Content Marketing is an important element of B2B marketing. It can be tempting to jump right in and create content and distribute it to the world. However, it will be worth your while to review and prepare, when you do, you’ll not only save time, money and resources but you’ll increase your effectiveness and gain a higher ROI for your marketing activity.
In this blog, we look at the benefit of content audits and how they can help you set the foundations to improve your B2B marketing performance.
What is a B2B content audit?
Content audits are a key part of your marketing research that informs your marketing plan for the year. For many B2Bs content marketing is an important part of their marketing strategy. For example, take a look at this statistic from marketingcharts.com
52% of B2B buyers say they are definitely more likely to buy from a business once they have read their content.
Your content audit comprises the cataloguing and analysis of all your content on your website, social channels and even your email funnels. In the content audit you’ll be assessing the strengths, weaknesses and ROI of your content and finding opportunities to improve your engagement and response in line with your business objectives.
When you have a clear understanding of what content, topics, formats and channels work best, you have the opportunity to hone your activity in a way that saves time and budget and also improves results.
Content marketing formats you will need to audit:
Review the formats below in line with your objectives and their performance metrics, e.g. leads, engagements, shares or subscriptions/follows. Compare their performance across your channels e.g. email, web, social.
Website and landing pages (copy, meta data) vs SEO and traffic results over the period you’re assessing.
Video & animations
Graphics/carousels
Product descriptions
Long-form text posts and articles on channels such as Linked In
Audio and podcasts
Webinars/demos
Downloads e.g. e-books or audio
Case studies
FAQs
Pillar content
Remember to compare the performance of all items across all distribution channels, e.g. email, web, video channels and social media.
TOP TIP! What Most People Miss in their Content Audits
The purpose of your content audit is to find out what content and tactics will help you drive greater traffic to your website and landing pages and convert that traffic to leads or sales. A key piece of intelligence that some people forget is to also audit your key competitors.
By auditing the activity and performance of your key competitors, you can find out how they are achieving growth and learn from their ideas, topics and innovative strategies.
You can compare your performance on social channels and using tools such as ubersuggest.com and similarweb.com you can start comparing their content strategies, seo and keyword strategy. These sites will also give you ideas for content and formats for your content marketing strategy.
Once you have collated your information, as well as your competitors (and perhaps signed up for a few of their downloads and experienced their conversion funnels…), you can compare your performance and see where there are gaps you can capitalise on.
Don’t under-estimate new entrants to your market, they have probably already done this work and are vying for your audience. If they are growing fast, it’s worth finding out what you can learn to apply in your own marketing plan.
The 5 Steps for Your Content Audit
Define Your Goals First, take your business objective (e.g. revenue or volume of sales for specific products or services). Then, what are the metrics that will help you deliver on these business, financial and marketing comms (brand) goals? Be specific. Is it traffic, engagement or leads you require? What volume will deliver your intended results?
Perform Your Content Audit Identify your inventory and the metrics they achieved and, not forgetting, assess your competitors’ performance too.
Compile Your Content Audit It’s time to get the microscope out. Collect and analyse your data content by type, topic, format, length, meta description, keyword, author, search engine ranking and any other identifiable features. Set the comparisons up in a spreadsheet by groupings.
Sort Your Content Your audit will help you identify the content that is performing well - and not so well. Once you’ve assessed the content, add a column to your audit spreadsheet that shows its status - e.g. keep or delete. Here’s a way to sort your content to help your plan.
Content to Keep If it’s performing well and it’s up-to-date, keep it! Remember, it doesn’t have to end up on a dusty library shelf, you can re-use and re-distribute it for the new strategy you are planning. This might include things like case studies and FAQs.
Content to Update When you find content such as blogs, landing or web pages that aren’t performing well, first take a look to see how it could be adapted to better meet your objectives or rank for that all-important keyword. Sometimes content goes out-of-date (that perhaps was popular in the past) and you could update it and leverage and improve the ranking factors it already has; e.g. any content with statistics. Any content that just hasn’t performed but meets your target audience needs, could just be re-worked to try and net more traffic.
Look for the Opportunities Your audit might reveal old content that is getting new traffic. This is great content to prioritise for updates to make it more relevant for searches. This includes, re-writing articles, web pages as well as new pages that have been viewed a lot over the past month with a view to improving them to make them even more popular.
Content to Bin You’ll inevitably have content that just didn’t perform, it’s simply out of date (e.g. past promotional campaigns) or it would need too much work to make it worthwhile, you can delete it. It’s also important to make sure that you delete duplicate content that would negatively affect your SEO. If content hasn’t been viewed for over 24 months, it might be time to delete it!
5. Write Your Content Marketing Plan
Break your plan down by quarter and when it comes to video and audio, it’s usually a good idea to group content together to get them completed at the same time as there can be cost and time-savings related to this. Really think through what additional versions you need for each piece of content, e.g. blog + social media carousel + audio version.
Tools for Content Audits
Google Analytics
SEMrush (various tools)
Ubersuggest
Similarweb.com
Social media analytics
To discuss how The Content Maven can help you conduct marketing research and audits and improve your marketing plans, request a call with Alison.