Strategic content marketers who want to get the most bang for their existing content buck are paying close attention to the value of content audits. Knowing what you’ve got in the content vault is the first step to identifying how to leverage the investments you’ve made in that content.
If all you’ve done so far is to meticulously catalogue your content in a spreadsheet with asset types, titles and links, you’re off to a great start. But that’s not a content audit, it’s a content inventory.
Building a content inventory is a foundational step in performing your content audit. That list of assets will allow you to objectively and systematically evaluate the content to make key decisions about what you can refresh, what you can repurpose into new formats and what you should retire altogether.
According to SiriusDecisions, 60% to 70% of marketing content is never used. Never used! That could be because the content is deemed not relevant to buyers (29%) or because nobody knows the content exists (25%). (See, that inventory is already coming in handy!) And despite this data,
55% of B2B content marketers say their biggest challenge is producing enough content.
In actuality, a content audit is likely to demonstrate that you have lots of content, at least in some areas, and it allows you to restore and protect your investment in content by:
- Identifying and leveraging existing content for buyer-focused campaigns;
- Assessing content based on factors such as repurposing potential and vulnerability to age-related issues;
- Maximizing the value of future content investments; and
- Identifying and filling gaps in your content library based on an objective, standardized evaluation process.
Your content inventory won’t allow you to do that, because it lacks the deeper dive into persona and buying stage alignment, quality evaluation and scoring (by age, repurposing potential, etc.) and other factors important to your business (industry or business-size segmentation, product and/or solution-area references, etc.). This asset evaluation process is where you’ll learn where the strengths and gaps lie in your existing library.
This isn’t a quick or easy process, but it’s the only way to learn what the content in your vault is worth and where to continue leveraging it.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: What’s In Your B2B Content Marketing Vault? What Only A True Content Audit Can Tell You
More Sales & Marketing articles from Business 2 Community:
- The Complete Guide to Using Quora for Marketing
- A Simple (But Often Overlooked) Source of Content Marketing Insight
- Linking Social Media and Customer Service
- Rebranding: What To Do When Shift Happens
- 3 Ways Predictive Analytics Help You Hack Customer Acquisition
