A recipe for success: the importance of a content marketing audit

A content marketing audit helps you work out what’s great, what needs ditching and what needs fixing. Which is why every content marketing programme should start with an audit. Because if you don’t know what you’ve got, you don’t know what you’re missing.  Do you know what content you have online and how it’s being used? Is it doing what you need to drive sales?

Prepare for success

Say you were heading out to shop for a dinner party and you were determined your evening would be a great success, wouldn’t you do some prep before you left home? 

• Firstly you’d consider who you were entertaining
• Then plan an appropriate menu
• Next check to see what you had in the cupboards, fridge, freezer …and drinks cabinet
• Based on the outcome of the above, you’d write your shopping list
• And along the way you’d most likely find a few things that were way past their use-by date and needed chucking out, right? Right.

Avoid a big flop

Well, the same applies to your content marketing. You need to carry out a thorough audit to assess where the gaps lie between your marketing and your customers. Then you can make informed decisions on exactly what is required to make your website and content marketing engine work as hard as it possibly can for the successful generation of more prospects and sales – and avoid a big flop. If you don’t…

You won’t know what you need to change when it comes to:

• How usable, navigable, content friendly and conversion capable your website is
• The degree of search engine optimisation (SEO) of your website
• What content you have - its quality, tone, format, where it is and who is responsible for it (content such as case studies, white papers, reports and videos)
• Marketing activity like social media (LinkedIn, Twitter), blogs, emails, PR and CRM

If you need a hand, we can help you at any stage of the auditing process.  Oh, and if you’re ever stuck for an incredibly delicious recipe for coq au vin just give us a shout. 

Any questions or comments are welcome below. Do you think an audit is worth the time and effort?

Read more posts on:

• Best Practice
• content marketing
• content strategy