At Odyssiant, we are advocates for content audits that go beyond the basics of telling you ’what you’ve got’ and instead inform you of what you need to create in order to maximise your opportunity to engage and sell.
And to engage and sell through content, you need your content to be connected together to serve the customer’s end-to-end journey.
So, what will a content audit that assesses how well you are supporting the customer journey tell you?
Whether you are fully supporting your business opportunities
As the business world adjusts to the impact of the COVID-19 crisis and the looming worldwide recession that economists are forecasting, supporting your business’s main growth /selling opportunities has never been more important. Content has an important role to play in achieving this.
Your content audit should tell how you are serving those business opportunities from a content perspective. Which industries or products, for example, do you have sufficient content for and where are the gaps? Is the content rich in variety (thought leadership, case studies, etc.)? Depending on the nature of your business and market, there will be several more questions that the content audit should be able to answer that will ensure that your immediate content investment is focused on your main business opportunities for the months ahead.
Where the gaps are in the customer journey
The perfect content audit will align content with customer journeys to clearly show how well each stage of the journey is served – these are the end-to-end journeys such as the Buyer’s Journey, Retention Journey or Cross-sell/Up-sell journey rather than process journeys that fulfil a customer task.
By mapping the content against customer journey maps, based on your main business opportunities, you will be able to understand how you could better meet the needs of the customer as they progress through that journey by ensuring that all the content exists at every step of their journey.
Which audiences are served well / poorly
By auditing content against customer persona types, you will be able to see how you are currently serving each of your persona groups. By comparing this against your prime business opportunities, you will then be able to ascertain whether you are well positioned to target your key target audience types.
Whether you are supporting the priority customer needs
Matching content to customer needs has emerged as a key requirement for any successful content programme. As a relatively new requirement, it is unlikely that your existing content is tagged with customer needs but it is perfectly possible to retrospectively add these customer need tags as part of the content audit.
Hygiene factors
There are several basic insights that a content audit will reveal, including:
- Content performance – although it is best practice to always add the performance metrics to any piece of content once published, a content audit provides the opportunity to either retrospectively add this in or to take that essential ‘step back’ and assess what drove the most success. This will, of course, help inform your future content planning in terms of channels, content types and much more.
- Content reuse / repurposing opportunities – given the impending need to reprioritise marketing activities in response to the COVID-19 crisis and looming recession, there will be the opportunity to potentially reuse or repurpose (with minor amends) existing content.
- Treatment of aged content – it’s a task that is often overlooked (until it’s time to update the website!) but aged content should always be considered in terms of assessing whether it is time to update or retire old content.
What content to create next – a content plan
The final piece in the puzzle that the perfect content audit will provide is to inform the plan of what needs to be created next!
What next?
A content audit is often treated as ‘one and done’. To stop this happening, you need to be using a tool for your content programme that automatically tags the key data into the content – i.e. content journey step, personas, audience needs, etc. This is something Odyssiant does automatically.
However, the content audit also opens up the opportunity to ensure there are connections between all your content so that you can serve the customer journey. It is perfectly possible to do this manually but (and it’s a big BUT!) the more content you have the harder this is going to be with the risk of dead links growing as each week passes by. Want to find out how Odyssiant can help connect your content together automatically? Get in touch and we can tell you more.