Building a Content Inventory

3 minute read

Upland Admin

When marketers deliver the right content to the right customer at the right time, the results are increased engagement, the ability to drive prospects down the funnel, and improved revenue numbers. But this strategic objective relies on a far more fundamental question:

Do you know what content you have?

Building a content inventory allows you to know what resources you already have, so your team can address the objectives of the overall marketing department—and the wonderful content you create doesn’t go to waste. Sounds great, right? So, where should you begin to create a content inventory?

In this post, we’ll outline a few key ways your organization can start to build out an inventory of content assets to support business objectives. While you ideally would have a marketing operating system to manage it (*cough* Kapost *cough*), these objectives apply to any process around a content repository.

Establish Your Organization’s Priorities

Let’s get started! First, you need to understand the essential priorities of your organization. Here’s what you need to ask yourself:

  • What kind of content is important to my company at a strategic level?
  • What particular product lines, personas, buying stages, etc., are you addressing?
  • Is there anything else that’s critical to your individual business?

Either sit down with your team to answer these questions, or take a moment to do it alone. Once you have a good framework of what your overall objectives are, you’ll be better able to target your content.

Align These Priorities with Content Creation

Start with just 3-5 attributes that help give you insight into what is important to your organization. From there, you can better frame your content to fit the needs of your business. Consider these factors:

  1. Bring in the right stakeholders: Have you assessed what’s important with a broad enough audience? Think about the various layers of your organization from leadership down to interns within marketing as well as key members of cross-functional teams.
  2. Start by looking at your reports: At the end of each quarter, what types of data points are you asked to report on? How does your leadership team want to see content?
  3. When in doubt, keep it simple: Start with the easiest ways to categorize your content, like product lines or businesses. Think about what matters most across your organization! You can always add new attributes later, but having a solid foundation is crucial.
  4. Don’t forget your internal audiences: Don’t forget your sales team and other internal audiences for your content. What are the key ways they think about content?
  5. Singularity: It’s important that the attributes you define are universal across your organization. Does everyone use these terms in the same way? Do they make sense to everyone who will consume or create content? We’ll address this later as well.

Takeaways

A content inventory is a powerful tool for aligning marketing assets with your customer journey. Defining how to categorize your content in a strategic way is the first step.

Looking for extra help? Kapost Customers can contact their CSM for best practices, help building a strategic plan to build their content inventory, or more information about our services such as a Strategic Taxonomy Workshop. 

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