From Brian Hansford, director of client services and marketing automation practice lead at Heinz Marketing
This is the latest in a series of weekend posts highlighting a wide variety of applications we think are pretty cool. Most have to do with sales, marketing and productivity. Check out past featured apps here.
With the evangelism on content marketing, there is very little talk or availability of practical tools that help with intelligent content efforts.
Enter Kapost, with their fantastic Content Auditor. I love this tool and use it with our clients to help develop an intelligent content strategy. And it’s free. This tool is a fantastic starting point which is nicely designed to parlay up to Kapost’s valuable content platform solution.
Discovering the Assets
Marketers need to know what they have published through online and social channels. Simply focusing on quantity production (the Content is King Camp) is unfocused and random. Plus, marketers may not know the high-value content they already have that can be re-purposed in other ways!
Start Smart
Marketers need to critically evaluate what they have, who they intend to focus on, where content fits in the buyers journey, where content is available, the themes, types and formats. That’s a big effort and it’s strategic to any marketing strategy.
Kapost’s Content Auditor is a fantastic resource to get this effort started the right way. The Content Auditor will scan and compile content assets published through these channels:
- Websites
- Slideshare
- Youtube
- Google+
The Content Auditor thoroughly catalogs everything from images to blog posts to eBooks to videos. Each cataloged asset can be sorted and assigned a customized attribute. (For example, data sheets, case studies, etc.) All of this is captured in one portal.
Where the Content Auditor gets really cool is how marketers can track where content maps:
- Personas
- Buyer’s Journey
- Go to Market or Campaign Themes
- Buyer or Product Centricity
Kapost Content Auditor Dashboard view on mapping to buyers journey and personas.
All of these attributes are customizable. They require that marketers truly understand their customers and how they engage. This is the point where most marketers get tripped up with their audit efforts because it’s tedious and takes too long and usually involves a static spreadsheet. Kapost takes the pain out of the effort.
The Content Auditor does a nice job with a dashboard display that shows the results. And the audits are saved and can be dynamically updated as more content is published. That’s so much better than a static spreadsheet! The visual representation gives marketers an idea where the content gaps are and how to build a strategy that focuses a strategy in the right direction.
Note: The Content Auditor does not currently scan unpublished storage channels like Box folders. Content consumption isn’t tracked either. Considering this is a free (and high-value) tool, that’s OK. Marketers can map this audit to the most popular assets using Google Analytics and their Marketing Automation Platform.
What is your experience using the Kapost Content Auditor? If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend it.
