Can marketers afford NOT to audit their content?

I started to write this article after embarking on a second content audit (the first one I did was for a previous company) and this got me thinking about how many firms undertake this exercise?

Let’s get back to basics… what is a content audit? For me (and I appreciate others may have different views) it’s a rather time-consuming (but valuable) process to review content held within a website, plus any other content currently in use. The idea is to review and identify content gaps, relevance of existing content, the types of content (where does it sit in the content matrix and at what stage of the buyer’s journey), and to analyse the performance of the content in question. The ultimate goal is to serve relevant content, so it’s vital to understand your audiences, the challenges they face, and offer valuable information to solve those issues. This should help reach your objectives at every stage of the buyer’s journey (funnel) – from brand awareness right through to helping existing clients.

There are lots of benefits to doing this with plenty of resources online, but from my experience, some of the standout findings and thoughts from conducting this exercise are (in no particular order):

SEO/website - What are your prospects searching for, what content do you currently host on your website that’s causing an adverse effect (e.g. broken links, stale and/or potentially duplicated content) and what’s working (don’t forget the good stuff)? If your visitors aren’t converting to leads, there could issues with your content.

You could research new, potential keywords that could help your site outrank competitors based on what’s ‘trending’ at a given time.

Blogs - Are your blogs attracting your audience or is your published content just creating ‘noise’ on your site? Are they moving prospects through the sales funnel (i.e. you’ve attracted them, but there’s no follow-up content to give them a subtle push to the next stage)? Have you, or do you, regularly check the performance of your blog posts? If not, this part of the content audit will have an enormous benefit. If you outsource your copywriting, you could be effectively ‘burning money’ on poor performing content!

Content structure/formats – Is your current content resonating with your audience? Have you been focusing too heavily on just educational content for example and neglected the other content types such as entertaining, inspiring and convincing? Is your content addressing the pain points of your audience and does it fit with a specific marketing persona?

Brand check – You could find some of your current, but older content is out of brand. The messaging is no longer on-point and/or articulated clearly to your audience. It’s always worth a double check to see if your content still matches with your company's value proposition. You might find on some of your content needs a refresh from a branding perspective, you’d be amazed what you’ll find across different channels – there’s invariably some old branded documentation lurking somewhere!

Re-purpose and amplify - One great insight from the audit is to determine which content can be re-purposed to create even more killer content. Content can be time-consuming and expensive to produce, so there’s no harm in maximising it. This can be from re-purposing to sharing via different channels. Once you have the content, utilise social media to amplify it and lean on staff to actively share your hard-earned efforts via their communication channels.

Lead generation – Ultimately, your content should have a (strong) hand in generating leads. That’s the point right, to draw in new leads and help convert them?

Metrics

Without reviewing the metrics of your content, you won’t understand if it’s doing the desired job for you and your business. Why not ascertain what your baseline objectives are and make improvements from there? You should be able to find what is and isn’t performing. So, it’s definitely worth defining what good looks like and add objectives and measure the KPIs.

In summary…

I’m currently using an Excel sheet that has morphed over time with columns added and removed (currently at 20 columns containing things like title, format, status, stage, topic, persona, pain point… (the irony of my own audit sheet being tinkered with) and 100 rows of content assessed so far. But there’s still a fair bit more to go…  

I’m sure you’ll have your own ideas, or perhaps I’ve missed a few other key considerations from this short article. Do let me know if you have any thoughts and/or your top tips to share.

#contentaudit #marketing #content #contentcreation #blog