The most intimidating part of creating a content marketing strategy is coming up with all of the assets. You’ll have to supply your audience with a consistent flow of information and media or risk losing their attention. Once you start getting a few weeks into your strategy, though, you may find yourself grappling with a new challenge: keeping everything organized.

As with just about everything else, the best way to organize your content marketing plan will depend partially upon your specific situation. Storing a bunch of large video files is different than storing text documents, which leads to another set of challenges. No matter which type of media your digital marketing plan calls for, it will be easier to stay organized if you make it a priority from the beginning. You can always make adjustments to improve your system as you go along.

Why Is It Important to Track Your Content Marketing Assets?

The dictionary definition of content marketing is:

“A type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.”

Creating and sharing content online doesn’t necessarily require a ton of organization if you’re only using one channel. If you’re a YouTube star, for example, and that’s your only platform, you probably don’t need much of a system to keep your videos organized. If anything, you might just want to keep a running list of ideas for future videos. It’s when you start adding other social channels that you need to pay more attention and develop a system.

To run with that same example, let’s say a YouTube star also has accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. They use those accounts to promote their YouTube channel, since that’s where they make their money. To drive people to YouTube, this savvy internet personality wants to cross-promote their video with posts on other social media channels. This is where it becomes important to stay organized.

The Risk of Disorganized Content Marketing

Our made up YouTube star starts posting on other social media platforms to drive traffic to their videos, but has no content marketing organization system in place. There are two main things that are likely to go wrong:

• They simply make a post on all of their other social channels to announce each new video. As a result, every social feed becomes almost exactly the same. Their audience has no particular reason to follow them on both Twitter and Facebook, because the two feeds are practically identical.
• In an effort to make all of their social media feeds unique, they post about different videos at different times across channels. It’s too hard for our theoretical content marketer to remember what they’ve posted where, though, and they end up talking about the same video over and over again on the same platform. Their social feeds become repetitive and stale, and their audience unfollows them.

How Do I Keep Track of My Content Marketing Efforts?

The good news is that this particular problem has an easy solution. Simply create a content marketing tracker in a spreadsheet, then log the date every time you share an asset on a new social media platform. The Buddy Gardner content tracker is in a Microsoft Excel document, but Google Sheets or another option should work just as well. Here are some fields you may want to include:

• Asset name
• Date the content was created
• Date shared on Twitter, Google My Business, Instagram, and all other platforms
• URL
• Anything else that’s useful for you to keep track of (for BGA, that’s the blog background color and topic tags)

Deciding which fields to include is probably the hardest part, and there’s really not much to it at all. From there, just update your spreadsheet every time you create a new content marketing asset, then again whenever you share one of your assets somewhere on the internet. Keep your content tracker up to date, and you’ll have a much easier time making sure all of your social media feeds are in order. If you want a free copy of the Buddy Gardner content marketing tracker to use as a starting point, just reach out.

‍