Actionable Insights for Content Strategy

Which content strategy tools do you find most useful?

For us, it has to be the content inventory & the content audit!

Sexy & exciting? No

Providing actionable insights that lead to real impact within your business? Absolutely

So why do we love these tools so much?

A good inventory & audit done together can help you:

✅ Understand the depth & breadth of your content
✅ Understand the quality of your content & how to improve it
✅ Identify inconsistencies in your messaging
✅ Improve your editorial guidelines & processes
✅ Create consistency in style
✅ Prepare new content for your website
✅ Create small and large categories on your website
✅ Remove low-value content & focus on optimizing high-performance content for visitors instead
✅ Improve SEO strategies e.g. building workflows in to publishing tools to ensure content is tagged with the correct metadata
✅ Improve the buyer journey at all client/prospect touch-points

Suddenly you understand what content is working, what content needs updating & what content you need to create.

Then you can make a real content marketing plan to deliver fresh, more cohesive & connected content experiences that drives the only business outcome that matters to most businesses – revenue growth.

Some of the questions we often get asked are:

❓ What is a content inventory

A thorough inventory looks at print as well as digital marketing assets & maps these to the different stages of the buyer journey. This enables you to evaluate your content marketing efforts across all customer touchpoints and enables you to operate from a position of knowledge.

❓ Do you look at every piece of content or a sample

Establishing your content marketing goals and your time frame is imperative in deciding if you need to resource a full content inventory and audit or just a sample.

If you’re doing something big such as:

⦿ Overhauling your website
⦿ Making major changes to your product or service offerings
⦿ Planning to enter a new market

Then yes you probably need a full inventory.

If you are doing a smaller-scale project, narrowing your focus to the content where that change matters most may be more appropriate e.g.:

⦿ Home page
⦿ Top-level entry pages
⦿ Blogs
⦿ Feature-article content

❓ What is the difference between a content inventory and a content audit

In a content inventory, you discover what you have in terms of assets; In a content audit, you apply an analytical & editorial perspective to figure out the why. 

⦿ Why does this content exist?
⦿ Where does it sit in the buyer journey?
⦿ What business or user goal was it created to achieve?
⦿ Is it delivering on those goals (or not)?

If content audits/inventories are something you want to know more about, let us know - happy to share our templates & give you some practical tips on how to get started!