Customer Surveys

Use feedback from customer surveys to create a more targeted content strategy and improve your content creation.

Use Customer Surveys In Your Content Strategy

Use feedback from customer surveys to create a more targeted content strategy and improve your content creation.

Customer SurveysCustomer surveys can help you create a content strategy that is more in line with the needs and preferences of your target audience, which can help you create content that is more likely to be consumed and shared.

In this section, we will discuss the role and benefits of customer surveys in creating a content strategy, including tips for using them effectively, useful customer survey tools, and potential downsides to consider.

Why Use Customer Surveys In Your Content Strategy

Customer surveys can be a useful tool for creating a content strategy because they allow you to gather direct feedback from your target audience about what types of content they find most valuable.

This can help you understand what topics and formats your audience is most interested in, which can inform your content creation decisions.

For example, if you run a customer survey and find that a large portion of your audience is interested in learning about a particular topic, you might consider creating more content around that topic.

Alternatively, if you find that your audience is not particularly interested in a certain type of content, you may want to consider focusing on other topics instead.

Overall, customer surveys can help you create a content strategy that is more in line with the needs and preferences of your target audience, which can help you create content that is more likely to be consumed and shared.

Tips For Using Customer Surveys

Here are some tips for using customer surveys to gather valuable insights from your customers and use that information to inform your content strategy and other business decisions:

  • Determine your survey goals: Before you start creating your survey, it’s important to have a clear idea of what you hope to learn from your customers. This will help you create a survey that is focused and effective.
  • Choose the right survey format: There are many different types of surveys you can use, including online surveys, phone surveys, and in-person surveys. Choose the format that is most appropriate for your business and your audience.
  • Keep it short and focused: No one likes to take a long, tedious survey. Keep your survey short and focused to maximize the number of responses you receive.
  • Use open-ended questions: In addition to multiple choice and rating scale questions, consider including open-ended questions that allow your customers to provide more detailed feedback.
  • Analyze the results: Once you have collected your survey responses, it’s important to carefully analyze the data to understand what your customers are saying. Look for patterns and trends in the responses, and use this information to inform your content strategy.

Customer Survey Example

Here is an example of a customer survey that could be used to inform a content strategy:

How often do you visit our website?

    • Rarely
    • Occasionally
    • Monthly
    • Weekly
    • Daily

How would you describe the content on our website?

    • Boring
    • Okay
    • Interesting
    • Very interesting

What topics would you like to see more content written about on our website? (Please select all that apply)

    • Product reviews
    • Industry news
    • Tips and tricks
    • Company updates
    • Other (please specify)

What types of content do you prefer on our website? (Please select all that apply)

    • Articles
    • Videos
    • Infographics
    • Podcasts
    • Other (please specify)

How likely are you to share content from our website with your friends and family?

    • Very unlikely
    • Unlikely
    • Neutral
    • Likely
    • Very likely

Customer Survey Tools

There are many online survey tools available that allow you to create and distribute surveys to your customers.

Most of the tools listed below provide benefits and advantages like:

  • Customizable design: The tool allows businesses to create surveys with a professional and customized look and feel.
  • Multiple question types: The tool supports a variety of question types, including multiple-choice, rating scales, and open-ended questions, allowing businesses to gather a wide range of data from their customers.
  • Data analysis tools: The tool provides a range of data analysis tools, including charts, graphs, and pivot tables, to help businesses analyze and interpret their survey data.
  • Integration with other tools: The tool can be easily integrated with a variety of other tools, including CRM systems, email marketing software, and social media platforms, making it easy to gather and analyze survey data.
  • Advanced features: The tool offers a range of advanced features, including the ability to add images, videos, and other media to surveys, and to create surveys in multiple languages.
  • Mobile-friendly: The tool is mobile-friendly, making it easy for respondents to complete surveys on their smartphones or tablets.
  • Customer support: The tool provides excellent customer support, with a range of resources and support options available to help users get the most out of the platform.

