What's your lead nurturing health score?

Picture this…You have a packed day ahead with back-to-back meetings, a strategy session and a Town Hall update for the entire company to attend. Next Monday? It’s showtime with a major customer presentation, spotlighting your company’s flagship instrument that revolutionises scientific workflows. As you dig into your content asset library for pictures, content, testimonials, and data, you hit a snag—outdated case studies and scattered data sheets stare back at you. How do you pull together something current and on-brand in time? Maybe borrowing from Bill’s presentation from six months ago could save the day? Let’s hope so…

For science marketers and sales folk looking to nurture leads and secure new business while keeping existing customers engaged, the day-to-day is pretty hectic. But amidst the hustle, there’s one often overlooked, basic exercise that’s instrumental to feeding all your marcomms and sales efforts – a content audit. It might not sound flashy or feel like the most productive use of your time, yet the payoff for your workflows, strategy success, and long-term focus is monumental. Here’s why a content audit is worth doing. It helps to:

1. Re-align and update any existing assets with current research and industry trends. It’s also more cost-efficient to update what you already have, than to create a new piece of collateral.
2. Boost your SEO performance, since you’ll be able to spot underperforming content, and gaps in your SEO strategy such as missing keywords and poorly optimized meta tags.
3. Enable you to see the big picture of which content pieces resonate with your market and which don’t, helping you to refine your strategy and streamline where you put your marketing investments.
4. Eliminate redundant content, avoiding confusion and ensuring that your sales and marketing teams spend time using content that brings value to your audience and aligns with your overall business goals.
5. Support compliance and accuracy of your content, reducing your risk of disseminating incorrect or non-compliant information.
6. Inspire you to create new pieces of content that plug gaps in your funnel. In most companies, this usually means going into middle-of-the-funnel (MoFU) and bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFU)-level assets, that are better for nurturing, application-focused, and often designed for fewer, more specific audiences. These assets are less attention-grabbing, more informative, greater-depth pieces. The serve to provide proof of quality, and to inform about technical details that scientists look for and need to see. Examples of such content pieces are FAQs, app notes, case studies, technical webinars and demos.

Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs: “A content audit is like a spring cleaning for your content marketing. It allows you to declutter, organize, and optimize your content to better serve your audience and achieve your business goals.”

How to conduct a content audit

While performing a content audit isn’t at all complicated, we have broken it down into easy-to-follow-steps making the process more efficient, effective and user-friendly…

Step 1: Know what you want to achieve

Before diving into your audit, decide what information you’re looking for and how you’ll apply your findings to your marketing function. Are you looking to improve SEO performance, enhance user engagement, or identify which content needs migrating to your new CMS? Clear goals will guide your audit process and help measure its success.

Step 2: Make an inventory of the content

Create a comprehensive list of all your content assets including: blog posts, articles, white papers, videos, webinars, infographics, emails, posters, trade media articles, NPD documentation, brochures/catalogues and any other content formats you use. Tools like Screaming Frog, Semrush, or Google Analytics can help automate this process by crawling your site and generating a list of URLs. Look to find a way to better organize all your content for findability in the future, ideally for anyone in your business – not just the marketing team. This is normally done through a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system that enables asset search. To implement that, you would also need to tag your assets with keywords.

Remember that your business’s content also lives in the not so immediately obvious places – training materials, sales/telemarketing/customer service scripts, social media posts, and point-of-sale materials. Picture a customer who attends a webinar, follows your social media posts, goes to the same trade show as you and sees your stand, lands on a landing page and fills in a form to download a new ebook, then browses your website. Are they getting consistent messaging at every touchpoint? You won’t know without applying an omnichannel perspective to your content audit, to ensure that is the case.

Step 3: Gather data

For each piece of content, look for these data points and make a note of them:

• Traffic and engagement metrics (page views, bounce rate, time on page)
• SEO metrics (keyword rankings, backlinks, meta descriptions)
• Content performance (social shares, comments, conversion rates)
• Content details (publication date, author, word count, format, was it produced in-house or outsourced etc.)

Step 4: Analyze your content

Evaluate each piece of content based on the data collected. Identify content that is performing well and areas that need improvement. Key aspects to consider include:

• Relevance: Is the content still relevant to your audience and industry? Does it address customer challenges effectively? Has it been optimized for your buyer personas?
• Strategy: Does it support the buyer’s journey? Do you have the content needed for awareness, consideration and decision stages? Do you have content for customer retention?
• Effectiveness: Does it deliver against your current marketing KPIs and business objectives? Is it information rich? Could it be re-purposed into other formats?
• Accuracy: Is the information up-to-date and accurate?
• Engagement: Is the content engaging and valuable to your audience? Does it perform well?
• SEO: Is the content optimized for search engines? Is there much duplication? Check targeted keywords, meta descriptions, header tags, and internal link structures. These are very common problems that harm the SEO performance of many company websites.

Neil Patel, Co-founder of Neil Patel Digital: “Content audits are crucial for maintaining a high-performing website. They help you identify what works, what doesn’t, and how you can improve your overall content strategy.”

