Reassigning materials

after i import a model from sketchup via data smith I want to replace some of the original sketchup materials with those from the unreal library. How do I do that?, its easy enough to select all the surfaces with the same material but when i drag and drop an unreal material it only seems to assign one object at a time. As there are thousands of components thats not a good option. In programs such as vray there are options to easily swap one material for a different one, I cant seem to find the same thing in UE4 but its probably there somewhere.