Here are some powerful and flexible customer survey platforms that you can use to gather valuable insights from your customers:

SurveyMonkey

Customer Surveys Tool - SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey lets you measure and undertand customer feedback.

SurveyMonkey is a popular survey tool that allows you to create, distribute, and analyze surveys. SurveyMonkey offers a range of customization options and can be used to gather a wide variety of data from customers.

SurveyMonkey - Customer Survey Template
SurveyMonkey – Customer Survey Template

SurveyMonkey has a user-friendly interface and offers a variety of templates and customization options, including custom branding options, allowing you to create surveys that match your brand’s aesthetic and messaging.

SurveyMonkey also has a large user base, which means you can reach a large number of potential respondents when distributing surveys.

More info: SurveyMonkey

Forminator

Forminator
Forminator

Forminator is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to create and manage forms and customer surveys on your WordPress website to gather feedback and insights from your audience.

To use Forminator to create customer surveys, follow these steps:

  1. Install and activate the Forminator plugin on your WordPress website.
  2. Create a new survey form using the Forminator form builder.
  3. Add questions to the survey form using the various question types available in Forminator, including multiple-choice, rating scales, and open-ended questions.
  4. Customize the look and feel of the survey form using the built-in customization options in Forminator.
  5. Publish the survey form on your website or share it with customers through other channels, such as email or social media.
  6. Analyze the survey results using the data analysis tools provided by Forminator.

More info: Forminator

Google Forms

Google Forms
Google Forms

Google Forms is a free online survey tool from Google that allows you to create and distribute surveys to gather data from customers and other stakeholders.

Google Forms can be easily integrated with other Google tools, such as Google Sheets and Google Drive, making it easy to manage and analyze survey data.

Overall, Google Forms is a reliable and convenient tool that is easy to use and integrates seamlessly with other Google tools, such as Sheets and Docs.

More info: Google Forms

Typeform

Customer Surveys Tool - Typeform
Typeform makes people-friendly forms and surveys.

Typeform is a survey tool that allows you to create visually appealing surveys with a range of customization options.

Typeform is designed to be user-friendly and can be used to gather a wide range of data from customers.

More info: Typeform

SurveySparrow

Customer Surveys Tool - SurveySparrow
SurveySparrow – an all-in-one omnichannel experience management platform.

SurveySparrow is a cloud-based customer survey and all-in-one omnichannel experience solution that enables businesses of all sizes to create engaging feedback surveys.

SurveySparrow lets you create engaging and conversational customer surveys and offers a range of customization options.

It also includes a centralized dashboard, allowing you to import and organize your contacts into custom lists based on job titles, locations, and age groups.

More info: SurveySparrow

SurveyPlanet

Customer Surveys Tool - SurveyPlanet
SurveyPlanet – Free online survey maker.

SurveyPlanet is a free and user-friendly online survey tool that allows you to create and distribute surveys with unlimited questions and responses to your customers.

You can create surveys for free or upgrade to a paid plan if you need advanced or enterprise-level features, including the ability to export and print survey results, use custom themes, question branching, survey results filtering, create white label surveys, run kiosk surveys, receive completion notifications, and more.

SurveyPlanet is a reliable and convenient tool that offers a range of customization options and integrations with other tools, such as Mailchimp and Salesforce.

More info: SurveyPlanet

SurveyLegend

Customer Surveys Tool - SurveyLegend
SurveyLegend lets you create professional customer surveys with no design or market research skills.

SurveyLegend lets you create visually appealing surveys with a range of customization options.

You can create custom, engaging text-based, media-based, or choice-based mobile-friendly surveys, forms, questionnaires, and polls on any device with the tool’s free, dynamic survey maker.

SurveyLegend lets you customize the look of your survey and display results with eye-catching and insightful graphics using drag and drop with no design or market research skills.

The free version limits you to 3 surveys, 6 pictures, no data export, 1 conditional logic, and includes ads and a watermark. If you need more advanced features and the ability to create unlimited surveys, export your data, advanced logic, and more, then consider upgrading to one of their paid plans.