Step 5: Take action

Based on your analysis, decide which action to take for each piece of content. Common actions include:

• Update: Revise and update outdated information.
• Optimize: Improve SEO elements like keywords, meta tags, and internal links.
• Consolidate: Combine similar or overlapping content.
• Delete: Remove low-performing or irrelevant content.
• Repurpose: Convert high-performing content into different formats (e.g., turning a blog post into a video or infographic).

It’s a good idea to map out these actions for your team throughout the year, this way you can allocate the internal and external resources required, as well as set aside budget to cover those activities.

Rand Fishkin, Founder of Moz and SparkToro: “Conducting a content audit can uncover hidden gems in your content that just need a little optimization to perform better. It’s a process that every serious content marketer should embrace.”

Secrets to running a successful content audit

Tip 1. Use a variety of tools and platforms to speed things up

Use the right tools to make your content audit less of a nightmare. As well getting data points from whatever platform you use for your content library and your CRM, here are some other tools that will be helpful: Google Analytics (traffic and engagement metrics, user behaviour), Semrush (keyword rankings, backlink analysis, competitor insights), Screaming Frog (site crawl data, broken links, duplicate content), and Moz (domain authority, keyword performance, link analysis). These tools give you valuable data and insights, saving you time and boosting accuracy. It’s like having a team of digital detectives on your side, doing the grunt work so you can focus on the big picture.

Tip 2. Prioritize high-impact content

Like many of the companies we work with, you might have hundreds of landing pages to optimize, in which case focusing on those that have high-traffic or align with your business priorities for any given time-period, will help you keep your sanity and actually get results.

Tip 3. Involve others

A content audit should be a collaborative effort. Involve different team members, including content creators, SEO specialists, sales folk and subject matter experts, to ensure a comprehensive and effective audit. Give them clear rules of engagement to avoid months of to-ing and fro-ing with your SMEs, and to contain the over- zealous grammar police. Yes, we see you! We’ve been using a cool but hard-to-notice feature within Semrush to optimize on-page SEO along with data from Hotjar (for UX insights) with sensational results recently. Want to learn more? Most importantly though, the best way to ensure the audit gets done is to make it part of your team’s job requirements. When people know they are going to be measured on it at the end of the year, they will make sure to get it done.

Tip 4. Document what you did and what you know

Keep detailed records of your audit process, findings, and actions taken. This documentation will be really valuable for future audits and can help track the progress and impact of your efforts.

Tip 5. Go for quick wins

If there are assets that you can apply a quick fix to, do it to feel immediate benefits. Some of the most common issues are:

• Wrong, out-of-date, no longer on-brand content, if it can be quickly fixed or updated – fix it.
• When reviewing web pages, if you find content that connects to nothing or dead links and no longer existing microsites – delete them.
• Duplicate content is a big issue affecting most large companies – consolidate and see immediate benefits.
• Broken links to important content or gaps in essential content, can be easily added or created.

Tip 6. Set a manageable cadence of reviews

Decide how often a content audit is manageable for your team. The very first one you do will likely feel like trying to alphabetize the British Library – it will take a while. But if you get into the groove and schedule these audits to run regularly, you’ll probably deal with no more than 50 pieces every quarter. This is way more manageable than trying to do it all at once, but of course, it all depends on your content velocity.

As a Head of Marketing or a Director of Communications, especially if you’re new in the job, a content audit won’t feel like a priority, and that’s why many companies we work with haven’t ever carried one out. Yet it is like getting a backstage pass to the inner workings of your role and your company. It’s one of the quickest ways to get up to speed. Plus, it’s a shrewd move for your career. The intel you gather from a content audit is critical to understanding how to expand your reach, brief new media partners, and ramp up your team’s lead generation game.

It’s time for a content audit…

If you find yourself in any of the below situations, then it is time to bite the bullet. 

• You’ve never done one, or no one remembers the last time you did one.
• Your content is old, outdated, or underperforming.
• You are developing a new content strategy.
• Your content has grown since the last audit.
• You plan to implement new content management technology.

Consider this: companies that invest in content marketing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost (1). Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing while generating more than three times as many leads (2). Yes, your content is a goldmine – treat it like the precious resource it is.

Follow the simple steps above, to help you run a content audit that will inform various aspects of your marketing strategy for years to come. From boosting your SEO and digital presence to growing your business development pipelines and improving sales conversions – a good content audit is your new best friend.

Remember, content marketing is not a one-and-done deal. Regular audits will keep you ahead of the curve and solidify your company’s position as a trusted authority in your field. And if you need a hand with your content audit, Qincade has got your back. 

We’ll do the heavy lifting, summarize the findings, and give you a set of recommendations. Our content strategy design service includes a thorough audit. Drop us a line to find out more – we’re here to help you shine!

References:

1. Forrester Research – https://www.forrester.com/report/Brief-Marketing-And-Media-Efficiency-Outcomes-Drive-Content-Marketing/RES128042

2. https://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-marketing-infographic