extra" content that your team can drag and drop on-the-fly is the perfect solution. We'll share a few great examples below on how you can use the content library.
Content Library Use Cases
Here are a few great ideas for personalizing and customizing your documents for each client using the drag-and-drop content library.
EXAMPLES
- Videos: Store your videos in PandaDoc to make it easy for your team to drop them into their documents.
- Testimonials: Add a library of testimonials so that your team can use the most appropriate testimonial for each client.
- Case Studies: Like testimonials, store by industry, or customer persona so that your team can use the most appropriate content for each document.
- RFP Content: The Content Library is great for anyone who drafts RFPs & needs easy access to specific blocks of content.
- Legal Language: Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, SLAs, Legal Clauses, and more.
- Marketing Content: Build your brand and ensure brand consistency
- About us: A great way to introduce your company, share your company values, and executive and team member bios
Content Library How-To
It's easy to create content blocks. You can build them from scratch in the content library area, or create them from existing content in your templates and documents.
Build from scratch:
On the left toolbar, choose the content library icon. Click “Create” then select either “Content Item” or “Upload”. Library items can be either natively built within PandaDoc or uploaded.
- If you clicked “Content Item”, from here you can give the item a name, add your roles, blocks, and content.
- If you chose “Upload”, you can give the item a name, add roles and fields.
Now when you need to use these items, they are available within the Template or Document.
Create from existing template or document content:
Here's how to save content from an existing template or document into your content library:
Entire Page:
You can save an entire page to the content library. Click the three dots above the page you would like to add to the library, here you will see the option to add the page to the Content Library.
Specific blocks:
To start, click on the block you wish to save, once the block is clicked a floating menu bar appears at the top. Click on the ‘Add to Library’ icon. Next, pick ‘Create new library item’ and then give the item a proper name then click ‘Add’. On the next screen, you can add the item to a specific folder, or just click ‘Add’ and this will place the new item in the main Content Library folder.
*Note, you can build on an existing library item by selecting ‘Add to an existing library item’. For this, you would type in or search for the already created library item and then follow the prompts. Additionally, if you are building library items this way, you may have to open the item up in the Content Library to make sure the structure is the same - meaning blocks that should be on the left side are on the left side.
Adding a Library Item to a Document or Template:
You can add Content Library items to documents and templates two ways
In a Page:
On any native PandaDoc page, between blocks, you will see a blue line with a + symbol appear. Click the + to access the Content Library
As a page:
You also can add a content library item as a page of its own. To do this click the + icon between the pages.
Best Practices
Naming: Be sure your items are clearly named. For example, if it is a Testimonial then, “Testimonial - Company Name” might be good.
Folders: Be sure to create subfolders in the Content Library folder for quick access. Examples: Testimonial Folder, RFP Folder, Products Folder, etc.
Themes: If a library item does not look correct in the content library folder, then the theme is the reason. Be sure to apply the correct theme to the library item. Additionally, library items will adopt the theme of any template or document they are placed.
Your Turn
There are potentially hundreds of ways to use stored content library items, and we haven't thought of them all! How could your team leverage the content library to make your sales pitches more personalized and memorable?
-
Hello Ryan,
Thanks for reaching out via the Forums here!
I do have a suggestion for you. It will be a few extra steps but will get you to your goal.
You will follow these steps:
- Save the three pages as content library items separately.
- Open a blank document and add those three pages to the document.
- Save the document with the three pages to your content library.
- You can then delete the other three content library items if you'd like.
I have submitted feedback on your behalf in our idea portal here. You may submit another vote for the request, subscribe to receive updates regarding the status, and post in the comments of the request. We appreciate this feedback so that we can continue to improve the product to better serve you.
Thank you for choosing PandaDoc!
-
Hello Yad,
Thank you for reaching out in the Forums.
The ability to update a document automatically when a content library item is updated is not available at this time. I apologize for the trouble.
A feature request regarding this has been submitted to our product team. You may click here to add another vote to the request, add any additional comments (I already added a few for you), and subscribe to receive updates regarding the status of the request.
Thank you for choosing PandaDoc.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
4 comments