More info: SurveyLegend

AskNicely

AskNicely
AskNicely

AskNicely lets you collect and act on customer feedback in real-time and get feedback via email, SMS, or web.

The tool lets you track any customer experience metric including NPS, 5-Star, or CSAT (see below), see customer experience trends broken down by location, branch, or individual, and make evidence-based decisions.

More info: AskNicely

Qualtrics

Qualtrics
Qualtrics – free survey maker

Qualtrics is a powerful survey tool that offers a wide range of features and customization options to collect feedback and understand your audience’s needs.

It provides a free survey tool with over 50 expert-designed pre-built survey templates for customer, employee, brand, product, and market research professionals (or create your own form from scratch).

Qualtrics is often used by many businesses and organizations to gather data from customers and employees.

More info: Qualtrics

Pointerpro

Pointerpro
Pointerpro

Pointerpro (formerly SurveyAnyplace) is a survey creation platform that lets you create your own online surveys with customized reports created automatically.

Pointerpro’s survey maker generates personalized PDF reports immediately upon completion of the survey.

More info: Pointerpro

Alchemer

Alchemer
Alchemer – Enterprise online survey software and tools.

Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo) is a comprehensive, flexible, and easy-to-setup-and-use survey tool and feedback software that offers a range of advanced features, such as logic branching and custom reports.

Alchemer is a good option for businesses that need to gather more in-depth data from customers using an enterprise solution covering everything from survey software to customer feedback management.

More info: Alchemer

Customer Experience Metrics

Many customer survey tools track customer experience metrics to measure and track the satisfaction of your customers.

These metrics help your business understand how well you are meeting the needs and expectations of your customers and identify areas for improvement.

Some common customer experience metrics include:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer experience metric that measures the likelihood of a customer recommending a company’s products or services to others.

NPS is calculated based on responses to a single question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”

Customers are divided into three categories: promoters, passives, and detractors.

Customers who respond with a 9 or 10 are considered “promoters” and are most likely to recommend the company, while those who respond with a 7 or 8 are considered “passives,” and those who respond with a 0 to 6 are considered “detractors” and are the least likely to recommend your products or services to others.

The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

NPS is a useful metric for businesses because it provides insight into the overall loyalty of your customer base.

5-Star rating

5-Star is a customer experience metric that measures the overall satisfaction of a customer with a company’s products or services.

Customers are typically asked to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest rating.

This metric can be helpful because it provides your business with a simple and easy-to-understand measure of customer satisfaction.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

CSAT is another measure of customer satisfaction. It is typically based on a scale of 1 to 5 and is often used to measure satisfaction with specific touchpoints, interactions, or experiences within the customer journey, such as a customer service call or a product purchase.

Customer Surveys – Potential Downsides

While customer surveys can be a useful tool for creating a content strategy, there are also some potential downsides to consider.

One potential downside is that customer surveys may not accurately represent the preferences of your entire audience. This is because surveys are often only completed by a small percentage of your total customer base, and the responses may not be representative of the larger group.

Another potential downside is that customer surveys can be time-consuming and resource-intensive to create and administer. This can be especially challenging for small businesses with limited time and resources.

Finally, it’s important to remember that customer preferences can change over time. This means that even if you use customer surveys to inform your content strategy, you may need to revisit your strategy periodically to ensure that it is still aligned with the needs and preferences of your target audience.

Overall, while customer surveys can be a useful tool for creating a content strategy, it’s important to use them in combination with other methods, such as analyzing website traffic data and monitoring social media engagement, to get a more complete picture of your audience’s needs and preferences.

Customer Surveys – Summary

Customer surveys are a popular and effective method for gathering feedback from customers and using it to inform a content strategy.

Surveying your customers directly can give you valuable insights into their demographics, interests, and pain points.

There are many online survey tools available that allow you to create and distribute surveys to your customers.

By asking targeted questions about topics, formats, and preferences, and gathering feedback, you can get a better understanding of what your customers need and how you can address their pain points to create content that resonates with your target audience and meets their needs.

