How To Masterfully Track Your Content Marketing Efforts

You probably have a general knowledge of the topics and types of content you’ve created for your organization over the years. Some stick out as high performers, but some you’ve completely forgotten. What if I asked you to tell me exactly how many pieces of content you have relating to the topic of ‘part quality’? Do you have an answer? Better yet, do you know what type of content is underrepresented in your vast content library?

If you’ve been producing content for more than a few years, the answer is probably “no” to both questions.

This is no fault of your own. It’s impossible to remember every piece of content you’ve created (let alone the details associated with each). At Crafted, we work with manufacturers that are creating amazing high-value content. This is fantastic! But, they’re not implementing mechanisms and processes that allow them to track their content creation efforts.

To solve this issue, we recommend all manufacturers utilize a content inventory spreadsheet to track their content creation efforts. Not for the sake of tracking, but to enable us to work smarter…not harder. A content inventory worksheet will help us to make better and more informed decisions about our content marketing efforts.

A content inventory has 3 purposes that are critical to a functioning content marketing strategy.

1. Identify Content Gaps

Inside of your content inventory, we suggest tracking information like type of content, word count, topic/category, persona, and stage of the buying cycle. If you track all this information, then you’ll be able to identify areas within your content marketing that are missing.

For example, you may look at your content inventory and realize that you’ve written a very minimal content to purchasing agents because you’ve been writing most of your content to your engineer persona.

Identifying content gaps through your content inventory will help ‘sure up’ any weaknesses (gaps) in your content marketing.

#2 Track Content Marketing Goals

If you’ve implemented a content marketing strategy within your organization, you’ve most likely set goals for the initiative. This is great! How are you measuring your goals? Well, your content inventory can be a great way to track items like word count and total posts created.

For example, maybe you set a goal to write 3,000 words of content every month. As you catalog your new posts, be sure to include the word count for easy tracking. The same concept applies to personas, topics, authors and anything else you want to track.

Quick disclaimer on this example goal – don’t only write for word count. Write for quality and user experience first. Word count should be a result of strategy driven content marketing.

#3 Work Smarter Not Harder

As you implement new initiatives like lead nurturing or executive thought leadership, you’re going to rely on your existing content to bolster these efforts. If you haven’t cataloged your content into an inventory, how in the world are you going to find the content you want to deploy in these initiatives? You’re going to have to wade through your CMS and server to find content, and then judge it based on relevancy and datedness.

For example, you may decide to roll out a lead nurture campaign to get more business from a specific vertical (aerospace for example). You’re going to need to find content that relates to that vertical, that speaks to specific personas, and that covers specific topics. Using a content inventory spreadsheet will make this process quick and easy.

Rather than waste time, project after project searching for content, take 2 minutes after each piece of content is created to log it into your content inventory.

Start reaping the benefits of a content inventory.

A content inventory can be a game changer for your organization. It will help you work smarter, track goals and identify content gaps. The ability to do each of these things will better support your marketing efforts and make you more successful! Take the time and log your existing content and then implement processes to log content going forward.

Then, start reaping the benefits!