Auditing your content is a great marketing habit to practice and doing this on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis can help you keep a pulse on your content marketing efforts.

Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Marketing Audit

January 8, 2023

Auditing your content is a great marketing habit to practice and doing this on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis helps you keep a pulse on your content marketing efforts.

A lot can happen in a few weeks with the digital marketing space and so it’s important to keep notes of what’s working and ways to optimize and improve your efforts.

Perhaps you make mental notes about milestones and memorable wins with your content or jot down a few observations from time to time, but getting into the habit of doing this regularly will help you maintain a better pulse on your content marketing efforts.

In this article, I’m going to share some ways you can evaluate your content and most importantly, the questions you should be asking yourself as you conduct a content audit.

How to Conduct a Content Audit

1. Review your website analytics

Take a moment to look at your traffic behavior and analytics. You can look at this activity on your website’s dashboard. You can also refer to third-party tools such as Google Analytics as well to better understand the performance of your marketing efforts or products and offers. While analyzing your website data, you want to also evaluate your sales pages, blog posts and see where and how people came to visit, learn and purchase from your brand. You can also turn to Google Analytics’s dashboard to sort and filter the different columns. Take a look at your traffic sources, which pages your audience visits and how many page views they generate per month. Compare your current month to last month and see what changed and take notes.

Questions to ask yourself as you conduct a content audit of your website:

Which pages get the most traffic?
What does your referral traffic look like?
Which posts or pages generate interest and questions from your audience?
Do you see anything that may be outdated that may need to be refreshed?
Is there anything on your site that can give you a sense of what’s resonating most with your audience?
What generated sales or interest in your products and services?
Which activities or actions boosted sales for you?

2. Review your social media analytics

Sort and filter your analytics so that you can see some of the highest engaging posts. You want to look for patterns or common themes in how your audience is engaging and connecting with you online. A little bit of digging and research into your analytics will help you understand what’s working and not working in your content marketing. Take an objective look at what your audience is engaging with and what’s truly helping your content marketing.

Questions to ask yourself as you conduct a content audit of your social media analytics:

Are there certain topics or visuals that generate a lot of interest or questions from your audience?
Which posts receive a lot of comments, saves, shares, etc? Look at why it may have received so much engagement and see if there’s a way to repurpose that content or expand on it for future posts. Take note of which posts you can repurpose, expand on or update with new information.
Identify posts that prompted questions, interest or other types of engagement.
Which channel(s) are you most consistent on right now? What does your content mix (i.e. blog posts, graphics, short form video, memes, GIFS, etc.) and content distribution plan look like? Are you maximizing your content repurposing strategy?
What’s working and not working? What moved the needle for you? As you work your way through each channel, analyze the performance of your content. What type of content was it? (i.e. quote, graphic, video, etc). What was the tone of the message? When and what time was it posted and on which platform? What did the message convey?
Which channels are currently offering the least engagement or poor performance?
Could weak performance be attributed to poor execution?
Which posts have frequently asked questions? Is that a gap in your messaging or an opportunity to help fill a need and provide more value for your audience?
Take a look at some of your competitor’s pages. Are there topics that they’re not covering that you can help address or expand on in your content marketing? What are they doing well that you could remix for your own brand.
Which channels give you the highest feedback loop with your audience where you get to receive their feedback or have them click and engage with your content?

Look for little clues and insights that can help inform new content ideas or opportunities to pivot into new topics. It’s important for you to stop doing what’s unnecessary and start focusing on content and activities that are effective in your business and content marketing.

Remember: You don’t need more content, you need effective content.

Take a look at any unique factors that may be contributing to poor performance on a platform (i.e. inconsistency, lack of optimization, type of content, your engagement strategy, etc). Take a look at the content that has performed well and determine what was unique about the content. Your goal is to become familiar with your highest-performing content so that you can continue to iterate it once you begin to create content for your social media content strategy.

As you evaluate each platform, think about whether you have the time and resources to invest time on this channel. Remember that you don’t have to be everywhere. It’s OK to start and expand onto other channels over time.

3. Audit your copywriting

Take a moment to review the copy in your content to see if there are ways to simplify, attract or better connect with your audience. Review copy in your headlines, call-to-actions, emails, landing pages, buttons, etc.

This is an important step in your content audit because you can really refine the way you write your offers and content for your audience. For example, the open rates of certain emails can really help you understand which titles helped contribute to higher engagement from your audience.

Questions to ask yourself as you conduct a content audit of your copywriting:

How often do you incorporate a conversion or engagement call-to-action?
Which content received high engagement? Do you know why?
What’s the open rate of some of your highest-opened emails?
Are there any themes, topics, pain points or offers that seem to resonate well with your audience?
What’s your conversion rate for your email funnels?
Is there an opportunity to modify some of the copy in your titles, objections or call-to-actions?
How often are you using the same phrases that your audience uses to describe their pain points or that directly address their objections toward buying your offer or service?