When using customer surveys it’s important to measure and track the satisfaction of your customers using customer experience metrics. By regularly collecting and analyzing these metrics, you can identify areas for improvement and work to enhance the overall customer experience.

Finally, keep in mind that customer surveys have limitations, and it may be necessary to use other methods to get a complete understanding of audience preferences.

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Image: Survey Forms

Web Content Accessibility

Learn about the importance of making your web content more accessible and inclusive for all of your website’s users.

Web Content Accessibility

Learn about the importance of making your web content more accessible and inclusive for all of your website’s users.

Web Content Accessibility - Man reading braille in front of a computer.The web has become so central to our lives that many people around the world today spend hours each day on average looking at screens on their digital devices searching for information, for work, or for entertainment.

According to WHO, around 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability. So, it’s important to ensure that both your website and your content allow people with disabilities or impairments to access and benefit from the same kind of user experiences that people without disabilities enjoy.

Making your website and web content accessible not only has ethical and commercial justifications but in some countries, there are also legal implications for not complying, especially if you are a nonprofit organization.

In this lesson, we look at:

  • What Are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?
  • Ways To Make Your Web Content Accessible

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Before You Begin

Please review the sections below before starting this lesson:

What Are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is an internationally recognized standard for making web content more accessible to people with disabilities. It was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that works to develop web standards and technologies.

The importance of content accessibility cannot be overstated. With over 1 billion people living with disabilities worldwide, ensuring that web content is accessible to everyone is not only a moral imperative, but it also makes good business sense.

When web content is not accessible, it can exclude people with disabilities from accessing important information, services, and opportunities. This can lead to social isolation and discrimination, and can also result in lost business and revenue for companies that fail to make their content accessible.

On the other hand, when web content is made accessible, it benefits everyone. People with disabilities can fully participate in society and access the same information and opportunities as everyone else. It also helps businesses reach a wider audience and can improve search engine optimization (SEO).

WCAG covers a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities on desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile devices, wearable devices, and other web of things devices.

This includes accommodating people with blindness, low vision, and other vision impairments; deafness and hearing loss; limited movement and dexterity; speech disabilities; sensory disorders; cognitive and learning disabilities; and combinations of these.

There are three levels of conformance to WCAG: A, AA, and AAA.

  • Level A is the most basic level and covers the minimum requirements for accessibility.
  • Level AA is the next level and covers a higher level of accessibility.
  • Level AAA is the highest level and covers the highest level of accessibility.

Following the guidelines can make your web content more usable to users in general. In some countries and jurisdictions, website owners can also be fined or sued for discrimination if their websites are found to be non-accessible to all users.

Different WCAG Versions

Just as the web is continually evolving, so too will the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

WCAG 2.1 is the most recent and relevant accessibility standard. Website owners are advised to start with WCAG 2.0 when allocating resources then step up to WCAG 2.1 to help more people with disabilities and reduce their future legal risk

WCAG 3 is currently a work in progress and will aim to address various types of web content including static content, interactive content, visual and auditory media, and virtual and augmented reality. The guidelines also address related web tools such as user agents (browsers and assistive technologies), content management systems, authoring tools, and testing tools.

WCAG 3 also introduces a new color contrast guide, called Advanced Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA), and aims to replace the older WCAG 2.0 method, while providing a wider range of recommendations for making web content more accessible.

WCAG – Four Principles

Note: The section below was sourced from this article: Understanding The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 

WCAG is comprehensive and detailed, but difficult to understand quickly.

WCAG consists of four broad principles with recommendations that website owners must take practical steps to satisfy in order for their web content to be considered accessible:

  • Perceivable: Users must be able to perceive it in some way, using one or more of their senses.
  • Operable: Users must be able to control UI elements (e.g. buttons must be clickable in some way — mouse, keyboard, voice command, etc.).
  • Understandable: The content must be understandable to its users.
  • Robust: The content must be developed using well-adopted web standards that will work across different browsers, now and in the future.

