Tips for Conducting a Successful Content Audit
It’s important to know how effective your content is. You want to know that it’s performing well so that you can continue with your current strategy. If it’s not performing well, you want to know so that you can adjust and improve its effectiveness.
In order to find out if your content is helping you to achieve your goals, you should perform a content audit. A content audit will help you discover any gaps that exist within your content, prevent you from creating duplicate content, and help you discover how well you current is performing overall.
If you want your content marketing to be as effective as possible, enough can’t be said about doing a content audit to see where things stand. This will help you as you go forward and create a plan that will improve your chances of success. Here are some tips for when you run your own content audit:
Understand Your Target Audience
To create content that helps to achieve your overall goal, you need to know you target audience. Attempting to appeal to everyone will only backfire because every audience has its own needs and expectations. Honing in on your target audience will benefit your business. If during your content audit, you discover that your content has missed the mark in this area, you can begin to learn more about your target audience and buyers. This information will help you as you go forward with your content marketing strategy.
Establish Content Marketing Objectives
In order for your content marketing strategy to be successful, you need to know your objectives. Once you have nailed down your objectives, you can determine if your content is meeting them while doing your audit. This will help your business greatly as you make changes to your strategy. Some of the objectives you want to think about may include:
- Increasing search engine traffic
- Increasing social signals
- Building brand loyalty
- Supporting the sales cycle
Content may have more than one objective, so don’t feel as though you need to pick one for each separate piece. Consider the goal of each individual piece of content. One may be share information, which another may be to encourage the purchase of a product or service.
Analyze Your Sales Cycle
When creating content for your business website, it’s important that you know about your sales cycle. You can create content that it targeted to each of the different phases of the sales cycle. Why is this beneficial? Users who visit your website aren’t all in the same phase of the sales cycle. You may have returning customers looking for new products or services, new visitors who are interested in learning more about your brand, as well as those who are close to making a first-time purchase.
If you only direct your content to people in one phase of the sales cycle, you are leaving out other demogrpahics. If you are a B2B company, for example, it could take up to a year to close a sale. You want your content to keep these potential buyers engaged with your brand and up-to-date on what’s happening both within your company and the industry.
Performing a content audit can help improve the success of your business as a whole.
Categorized in: Content Marketing
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