You’ve got thousands of online articles, myriad pages on your intranet and social media channels chock full of videos. Not to mention the lorry loads of marketing material. But is it any good?

When a business gets to a significant size it usually finds it’s swimming in too much content. 

The problem with this mountain is working out what’s still relevant, on-brand and useful for our customers. And even once we’ve worked this out, can we address the historic shortcomings that led to creating it in the first place, so we don’t do it all again? 

Mapping your content

A content audit is a map that plots all your existing content and communications output. Additionally, it has various notes detailing the performance, so you can decide what to do with it.  

I try and run an audit early on with a new client so we can quickly flag problematic content. I’ll start by asking if the content is up-to-date and accurate. (Anecdotally, this generates a need to address a large amount of content straightaway.) Most of the time content becomes out of date because it was created a while ago and simply doesn’t reflect where the business is now. Generally, we aren’t good at deciding how long a piece of content will be useful for and when it should be retired.  

The content audit covers a range of points: 

• Subject: What is the content about? Sometimes you can group content based on specific subjects or editorial pillars. 

• Audience: Who is the content designed for? Are they internal or external of the organisation? This can cover relevancy and also works well when there are typologies or segmentation of audience groups.

• Driver: What is the purpose of the content and does it have a call to action?  

• Brand and tone of voice: Is it on-brand? Is it written in our tone of voice?

• Legibility: Is it easy to understand and is it in plain English (specifically: logically structured, using simple language, error-free and accessible)?

• Producer: Who is responsible for the content, both in terms of creating and maintaining it? (Here I’d look to see if the person is still in the organisation or if a specific job role is responsible for it.)

• Data: What do the analytics show? Who is engaging with which pieces of content, how many views and how long are people spending on the site? Do these support or challenge your views of the content? 

Be realistic

A content audit helps you figure out what is working and what isn’t. But how deep you go is also driven by the resources you have at your disposal. If you’ve got thousands of web pages and only one person doing an audit, then it’s unrealistic to think you’ll be able to cover all the content and channels quickly.

Having a clear timeframe is as important as setting out a defined list of what you’ll cover. The best advice I can give is to also keep an eye out for patterns or correlations. You’ll often find dates ranges or channel-specific learnings covering large amounts of content. It may be you find a much-lauded channel performs poorly with the intended audience but is loved by senior management. Maybe there’s a channel you don’t feel confident using but actually gets a lot of engagement. Perhaps a particular author makes the same publishing errors so you can flag a bulk of their work.

It’s not a quick process but it’s an extremely important starting point in the journey of increasing the relevancy and quality of your content.

If you’re interested in learning how to perform a content audit or are considering external help to do your content audit, then please get in touch with us at hello@crocstar.com – we’d love to help.