4. Audit your freebies

Your freebies should be helping you attract or nurture existing audiences. Whether you have a lead magnet that leads people to a product or a freebie that guides your audience towards a service—you should audit your freebies to see if they’re being effective.

Your freebie may have a specific purpose and you want to make sure it’s optimized and working to help you achieve your marketing goal.

Questions to ask yourself as you conduct a content audit of your freebies:

What’s your highest converting freebie?
Where do people come to learn and engage with your freebie? (i.e. website, landing page, blog posts, Pinterest, etc). Take note of what’s helping you attract people to your freebie and think about ways to double down on those efforts.
Is there an opportunity to maximize your freebie opt-in? For example, if you currently share your freebie within blog posts, is there an opportunity to create a pop-up exit form? Or can you incorporate it into future videos or share it on Pinterest? Think about different ways to continue attracting or converting audiences.
What does the email funnel of your freebie look like? What’s the conversion rate and is there a way to improve that metric?
How often are you talking about your freebie and where?

5. Audit your visual content

Take a moment to glance through your visual graphics for your brand. You want to look at the content you share online such as your social media channels, including thumbnails for videos or branded images on your website. Things don’t have to be perfect and don’t let this stall you from showing up online, but you should aim to have your brand look cohesive online. This is an opportunity for you to take note of which visuals pop out at you as either being complementary or misaligned to your brand.

Building a brand online takes time, but you want to aim to show up in a way that establishes and builds brand awareness. One way to do that is through consistent (or complementary) visuals across your platforms.

Questions to ask yourself as you conduct a content audit of your visual content:

Are there any graphics or photos that look random and not aligned with your brand?
As you review your brand images on your website, how are you portraying your brand online and does it feel aligned with who you are and how you want to show up online?
Take a look at your product images and see what’s working and not working. Are there certain product angles or details that can be improved?
Are there any images that need to be updated on your website or landing pages?
Should you consider using a specific filter on your images or videos? If you’re already using a filter, is it time to update that filter or does it still work with your brand and target audience?
Are your thumbnails for videos eye-catching and are there any themes or performance observations that you can observe from auditing thumbnails?
How are your fonts and brand colors being used throughout your online presence? Is there a consistency in the “look and feel” of your brand?

6. Audit your audience

By this point, you’ve reviewed high and low-performing content and have had an opportunity to take note of how your audience engages with your content and their online behavior.

Review your insights to drill down a little more on who’s engaging with your content. You can use this information to determine if you’re reaching your target audience and opportunities to branch into new audiences or explore new platforms or content formats.

Questions to ask yourself as you conduct a content audit of your target audience:

What types of comments or questions are they leaving on your social media posts?
How do they respond to your sales emails or your newsletter updates?
Is your target audience active on the platforms that you’re currently active on? How are they engaging with your brand online?
How would your target audience describe themselves and how does the bio of people who engage with your content typically say or show in their online profile? (i.e. mothers, mothers of newborns, small business owners, runners, yoga enthusiasts, wellness enthusiasts, professional women in C-Suite level, etc). These are all very unique groups and spending some time reviewing who’s engaging with your audience can give you a sense of who they are and what problem they may be trying to solve or why they’re engaging with your brand to begin with.
Is your target audience evolving or do you feel like there’s more that you can share in your content to nurture existing customers while also attracting new audiences to your channels?
Do the comments or reviews that people share online about your brand sound like your ideal customer?
Can you get a sense of the different audience personas that make up your target audience and can you identify ways to capture, connect and convert your audience through your offers and content marketing?
Have you sent a survey or conducted a poll with your audience to ask them about how they learned about your brand or offer?
Have you also asked your audience online what type of new content they’d like to see more of from you? This can help guide your content marketing efforts because you’ll be better equipped to meet your audience where their needs are.

Auditing your audience can help you better understand who you’re speaking to and who you’re creating content for. This can also be a very eye-opening experience because you may discover ways in which you may be attracting random people to your digital channels. Auditing your audience is a great way to get a pulse on who you’re attracting, building trust with and how. You may also find that auditing your audience can help you hone in on who your target audience is and who is not.

7. Audit your content creation and publishing tools

Set aside time to also audit the tools you use to produce and publish your content. This can include apps, websites and subscription services you use to create, edit or optimize your content. Not only can this help simplify your content creation process, but it can also save you money!

Make sure you also review which apps you use and which ones you can delete and free up space on your phone. It’s also important to consider which tools help you streamline and simplify your content marketing efforts either your ease-of-use or collaboration features.

