How much thought have you given to your content marketing strategy? If you’re like many marketers out there, maybe not as much as you should. Content marketing can be a highly effective way to promote your services and provide engaging material to keep your audience interested, and it can be used throughout the sales funnel, from your first contact with a potential customer to retaining your loyal customers.
However, not all content is created equally. Even the most well-written blogs or social media posts don’t mean anything if they’re not the kind of content that your target audience engages with. To have a successful content strategy, you should be putting out the right kind of content, on the right platform, at the right time.
So, how exactly do you gauge whether your current content strategy is effective? Conduct an audit, of course!
What exactly is a content audit?
Content audits are an in-depth look at your current content across all platforms, including your website, social media accounts, email marketing campaigns, and any other marketing outlets you may use. The content that you’re looking at will include things like blogs, videos, podcasts, individual social media posts, white papers, and more. Before you start your audit, sit down and make a master list of all marketing platforms you use.
During the audit, there are some key aspects that you should be looking at:
- The type of content that you’re using on each platform. Are your social media posts all static images? Do you incorporate videos on your website? What items are you sending in your eblasts?
- The volume of your content production. How many blogs do you publish per month? How often do you post to social media?
- Whether your content is written for its intended audience. Your style of writing should be different if you are targeting those in their 20’s than it would be if you were targeting those 60+.
What is usually included in a content audit?
Although there are no hard-set rules on what you should do when conducting a content audit, here are some ideas to get you on the right track:
Goals and objectives – What goals do you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy? You may have several, so jot them all down! Some examples of goals would be to drive a certain amount of traffic to your website from a particular social media channel, or to receive a specified amount of revenue from your email marketing campaigns. Make sure to include goals that are both achievable and specific to your overall business objectives.
Performance of current content marketing campaigns – Dig into your website’s analytics, as well as get insights and reports from all your current marketing platforms, to determine if your current strategy is allowing you to reach the goals you set above. If not, crunch the numbers and see exactly how far you are from hitting your goals.
Identify strengths and opportunities – After analyzing your performance, list out exactly what’s working and what isn’t. Maybe you’re killing it on Instagram, but your Facebook game could stand to improve. Or maybe there are certain pages of your website that traffic spends a lot of time on, or pages that have a super high bounce rate.
Competitive analysis – Next, you’ll want to see how you’re currently stacking up against your competition. Take 5-10 of your biggest competitors and look at all the platforms that they advertise on and see how you compare. Look at how often they’re posting, the kind of content they’re posting, and how their content is being interacted with. In addition to showing you how you compare to your competitors, a competitive analysis can also shed insight on industry trends you might not have been aware of, as well as new ways you can reach your target audience.
When should you conduct a content audit?
Ideally, a content marketing audit should be conducted at least once a year. There are other times when it might be right to reassess your content, including:
- Your company has recently experienced a significant change
- There has been a significant shift in your industry
- There’s a new person taking over the marketing for your company
- Your leads or revenue are down, or you’re not getting the right type of leads
