Content Strategy & SEO

JCameron2
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Why Create a Content Inventory?

Are you creating social posts and aimlessly scrolling through your blog trying to find the right article to include? Or perhaps you're building out a lead nurture campaign and have to sift through pages of premium content to find the right case study or eBook in an effort to build trust with your buyer. Sometimes, great content just gets lost!

 

Wouldn't it be great if you had one central location where you could easily sift and sort through your content by buyer's journey stage, keyword, persona, etc.? 

 

This is why you should create and maintain a content inventory!

 

What is a Content Inventory? 

As stated, this is a central location in which you can house all of your historical content (Blogs, eBooks, Guides, Case Studies, etc.).

 

How do I create a Content Inventory?

All you need is to download/create a template using Excel or Google Sheets and then start filling it in!

 

Columns you may want to include are:

  • Content Title - e.g. "How to Generate Inbound Leads"
  • Buyers Journey Stage - e.g. "Awareness"
  • Content Type - e.g. "Blog"
  • Buyer Persona - e.g. "Marketing Mary"
  • Topic - e.g. "Lead Generation"
  • Keyword - e.g. "lead generation"
  • Keyword Difficulty - e.g. "89%"
  • Keyword Volume - e.g. "73K"
  • Performance Data (Views, Bounce Rate, etc.)

How often should I refresh my content inventory? 

The ultimate best practice would be to update the inventory in real-time. However, that's not always realisitic. At the minimum, it's advised to at least update your inventory once a quarter.

 

Ok, I have a content inventory... now how do I use it?

  1. Perform a content gap assessment
    • Once you know what content you have, asses where there may be holes. Do you have a lot of awareness stage content, but hardly any for the consideration stage? Is your content geared toward one specific persona? This assessment helps you understand what key content is missing and will help guide your decisions as you craft your next editorial calendar.

  2. Repurpose & Reuse Your Content 
    • A lot of your content may still be very useful, but it just needs a slight refresh. Identify high performing pieces of content from the past, or content you'd like to increase exposure for, and then audit them to make sure all information is still current/factual. Once updated, you can choose to republish and the content as is, but you may also consider presenting it in a different format, e.g. take a "5 Tips on How Generate More Leads" blog post and turn it into a downloadable Tip Sheet. 

  3. Share your content inventory with Sales
    • Don't forget, your sales team should still be providing high value content to your buyers even in the Decision making stage of the buyer's journey! A rep may be speaking to a Marketing Mary persona and needs to quickly find some applicable case studies to share with them. Make their lives easier by providing them access to this inventory of content they can utilize in their day to day conversations. Reps can then upload these pieces of content with the Documents tool to easily share and track views!

 

These are just a few ways a content inventory can be of use to your business!

 

Creating a content inventory can be a tedious process. It may take hours, days or even weeks depending on how much content you have and how far back in time you decide to go. However, putting in this leg work now will save you countless hours down the road and help you create higher powered Content Strategy for you business. 

 

Cheers,

Josh

 

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Looking for someone to help you talk through these resources? Need a HubSpot yoda to help show you the ways of the force in HubSpot? Josh is one of many Inbound Consultants, a part of HubSpot’s Professional Services Team, where you can get project based guidance, tailored training or ongoing consulting and resources like these to help you in your HubSpot journey!

8 Antworten
Jon_SEOSafari
Mitglied

Why Create a Content Inventory?

Booky.io is great for organizing your blog's content for easier navigation if you just want to make it easier for you and keep the custom navigation private. I use it for all kinds of purposes to boost my productivity. Love it!

Jnix284
Koryphäe | Diamond Partner
Koryphäe | Diamond Partner

Why Create a Content Inventory?

Thank you for sharing @Jon_SEOSafari, I love the idea of being able to create a digital repository of links for content management. 

There's a lot of data that gets captured in the spreadsheet version though, can links in booky.io be tagged or categorized to track additional data points?

 


If my reply answered your question please mark it as a solution to make it easier for others to find.



Jennifer Nixon - Delivery Lead at Aptitude 8

connect with Jen on Linkedin

0 Upvotes
RAcharya
Mitglied

Why Create a Content Inventory?

Nice

0 Upvotes
cglvrl
Mitglied

Why Create a Content Inventory?

Love this idea!!

katie_cort
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Why Create a Content Inventory?

Love this idea and the tips Josh! Thank you for sharing 🙂

0 Upvotes
Jnix284
Koryphäe | Diamond Partner
Koryphäe | Diamond Partner

Why Create a Content Inventory?

@JCameron2  thank you for sharing the insights about managing content by creating an inventory and then how to use that information to improve! I've used a similar template for blog content to keep track of the resources associated with the CTAs, etc. and I like the idea of incorporating the buyers journey into the tracking.

 

I will definitely be adding some of your suggestions to my list. 🙂

 

I would love to see a resource in HubSpot that could help manage this information natively, maybe a tagging system in file manager with a report view. A girl can dream, right?

 


If my reply answered your question please mark it as a solution to make it easier for others to find.



Jennifer Nixon - Delivery Lead at Aptitude 8

connect with Jen on Linkedin

JCameron2
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Why Create a Content Inventory?

Hello, @Jnix284!

 

I'm happy that you found the above insights useful! I also love your idea regarding some form of "Content Inventory Manager" tool in HubSpot. Have you submitted this as an official idea in the community? If not, I would definitely recommend doing so and encouraging others to upvote it! Also, I would be more than happy to take this back to products to see if it is something they are thinking about right now!

 

-Josh

0 Upvotes
Jnix284
Koryphäe | Diamond Partner
Koryphäe | Diamond Partner

Why Create a Content Inventory?

@JCameron2 

Thanks Josh, I appreciate the feedback and created an idea here and will share with my network 🙂

 

Looking forward to seeing what the product team is up to!


If my reply answered your question please mark it as a solution to make it easier for others to find.



Jennifer Nixon - Delivery Lead at Aptitude 8

connect with Jen on Linkedin