The 5 R’s of your new year content marketing audit: retain, refresh, retire, relaunch and repurpose
The beginning of any new year provides the opportunity to invest the time to undertake a content marketing audit. You’ve already spent a lot of time creating numerous pieces of content and now is an opportunity to step back and look at the big picture.
The Honner infographic Turning Content Marketing into Conversations details the key steps to executing a winning content marketing program. The content audit represents the last stage of this continuous process and provides the opportunity to retire old content, relaunch some of your best content and identify gaps in your overall content marketing efforts.
The idea of a content audit might sound onerous. But you need to remember how much effort it often takes to write one new piece of content. Investing time in a content audit not only provides an opportunity to improve your future content marketing efforts but can also provide the opportunity to relaunch existing quality content pieces with minimal effort.
Here are some simple steps to follow when conducting a content marketing audit:
First – gather all the data in your content audit spreadsheet
The first step is to set up a simple content spreadsheet. This allows you filter all the content by topic, target audience, date published, format (blog, video, infographic, e-book, image etc), customer journey stage (i.e. awareness, decision) etc. This should also allow you to rank all of your content based on performance metrics or customer engagement.
Second – allocate your existing content into one of these five buckets
Once you’ve got all your content in the spreadsheet, start to allocate each content piece into one of these five categories.
- Bucket 1 = Retain: Identify your evergreen content that still has long-lasting value.
- Bucket 2 = Refresh: Uncover outdated content and update it.
- Bucket 3 = Retire: Look for content that has limited engagement or is just plain irrelevant now – and retire it
- Bucket 4 = Relaunch: Discover the star content and promote it again. Assess your content metrics and identify your top 10 pieces based on customer engagement. Consider updating these content pieces and relaunching the piece again.
- Bucket 5 = Repurpose: You can also take your star content and package it into different formats. You also might want to consider turning these content pieces into videos or infographics or even a podcast. Also consider taking a series of content pieces or blogs and packaging them together into an eBook that could launched and promoted via paid media.
Additional communication strategies to consider during the audit process
- Look for content gaps in your content spreadsheet. The reviews should not only provide you with a view of what you have – but also what you don’t have. Are there areas of strategic importance to the business that have been neglected during the content marketing process?
- Publish a blog on your most read pieces of the year. This will drive more traffic to these key pieces and highlight the strength of your content marketing efforts.
- Identify technical flaws and find broken links that may be impacting your customer experience.
- Boost SEO: Find ways to improve some SEO such as ensuring you are using the right keywords or proper sub-headings tags.
- Spy on your competitors: Also consider tracking the performance of your competitors’ content for additional fresh ideas. Look at how they optimise their content and how many keywords they used.
- Use the insights to inform your future content strategy: Capture all the insights from this audit process, taking into account your successes and failures. It is probably true that 20% of your content is generating 80% of the results. It makes sense to learn what is performing and feed these insights into your strategic content plan.
Want help conducting a Content Marketing Audit? If you would like help or support conducting Content Marketing Audit please contact Honner’s Head of Marketing, Craig Morris on craig@honner.com.au