What has your content marketing done for you lately?
We talk a lot about the significance of great content marketing, but how do you quantify the efficacy of all the words strewn across your digital universe? Content acts as your brand’s voice, and it’s critical that you pay attention to how your blogs, eBooks, site copy and social posts fit into your overall strategy.
If you just want to talk, go ahead and fire off content willy-nilly. If you really want to say something, you need to start with a content audit.
What Is a Content Audit?
Content marketing is an umbrella term that refers to all the online messaging your brand uses to stoke interest in its services or products. For your content marketing to be effective, you need to base all your creative efforts on one key thing: a strategy. A content audit helps you determine what that strategy should be by examining the efforts you’re already making and what changes might be necessary to get you from where you currently are to where you’d like your brand to be.
Why Do We Need It?
A comprehensive content audit will help you:
- Identify your core audience and ensure you’re creating content that speaks to those people. Consider their objectives, understand their pain points, and find a way to make a connection that feels both authentic and compelling.
- Develop a holistic, SEO-driven content strategy that supports growth. When your content is educational, entertaining and in line with your overall messaging, great things can happen.
- Avoid “random acts of marketing,” a terrible affliction that causes businesses to burn through their resources without rhyme or reason, resulting in an avalanche of ineffective content.
What Is the Value of a Content Audit?
A content audit arms you with the tools you need to create content with a purpose. As you build a global strategy that frames future content creation across your various channels, you’ll find exciting new ways to engage prospective and existing customers alike. Not sure how you’ll know whether your new efforts are working? The benchmarks created during the auditing process will be your new yardstick against which all ongoing evolution can be measured.
What Happens If We Don’t Do It?
Not everyone bothers doing a content audit. You can easily identify those people by looking at their online presence. Sporadic blogs and a sprinkling of random social media posts are the red flags of the content marketing world. Those brands have no idea how their content is performing and have difficulty pinpointing who their audience is, and a holistic, SEO-driven content marketing strategy is little more than a pipe dream.
Content audits aren’t quick, easy or for the faint of art, but learning what to keep, what to get rid of and how to make the whole setup sing in harmony is a prize of epic proportions.
To see how your content stacks up, run through our Content Audit Checklist.