Substance and Style

At least once a year, it’s a good idea to audit your content. A good content audit will help you evaluate and improve your strategy and keep you from wasting time producing content that doesn’t help you meet your goals. It can also help you find content that can be repurposed or reused, ultimately saving you time and effort. As you head into the new year, set aside some time to look back at your content and think about what is and isn’t working. Here’s how:

1. Look back on the content goals you set during your last audit. If you’ve never done a content audit before, think about what you want your content to accomplish. Common goals include search engine optimization, audience growth, audience engagement, building connections, and making sales. None of these goals are better or more important than others; they’re specific to your overall business and marketing strategy. You probably have multiple goals and different kinds of content for meeting them (for example, lead magnets for growing your audience or blog posts for SEO).

2. Figure out what success looks like. Once you know what you want to achieve, figure out how you will measure success. Search rankings, site visits, clicks, likes, shares, comments, downloads, and sales are all valuable metrics. The data that will be of most use to you will depend on your goals and strategy. Ask yourself how you will know when you are doing what you set out to do. If you don’t already have a system in place to track the data you need, create one. 

3. Create a spreadsheet and take inventory of your content. The spreadsheet can be as simple or complex as it needs to be to serve your purposes, depending on your goals and the amount of content you produce. Once you set it up, you can reuse it year after year, so make sure you can sort by the data that matters most to you. List each piece of content, its primary goal (engagement, SEO, etc.), the kind of content it is (video, infographic, etc.), the channel where it was published, and how it performed. Create sortable columns for likes, shares, conversions, etc. Gather the content from your website, email campaigns, and social media posts (Note: if you produce vast quantities of social media posts, you aren’t going to want to list every post as part of this exercise; either evaluate your social strategy separately, or pick out pieces that stand out). This will make it easy to evaluate success by getting an immediate visual of which pieces did well and which did not. 

4. Identify the content that has resonated with your audience and think about why those pieces have been successful. What did you do differently with the pieces that have worked compared to the ones that haven’t gotten much success? If you see content that can be improved with some tweaking, make a plan for rewriting or editing those pieces. Look for content that can be repurposed (reposted with your thoughts as to why it resonated, changed to a new format, re-written with SEO in mind, posted again on an anniversary, etc.), make those changes, and schedule the new content. Look at what isn’t working and figure out why. Adjust your strategy accordingly. It’s less important to be successful all the time than it is to learn as you go. The longer you produce content, the easier it should be to create. The more strategically you create content, the more successful it will be.