60% of marketers create at least one content per day (source: emarketer). Did you also know that 60% of marketers reuse 2 to 5 times their existing content, but only 29% have a refined strategy for this (source: Ozcontent).

Both the creation of marketing content and the reuse of existing content are important in any effective and efficient digital strategy. However, without a structured approach, you run the risk of producing a lot of content for a single topic while neglecting other topics that are equally essential for your audience. This is to say that you are missing out on many opportunities to generate qualified traffic and leads.

To protect yourself from this, you can take a step back and carry out a content mapping. We explain how it works and what are the benefits. Follow the guide!

Table of Contents

• 1. Know your audience well before getting started
  • The buyer persona
  • The buyer’s journey
• 2. What are content audits and content mapping used for?
  • The audit: identify all your existing content on which to capitalize
  • Mapping: mapping your content to detect opportunities
• 3. How to proceed to achieve your content mapping
  • Audit all your existing content
  • Classify your content by themes
  • Map your content based on persona and buyer’s journey
  • Analyze and detect opportunities

1. Know your audience well before getting started

We keep talking about it, but a preliminary and in-depth study of your target audience is a must before embarking on the definition of your strategy. This allows you to concentrate your efforts on targeted actions that generate results. Little reminder…

The buyer persona

It is a semi-fictional representation of the profile of your potential customers. The buyer persona requires in-depth investigative work to collect quantitative and qualitative information about your targets.

You should be interested in different aspects of their profile: socio-demographic data, communication habits, information consumption habits, purchasing process, etc.

The buyer’s journey

Once you have a better understanding of your audience, you can move on to the phase of defining the strategy dedicated to this persona, this is the role of the buyer’s journey. It is about defining for each step of the purchasing process of your prospects, what actions to put in place and the relevant content to produce to achieve it and maximize your return on investment .

Before moving on, here is a quote from Ann Handley, Digital marketing & content expert at The Wall Street Journal, who explains the importance of taking an interest in our audience upstream before producing content:

“When we produce content, we think, ‘Will our customers thank us for this?’ I think it’s important for all of us when we think about our marketing actions to say to ourselves: “Is this really useful to my customers? Will they thank us for that? ” If you think through this lens, it will clarify what you are doing in a simple and elegant way.”

2. What are content audits and content mapping used for?

91% of B2B companies use Content Marketing in 2019, and 86% in B2C (source: Demand Metric). It is therefore a safe bet that companies have a lot of content available. However, as a general rule, marketing managers lack perspective and are not always aware of all the content available or of those that may be missing in their content strategy. 

This is where content auditing and content mapping come in.

The audit: identify all your existing content on which to capitalize

The content audit consists of identifying and listing all existing content regardless of its format and age. The goal is to obtain an exhaustive list of content on which you can capitalize for your marketing or commercial actions.

Mapping: mapping your content to detect opportunities

Once the identification work is done, you can categorize your content and classify it according to the targeted persona and their buyer’s journey. The objective of this approach is to identify the holes in your editorial strategy and the opportunities to be seized in terms of production or optimization.

Content auditing is a preliminary step to content mapping.

3. How to proceed to achieve your content mapping

Here are the 4 steps to follow to carry out your first content mapping and detect new opportunities for content strategy.

Audit all your existing content

Gather absolutely all the content you have available and list them in a table by classifying them by format (blog post, white paper, webinar, video, flyer, etc.).

Don’t overlook any content, including print formats. You can also ask the sales team to provide you with the documentation they have (sales brochure, product sheet, etc.) or even the support service.

Classify your content by themes

To facilitate the development of your content mapping and the identification of opportunities, you must then classify your content by topic. If possible, try to limit yourself to 6 or 8 themes to be effective. This approach can also then allow you to build topic clusters in order to develop your pillar content strategy.

Map your content based on persona and buyer’s journey

You arrive at the stage of content mapping itself. It is about classifying the content according to the audience (persona) to which it is addressed and the stage of the purchasing process (buyer’s journey) concerned. 

Once this work is completed, you will quickly see filled areas, others partially filled and some completely empty. This will give you a clear indication of the holes in your content strategy. You will be able to identify the content to produce to complete your conversion funnels.

Analyze and detect opportunities

To this first analysis, you can combine an analysis of the performance of your content (traffic generated, conversions generated, etc.). The objective is to define the content that requires optimization for organic backlinking (SEO) and / or a potential reorientation at the buyer’s journey level to fill the gaps in your strategy.

“Updating and publishing old blog posts with new content and new images can increase organic traffic by up to 111%” (source: Backlinko)

Finally, do not hesitate to compare supply and demand by analyzing your traffic generation performance via your content at the monthly search volumes for the keywords you are targeting. When it comes to content like white papers, you will need to watch the conversion rate. You can analyze this data with the AdWords Keyword Planner or use the free Keyword Finder tool .

To adopt a good content marketing strategy and concentrate your efforts on creating or optimizing good content, content mapping is an essential step. 

You can do it in-house if you have the resources and the time, or you can hire a content marketing expert to help you with this task. In addition to his experience feedback, this expert will have an outside vision and will be able to take more perspective for the audit and analysis.