Questions to ask yourself as you conduct an audit of your content creation and publishing tools:

Which tools will you use to help you create, publish, manage and automate your work?
Which tools make it easier for you to get things done quickly and easily?
Are there tools that require a premium subscription to use? If so, how important are those features to you? (i.e. no watermark, more storage, easier collaboration, etc).
Which tools help you collaborate more easily?
Which tools make publishing or distributing your information faster?
Which platforms you will invest your time and resources on? This can help inform your decisions on which tools are essential and which ones you can live without. Remember to identify a content posting framework that will help you stay consistent without causing burnout.

Tools for Content Creation

Here are some suggestions for tools that are great to use for your content creation (with affiliate links):

Airtable: To help you with your content calendar, inventory, CRM or other data management.
Canva: Creating graphics, videos, social media posts, presentations or PDF guides can all be created within Canva.
Tailwind: To help you schedule and manage your Pinterest account and generate traffic for your blog, online shop or other channels.
Planoly: Managing your Instagram account will be easier with a visual planning tool such as Planoly.
Epidemic Sound: Creating YouTube videos? You can find a library of great sound selections here.
Asana: Need to manage your projects and general operations of your brand or business? You’ll need a good project management tool. Consider using Asana to keep you on track with your goals, projects and tasks.
Convert Kit: If you’re building your email list, you’ll want to consider Convert Kit to help you grow and nurture your audience.
Social Squares: There are many ways to get stock images, but sometimes all of those stock images start to look the same and recognizable across different sites.

8. Audit your competitors and complementary accounts

In this section, you want to identify the competitors, influencers or any complementary accounts that are talking about similar topics, products or services as you. These accounts may be targeting your ideal customer and you may be able to gain some insights and takeaways. You may also find yourself identifying ways to partner with certain people or brands that would make for a great collaboration and win-win for both groups.

Questions to ask yourself as you conduct an audit of your competitors and complementary accounts:

Which platforms are your competitors successful on?
What’s their posting frequency?
Which type of content receives the most engagement?
Which platforms are they receiving the least engagement?
As you take notes, identify content that aligns and that you can replicate and remix into your own style. What can you improve on and make better? In what ways can you distinguish yourself from others in the market?
Do keyword searches on each platform and see what is popping up in the search results. Who are the influencers in your field? Which brands complement your content?

Try to not spend too much time in this section because you don’t want to end up going down a rabbit hole and you also don’t want to start copying or getting influenced too much by your competitor’s content strategy. You want to get a lay of the land and a pulse of what’s working and not working for your competitor.

Identify accounts that you could potentially curate content from to complement the interests of your target audience. Take note of accounts that you would want to collaborate with to expand your reach and better serve your target audience.

9. Audit your content marketing goals

In this step, you want to be very clear and honest with how you’re spending your time on social media and where you’re being effective with reaching y our content marketing goals.

The essential part of this process is to identify a goal that you can track and measure. You need to get very clear on what your business goal is so that you can effectively measure it on social media. This is an essential step in creating a social media content strategy. In this step, you should identify your business goal. For example, increase brand awareness, boost your email list, generate leads or increase web sales, and so on. You want to make sure you are clear about what your unique business goals are, your content plan, KPIs and action steps you need to take to achieve your goals.

Once you are clear on what your goals are, you are able to map out what your social media goal will be to help support that. For example, if your business goal is to boost web sales, then your social media activities will implement a Facebook pixel, ensure that your Google Analytics is set up and ensure that you have the systems in place to track and measure the performance of social media content. Make sure you identify your business goal and then identify the ways your social media activities will help support that goal.

Questions to ask yourself as you conduct an audit of your content marketing goals and activities:

Do you mention your freebies, offers or talk about your services enough?
What is the goal you measure for and how did you effectively accomplish it? (i.e. Is your goal brand awareness? Web traffic? Sales? Brand partnerships? Reaching new audiences?)
Evaluate how your content helps you move closer to your marketing goals. If you feel there are more opportunities to expand in this space, identify how your content will help support this goal.
When you evaluate your marketing funnel such as capturing, connecting and converting your audience, are there gaps in the content process that you could improve on?
How obvious is it for someone to understand what you offer and the process for purchasing or working with you?
Are there touchpoints that could be improved with your customer or target audience? (i.e. website contact form, link in bio information, onboarding form, email sign-ups, text enrollments, etc). What appears to be working and how can you improve this experience to make it easy to work with you?
Which activities generate the most leads or engagement for you?
Where are you spending your time and do you want to be there? If creating a video is challenging, could you delete it or delegate it from your to-do list?

Nancy Casanova

Nancy Casanova is a content marketer specializing in storytelling, workflows and brand strategy. She loves sharing content ideas, inspiration and tutorials online.