Author: Dillon Baker / Source: The Content Strategist
Few activities in B2B marketing yield immediate results. Long sales cycles mean it can take months, if not years, for your work to positively affect business. Luckily, there is one exercise proven to help you out right away: a content audit.
What is a content audit, exactly? It’s the process of tracking down and organizing all content produced by your company.
There are different ways to structure the audit. SiriusDecisions has an intensive seven-step process. Moz, meanwhile, has a good guide for completing one with an eye towards SEO. Whichever template you reference, make sure to include these three key steps:
1. Find every asset produced in a certain time period
This is the most time-intensive part of the process. But the trick is setting boundaries. You don’t want to waste time going back 10 years, because any data or commentary you used then probably lost its relevance. Reviewing content from the last two or three years is a better bet.
Also pay attention to how much you struggle during this exercise. If the audit feels like a death march, your company has a problem labeling and archiving content.
2. Map content to your marketing infrastructure
Once you round up all your content, the next step is to tag everything. Not only will a sound tagging structure help you organize all of your old assets, it’ll also give you direction for new pieces you create. Common tags could apply to parts of the marketing funnel, personas, topics, industries, and so on. Our editor-in-chief goes into a bit more detail on this step here.
3. Identify what’s worth keeping
This is the fun part. As…
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