How can you manage and organize your content assets?

I believe in conducting thorough research, analysis, and content audit to develop high-quality content. My 3-step approach begins with careful planning, including defining objectives, target audience, and key messages. Next, I conduct in-depth research, gathering reliable sources and data to enhance credibility and understanding. Lastly, I analyze existing content assets, evaluating strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. This systematic process ensures well-researched, tailored content that resonates with readers, delivers value, and achieves objectives. I continuously refine and adapt based on feedback and trends to produce engaging and impactful content.

How you manage and organise your content assets will to a large degree depend on the type, format and the intended usage. However, the baseline is the need for the correct and accurate information to be linked to each asset, whether it is physical or digital. You can have a nice looking database or CMS, but it's nothing if you don't have accurate data. Without that starting point, efficient management, organisation, preservation and exploitation of the assets will not be possible and the business will not achieve its full potential. Obtaining the accurate information will sometimes involve detective work and "getting your hands dirty" (literally) especially if it involves older physical assets, but that is part of the job.

Before you create any content, you need to know who you're creating it for. What are their needs? What are their interests? What kind of content do they engage with the most? Once you know your audience, you can tailor your content to their specific needs and preferences. Set specific, measurable goals. What do you want to achieve with your content? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Generate leads? Drive sales? Once you know your goals, you can create content that is specifically designed to achieve them. This will help you ensure that all of your content is consistent in terms of tone, voice, and formatting. A style guide can also help you to avoid common grammar and spelling mistakes.

Here are the three steps I used to perform a content audit for a global e-commerce company a few years ago. 1) File storage and naming: when storing content you’ll want to stick to a specific naming convention. This makes it easy to search and avoids files getting lost 2) Track & document your audit: when performing an audit you’re going to learn new things about the content and the company. Track progress and findings as you may see an opportunity to leverage the assets available 3) Create an orientation for a new content management system so that the changes your recommend will be adopted by the entire organization

Your content assets include everything from blog posts and articles to social media posts and even offline materials like brochures and flyers. Take a comprehensive inventory of all of your content assets, no matter where they're located. Evaluate the quality of your content. Is it accurate? Is it up-to-date? Is it engaging? If not, you may need to update or rewrite it. Identify any gaps in your content. Are there any topics that you're not covering? Are there any areas where you could provide more in-depth information? It will help you to create a more comprehensive and effective content strategy.

As a content creator, I create a content calendar and workflow, Planning and scheduling future content creation and distribution activities is crucial. To accomplish this effectively, you need to utilize a content calendar a valuable tool for visualizing and organizing your content assets based on editorial themes, topics, formats, deadlines, and responsibilities. It plays a pivotal role in ensuring a streamlined and well-structured content strategy. Content calendar and workflow are indispensable components of an effective content strategy leading to enhanced productivity improved collaboration and ultimately the delivery of high-quality content to your target audience.

Don't just create content on the fly. Take the time to plan out your content calendar in advance. This will help you to ensure that you're consistently publishing new content and that you're covering all of the topics that you want to cover. Create a workflow for your content. This will help you to streamline the process of creating and publishing content. A workflow can also help you to ensure that all of your content is reviewed and approved before it's published. There are a number of project management tools available that can help you to stay organized and on track with your content creation.

Make sure to update your content regularly with new information and insights. There are a number of things you can do to optimize your content for search engines, such as using relevant keywords, creating compelling titles and descriptions, and building backlinks. Once you've created and optimized your content, you need to promote it so that people can find it. There are a number of ways to promote your content, such as social media, email marketing, and paid advertising.