Web Content Accessibility Goals And Objectives

As mentioned above, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 provides a set of guidelines for making web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities organized into four principles.

These principles have the following goals and objectives:

  • Perceivable: Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
    • Provide text alternatives for non-text content, such as images and audio.
    • Provide captions and other alternatives for multimedia.
  • Operable: User interface components and navigation must be operable.
    • Make all functionality available from a keyboard.
    • Provide users enough time to read and use the content.
  • Understandable: Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable.
    • Make text content readable and understandable.
    • Make the site appear and operate in predictable ways.
  • Robust: Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.
    • Maximize compatibility with current and future user agents, including assistive technologies.

Examples:

  • Adding alternative text to images and providing captions for videos to provide a more accessible experience for users with visual impairments.
  • Making sure that all functionality can be accessed via a keyboard for users who cannot use a mouse or other pointing device.
  • Providing clear and simple language and instructions for users with cognitive disabilities.
  • Ensuring that website code is structured in a way that can be interpreted by a wide range of devices, browsers, and assistive technologies.

Let’s look at some more ways to make your content accessible and inclusive.

Ways To Make Your Web Content Accessible

According to leading digital accessibility solutions provider eSSENTIAL Accessibility,

“WCAG covers an exhaustive list of digital elements that can create barriers for people with disabilities. The guidelines address common barriers that prevent people from using digital platforms. Barriers can be tricky because unless they directly affect you, you might have an extremely difficult time knowing they exist.”

Source: What is WCAG?

Each of the four principles listed earlier provides a range of guidelines for making your web content more accessible and ensuring it complies with regulations. Click on each of the links above to view these recommendations.

Some examples of content-related areas covered in the WCAG include:

  • Non-decorative images and images that serve a structural or navigation purpose must contain descriptive alternative text (alt-text), so visually impaired users can have an appropriate description of the image.
  • The on-page text must be realizable without disrupting how the page displays, so people with vision disabilities can magnify the content and have an easier time reading.
  • Pre-recorded and live video with audio content need to have captions for users who are deaf or hard of hearing.
  • Pre-recorded audio content files need to have a written transcript. This is also helpful for users who can’t turn on the sound or are in a noisy environment and want to listen to an audio file.
  • Form-entry tasks must not have time limits or must include an extended, lengthy time limit to accommodate people who need more time to fill out forms.
  • Elements that display across multiple web pages (e.g. navigation, headers, footers, sidebars, etc.) must consistently show in the same areas of the website so regardless of which page users are on, they will always know where to find these.
  • Users must be able to navigate your website without the use of a mouse. For example, users should be able to use the “tab” button on a keyboard to progress through any given page.
  • All web pages must use a proper heading-level structure to allow users with screen readers to navigate easily through the content.

Web Accessibility Evaluations Tools

There are website accessibility evaluation tools you can use to determine if your web content meets accessibility guidelines and automatically help you handle many accessibility barriers.

Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List
There is a range of web accessibility evaluation tools available to ensure that your web content meets accessibility guidelines. Source: W3C

In addition to the list provided in the above link, see this page to determine what kind of tool you need and how it can assist you: Selecting Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools.

Summary

Content accessibility is crucial for ensuring that everyone has equal access to information and opportunities online. WCAG provides a framework for making web content more accessible, and meeting these standards can benefit both individuals with disabilities and businesses.

Making your web content accessible not only makes your website more inclusive for all users and is a legal requirement in many countries, but it also helps to create a more inclusive and equal society.

This lesson provides an overview of the steps you need to take to make your web content accessible to all users.

Action Steps

Download the guides and checklists in the Resources section below and conduct a thorough audit of your web content to ensure that your website meets all web content accessibility guidelines

Resources

Visit our tools and resources section for additional courses, guides, and helpful tools and resources.

References

Next Lesson

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Image: Man reading braille

Content Audit

Learn why businesses need a content audit and how to perform a content audit for your organization.

