New content has always been the king of the marketing game. After all, it is the content that keeps your returning visitors keep coming to your website in search of information. Great content makes these visitors turn into conversions as they trust in your brand over the period of time. Thus, in order to keep making good content or repurpose from your content treasury takes a lot of time and energy and content auditing is also essential.
How Do You Produce Content That Converts?
Every single content marketer out there keeps on making an effort to produce great content, but there are a few things that they must consider before diving into writing process. Writing a fiction is not the same as writing content for website, incase of content being produced for the website you need to thoroughly research over the internet to make the best it can be.
The demographics of your target audience is so very essential as you just can’t put any kind of content on your website and expect your audience to come on your website. You want your content to resonate with your audience so that they think of your website whenever they come over the web to do a particular kind of search.
While you don’t want to spend hours researching about your audience, you can facilitate the process by getting feedback from your clients by creating surveys or via social media pages. Another effort in this direction that can be made is to find out what kind of content your competitors are publishing or review some case studies in your industry.
Few examples of questions that you can create for general audience identification and their likes and dislikes are:
- What is your audience’s general demographic?
- What/Who influences them?
- What is your audience looking for?
- Any other platform where you find them the most?
- What is their general need that drives them to you?
After you have done this, you have at least taken the first step to creating a great content.
How To Conduct A Content Audit Without Taking Too Much Stress
While it is a not rocket science but there are some steps that marketers must take to ensure that your audit efforts don’t get wasted.
#1. Create Your Inventory
Before analyzing your content, it is important to take the entire stock of it, on all the channels where you post it. If this is going to be a manual task, then document it by creating a spreadsheet with the headers as the name, URLs, and description of the content asset.
If there’s too much content to handle then you can think of automating the process by just typing in the URLs of the location of posting the content and using the tools like The Content Auditor and many others.
#2. Identify what content categories matter the most
To get the most out of your audit, it is very essential to understand what kind of content matters the most to you, both externally and internally. Your content should be able to tell you where the holes are in your current strategy, for example you can tag content to buying personas to tell you where you were making a mistake in creating content, do you need to make content for top-of-funnel, or for middle-of-funnel, or for bottom-of-funnel, like that.
Common content categories are:
- Author
- Personas
- Publish Date
- Buying Stage
- Theme
- Buyer-centric or product-centric
- Product line
- Blog category
- Keywords
- Content type
- Competitors
- Primary call-to-actions
- Social shares
#3. Identify the holes in your current strategy
When you have finished with mapping all the content assets in the spreadsheet, you’ll get to see where you are lacking and where your efforts are most concentrated. Fill in these holes in the particular categories by creating content or repurposing it for that category.
#4. Identify the KPIs
What type of content is performing well, and what isn’t? Your spreadsheet of audit must tell the the top performing content and customize your KPIs so you can see what kind of themes, topics, and messages of content are resonating well with your target audience.
It is very important to track metrics like social shares, traffic, leads generated, and revenue. Now align your findings around four key areas: production, engagement, performance, and content scoring. This sets you on the course of making your future content marketing strategies.
#5. Present your findings for discussion
Once your mapping of content through audit is over, it is time to present your analysis in a coherent way for discussion. Apart from the data, you must suggest to your team what that data actually means for your company’s marketing future content marketing strategy. Expose content holes, suggest how you can fill these gaps by making new content or repurposing the existing one, removing the irrelevant content, and producing more of the kind of content that converts leads into sales.
Takeaways
Over the years of content marketing, it is very essential where your marketing efforts are heading by constant auditing and monitoring of your content and strategies.
Let us know if there’s any gap in this piece of content and something that you can add in the comments section.
