The top content strategy tools marketers love and how to use them

A recent email poll asking 50+ marketing professionals which content strategy tools they found most useful found the most cited were the content inventory and the content audit.

These are two simple tools that allow marketers to deliver a fresh, more cohesive and connected content experiences that drives the only business outcome that really matters – revenue growth.

A good inventory and audit can help you improve your editorial guidelines and processes, style guides, SEO strategies and building workflows in to publishing tools to make sure content is tagged with the correct metadata and to improve the buyer journey through your website.

Together they provide a detailed view of what you’ve got in terms of content assets and actionable insights. Suddenly you understand what content is working and what content you need to create as part of your content marketing plan.

What is a content inventory?

Unlike a content audit which is fundamentally qualitative, a content inventory is quantitative. It’s a comprehensive list – typically a spreadsheet – of all content assets, ideally across all content types, channels, and distribution formats.

A thorough inventory looks at print as well as digital marketing assets and 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, allowing you to make decisions based on data.

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

It is worth looking at all content, at least briefly, to see if it is still relevant and accurate and whether to keep, reuse, update or retire it.

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

Before you start your content inventory and audit, you should be clear on your content marketing mission statement. Without this, you cannot make solid recommendations for improvements.

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 and editorial perspective to figure out the why. Why does this content exist? What business or user goal was it created to achieve? Why is it delivering on those goals (or not)?

You can find out more about how EMARI can support you with your content audits here