Content Audit: What It Is and Its Purpose in Content Marketing

Last week, I shared how to develop a content matrix to support a buyer persona focused B2B content marketing strategy. This week, I will describe what a content audit is and explain its role in a B2B buyer persona focused content marketing strategy.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of taking inventory and evaluating the quality and effectiveness of the content your company has created for a specific purpose within a certain set of content mediums. Often, content audits are restricted to online mediums, but content audits are useful across all mediums.

What is the Purpose of a Content Audit?

The goal of a content audit is to:

1. Catalog the content your company has in its library and where it lives, so it can easily be repurposed, resurrected, and updated for future needs. This is especially important for offline content.
2. Evaluate the quality and effectiveness of each piece of content, so you can determine which content is important and should be kept, and what content can be removed and archived. This will also help you identify which content tactics have been the most effective and which have not been as successful so you can incorporate these data points into planning out your content marketing strategy.
3. Track the repurposing process to ensure that content is being adequately repurposed and to make it easier to update this content over time.

What Role Does a Content Audit Play in Managing or Developing a B2B Buyer Persona Focused Content Strategy?

A content audit provides the inventory catalog necessary to construct a content matrix. It also provides the metrics necessary to determine which pieces of content best correspond to specific stages in the go to market process. However, a content audit needs to be done alongside a content matrix to ensure that the focus, metrics, and audiences being evaluated for each piece of content are optimal.

The content matrix also identifies and helps prioritize any gaps that need to be filled. It can be used in conjunction with the content audit data to determine which content should be prioritized and which content needs can be filled through repurposing or re-working other content. As mentioned in my previous post explaining the purpose of a content matrix, an equally important role that a content matrix plays is that it categorizes content for the go to market team, so the team can create a repeatable go to market approach and easily evaluate its effectiveness. This is because content plays an important role in working prospects through the buyer journey. Without a content matrix, the content that sales and marketing individuals share with prospects can vary tremendously and is almost impossible to track.

A content audit won’t uncover what’s missing from your content strategy. This is the purpose of a content matrix. By maintaining an up-to-date content matrix and running a regularly scheduled content audit, however, a content marketing team will provide itself with the right information to develop and prioritize its content calendar.

Next week, I will explain how to set up a content audit process and will recommend a couple of tools to help you with this process.