The Content Audit
Complete the content audit worksheet
Analyze your content audit worksheet and identify opportunities
Reach out to us for a FREE 1-hour analysis
Strategic marketing starts with a content audit
The content audit is a strategic evaluation of your existing content. It enables you to assess it against your customer needs and your business objectives. Why does this content exist in the first place? What business or user goal was it created to achieve? To what extent is it delivering on these goals?
Why do I need a content audit?
- Identify underperforming and outdated content.
- Identify content that you can update and re-use.
- You can use a scoring mechanism to rate content based on how accurate and up-to-date it is, its degree of fit with current customer needs, the part of the buyer's journey it's focused upon and more. A content audit can help you with planning new content initiatives.
When do I need a content audit?
When you’re planning a new website
This is a perfect time to inventory the entire content of your existing website to determine what to keep, what needs updating and what should be discarded. It’s also an excellent opportunity to determine if your existing content is on-brand, accurate and up-to-date.
Launching a new product
A new product launch creates a need for a wealth of new content to support it, such as product literature, publicity to announce its availability, mentions in your company’s blog, newsletter and social media channels, and much more.
Launching a major marketing campaign
In order to launch an integrated marketing campaign, it’s a good idea to take stock of your existing content that can be leveraged as part of it. The audit will also reveal gaps that must be filled in order for the campaign to be a success.
How often?
Commit to performing a comprehensive content inventory and audit once a year. Special projects such as a new website or a new product launch should include a content audit that’s focused on the specific needs of the project (e.g., how can existing content be repurposed to support it?).
Let’s get started!
Step 1 The Content Audit Worksheet
Go to your website and fill out The Content Audit Worksheet with all of your website content. Repeat this process with your videos, social media and print assets.
Worksheet definitions:
Content format: Is it a blog article, video, infographic, technical paper, print brochure, etc.?
Audience or target: Who is this content targeting (i.e. customer, prospect, OEM, distributor, engineering firm, etc.)? Try to decide on a small number of categories that you can use consistently in this column, so you can sort and segment your inventory later.
Buyer’s journey: What stage within the buyer’s journey does this content target? Awareness, consideration, evaluation or purchase? What is the buyer’s journey?
Topic category: Identify topic categories and assign each piece of content to one of them. Your categories can be based upon product lines, customer applications or common challenges your customers face.
Where published: This column can help you get a “big picture” view of where you’re distributing your content. It may also help you to discern opportunities to repurpose existing content. For example, you may have produced an excellent report that didn’t get as much attention as it deserved when you first published it. This column can help you to identify hidden opportunities to better leverage your existing content.
When prospects are at the awareness stage, they are aware of your solutions and those of your competitors - but they don’t have an immediate need. Consideration assumes that they have identified a problem they need to solve and are actively looking for solution providers. At the evaluation stage, they have narrowed the field to several leading prospective suppliers and are nearing a purchase decision. Why is this important? Because most companies invest too much time and money creating content that’s designed to create awareness, while under-investing in content that’s needed to nurture their prospects through the other steps of the buying process.
Step 2 Analyze your Content Audit Worksheet
Identify topics that are not being written about, target audiences that are being ignored, and customer problems that are not being written about. Write down your analysis on a new tab within your Content Audit Worksheet.
Step 3 Reach out to Cultivate for a free one-hour consultation
We’ll help you take the next steps in your content audit, which involves taking a data-based, strategic analysis of it. This process will help you uncover problem areas and identify opportunities to take your go-to-market strategy to the next level of effectiveness and impact!