Do Something With Your Marketing: Content Inventory

In today's Do something with your marketing, I want you to build a content inventory. And yes, it is that time of year. Uh what is a content inventory? It's exactly what it sounds like: an inventory of the content that you have in any number of formats. Now, if you're a high frequency content producer, or you just have a lot of content laying around, it can be hard for people to catch up.

It can be hard for people who are just getting to know you to see everything that's available, right? You have dozens of videos, hundreds of blog posts, all these different things. And it's somebody who wants to dig in more, may not necessarily have the time or the inclination to dig for what they're specifically looking for. So make it easy for people. So let's go through this as an exercise.

Let's uh go ahead and flip around here. Here we are on my YouTube channel. You know, I've been doing the you ask I answer videos for almost two years now and done a lot of them. So let's see if we can turn that into an inventory. So you'll see the of course all the videos that are on a channel, but there's even with tags, there's not they're not necessarily organized all that well.

So let's go to analytics instead. Alright, let's go to our videos section, sit hit see more, and this brings up our video report. Right, and I want to filter on just uh you ask on the title. Let's see what got here. No, can't filter that there.

Alright. Let's look at from I think I started those in February 1 of 2018. Apply. I got lots and lots and lots of videos. So let's go ahead and export this whole thing into a CSV file and then pull open in our spreadsheet software of choice.

This is where I now wonder what window did that open up in. Ah, there we are. So let's take a look at our videos by date. And here we have our videos by date. And helpfully there's the YouTube ID.

So if we want to eventually turn these into links, we can. Now we could focus on some of the various metrics that are involved here, but that's not really what we're trying to do to this time. This time we just want it to do an inventory. So you see the titles all have different keywords. So let's go ahead and call one of these things Google Analytics.

Let's call another one all things IBM. How about data science and AI? What else we got here? Social media. Let's do social media.

So those are four topics that I tend to do a fair number of videos about. Now we're gonna do the count uh we're gonna do a count if function with multiple nested count ifs. Um so let's see what this looks like. This one equals count if we're gonna do B2, that cell, and then a catch all Google Analytics plus, and I'm actually just gonna copy this block over here and do one more. We'll do tag manager, data studio, and search console.

Take that, drop all that all the way down. Next for IBM. I actually have a pre-stored one because I do this one an awful lot. Same general idea equals count if B2 star data science. AI.

No, I'm leaving spaces in there so it doesn't count fractional words. Intelligence. Alright. I think the IBM one is wrong, yes. That's all A2, and that should be B2.

So I'm gonna copy this whole thing. Pull open a text editor and do a large scale fine replace there because I don't want to do it one at a time. Do a quick replace all. Okay, that's ready to go back in. And paste that in.

That looks better. Drop that down. Yep, now we can see some some there. We've got our data science and AI. And finally, let's do a social media ones.

If B2 Facebook. So far so good. So we've got four different topics. Now, here's how we can make these lists. Let's actually turn this, make one more column here called URL equals concatenate GPS www.youtube.com slash watch equals.

And this should make ourselves a nice YouTube video. URL. Yep, looking good. And now let's sort. So I'm gonna sort my column C.

Column C. Now we see should see these are all of the videos I've done in the US Answer series that are about Google Analytics or the Google ecosystem. So let's go ahead. I'm actually gonna move these columns over here and delete these. And now everything that's in this block of text is effectively ready to become a blog post of here's all the videos that I've made about Google Analytics.

So if you're trying to get caught up and you want to watch stuff about Google Analytics, this is how I produce that catalog, right? This is how I produce that um wrap-up or that compendium of all the content I've done about Google Analytics. And again, you can repeat this over and over again. Let's do a sort by data science and AI. Right?

Here's all the blog posts about uh art artificial intelligence that I've done. This is a again, this is a is a straightforward technique. You can see we're doing it in common spreadsheet software here, so it's not requiring anything super exotic. Now, if you wanted to also leave in those metrics like views, you could then call it your most popular list uh of videos about a topic. But this content inventory lets people catch up, let's people figure oh, these are all the things that are available to me, and you could even take these URLs and just write links you know in a blog post linking to each of these videos so that people can see.

Oh, if I want to want to binge watch on all of your IBM videos, you can, right? It makes this compendium. So that's what I want you to do with your marketing. Whatever, if you've got a a blog, you can export all your blog URLs, YouTube videos, podcast episodes, you name it, you've probably are sitting on this gold mine of content. But because it's not presented in an easy to consume, easy to binge format, uh, people won't catch up.

They'll they will just kind of start get on the train from wherever it is that they first started following you and not realize there's this massive back history of good stuff that you have that you could turn into, you know, wrap-up posts and things. I think about these content inventories a lot at this time of year, at the end of the uh the calendar year, because uh a lot of folks for the holidays they're like, yeah, you know, uh I don't know, we're gonna publish, or they do you know, year in review stuff, or they do, you know, stuff uh content that they need to have in place for when staff members are on vacation, if you work at a company or an agency, this is how you produce that stuff at scale, uh, with great volume, with great um uh far in advance, so that you're not scrambling at the last minute for content, you know, the day before you're going on on vacation. Uh and it's valuable. You can take these things and update them maybe every quarter and have a new quarterly wrap-up of new content about the key topic areas of your choice. So that's what I want you to do with your marketing.

Again, you saw how we did it from the very beginning. Export the data from the tool of your choice, do some very simple tagging, no machine learning or anything crazy like that. And it produces a nice list that you can then go and put in additional blog posts or wrap-ups or whatever. So please do that with your marketing and make the most of the content that you already have that you worked so hard to produce. As always, please leave your comments below, subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data, analytics, and digital marketing problems? Visit trustinsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.