Episode 31 - Why Content Audits are Essential

Make The Logo Bigger

Introduction of guest

• Just to give you a little background on Trisha...
  • Trisha Winter is a former SaaS CMO who now specializes in creating content for companies looking to amplify their content marketing. Trisha's strength lies in B2B technology marketing and her ability to make the complex simple and relatable for target buyers. You can learn more at her company website: FocusedB2B.com or reach out to her via LinkedIn or Twitter.
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/trishawinter/
• https://focusedb2b.com/
• https://twitter.com/TrishaWinter

Interview

Wrap up

Trisha: Here’s my recent blog post on this topic - feel free to break apart and turn into Q&A

Why Auditing is the Most Important Job of Content Leaders (And How to Do It) Blog Post

As a content lead, you care about the quality of content that your team is releasing to the wild. You likely spend a great deal of your time planning content strategy and brainstorming themes. You make sure that everyone knows their role in the orchestration of the content engine. But is auditing a part of your role? If you truly want to improve content performance, you may need to take a closer look at your content—and I don’t mean your assets.

Content you need to be auditing

When I was in your position, I always had a heavy hand in whitepapers and major assets. I did a thorough copy and design edit in multiple stages. I made sure that asset would be the best it could at engaging our target audience. Then after promotion, I reviewed the data to see how many likes, shares, click thrus and downloads we got. But you know what I didn’t do? I never audited all the content pieces and parts that surrounded that asset. And that was a big mistake.

It doesn’t matter how great your asset is, if the content used to promote it isn’t good, your asset will never reach its full potential. That’s where auditing needs to be a part of your weekly routine.

Here are the key content pieces you need to be auditing (in order of importance):

1. Landing pages
2. Emails
3. Social posts/Advertisements
4. Assets

Wait, the asset is the least important? Yup! It’s irrelevant until the roads leading to it are high enough quality to get people to that destination.

How to audit marketing content

Auditing is the practice of taking a small sample of the overall content and checking it thoroughly for mistakes. This does not mean you should put yourself in a review workflow for every piece of content. Instead, block a few hours in your calendar once a week to dedicate to auditing. Here is how to review each type of content.

Landing pages

Depending on the number of landing pages you have, try to look at 10-20%. If you have 40 landing pages, take a look at 8, if you have 100, take a look at 10.

Check for:

• A hook in the first sentence
• 3-5 Clear reasons the reader will get value from the asset
• Working/correct form and links

Common mistake: Marketers often rush the landing pages. Sometimes a designer will create them when a colleague misses their deadline. This results in copying and pasting the intro or not clearly thinking about how to convince the reader to fill out the form. (Read article on how to fix these mistakes)

Emails

Select 3 different assets and look at the emails used to promote them. If you only send one email per asset than go broader