Content Audit

Learn why businesses need a content audit and how to perform a content audit for your organization.

Content Audit. Image of women in office staring at a computer screen. If your role involves managing content for an organization, it’s important to know what existing content the organization already has.

A content audit provides an excellent planning resource and roadmap for future content creation. It helps businesses develop a content strategy and involves analyzing all of the published material in an organization to determine what is and isn’t working, and uncover gaps to fill.

In this lesson, we’ll cover:

  • What Is A Content Audit?
  • Why Perform A Content Audit?
  • Benefits Of Performing A Content Audit
  • What Are The Different Types Of Content Audit?
  • Goals Of A Content Audit
  • How To Perform A Content Audit
  • Taking Your Content Audit Further

Before You Begin

Please review the sections below before starting this lesson:

What Is A Content Audit?

“A content audit is a process of systematically analyzing and evaluating the performance and effectiveness of your existing content.

It involves identifying and cataloging all of your content, evaluating its quality and relevance, and determining which content should be kept, updated, consolidated, or removed.

The goal of a content audit is to ensure that your content is aligned with the goals and objectives of your business, and that it is providing value to your target audience.”

According to Wikipedia,

A content audit is an accounting of all currently published web content and a cornerstone of content strategy.

A content audit is the only way to fully understand the structure and quality of the content on your website.

It can help to:

  • Develop a content strategy.
  • Manage content quality.
  • Prepare content for migration or for the development of a new site’s information architecture or design.
  • Evaluate content against business goals, editorial style guidelines, and templates.
  • Establish a common language among team members.
  • Evaluate content for removal or revision.
  • Pinpoint gaps in content.

Additionally, a content audit can be performed in different ways, e.g.:

  • Full Content Audit – a complete and comprehensive accounting of website content.
  • Partial Content Audit – this focuses on a subcategory of the site, often one among the top site hierarchy.
  • Content Sampling – this merely examines samples of content.
  • Rolling Content Audit – this helps to monitor and maintain the initial scan. A content manager may go through the audit process at some agreed-upon time to scan for changes, i.e. weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually.

Source: Wikipedia

Content Audit vs Content Inventory

A content audit is a qualitative analysis of information assets on a website, while a content inventory is a quantitative analysis of a website.

A content audit answers questions like:

  • Is the content any good?
  • What content do we already have
  • Who is making this content
  • How do people find it
  • How is it performing?
  • Is the content current (accurate) or outdated?

A content inventory, on the other hand, simply logs what is on a website. It answers the question: “What is there?” and can be the start of a website review.

Source: Wikipedia

Why Perform A Content Audit?

Let’s say that a business has been publishing content regularly for some time as part of its investment in content marketing, but isn’t sure whether all the time spent posting articles on blogs, creating videos, and releasing infographics across multiple channels has paid off.

Also, some of their content may have become old (i.e. outdated, irrelevant, obsolete), aimed at serving an outdated purpose, or it may no longer reflect the brand.

After performing a content audit, the business can decide what to cull, refine, or develop to make sure that when moving forward, everything will be consistent and aligned to its current strategy.

It’s also important to note that while a content audit refers mainly to published content on a website, this can also extend to published content stored outside a website. For example, price lists, catalogs, reports, etc., as the information in these publications may also be outdated or misaligned with the brand and require a review.

Goals Of A Content Audit

Setting goals for your content audit is an important step in ensuring that your audit is focused and effective.

Here are the general goals you’ll want to set for your content audit:

  1. Identify the purpose of the audit: Start by identifying the main objectives of the audit. This could be to improve the user experience, increase conversions, or align the content with the business’s overall goals.
  2. Define specific goals: Once you have identified the main objectives, define specific goals that will help you achieve those objectives. For example, if your goal is to improve the user experience, a specific goal could be to reduce the bounce rate on the website.
  3. Set measurable targets: Make sure that the goals you set are measurable so that you can track your progress and evaluate the success of the audit. For example, if your goal is to reduce the bounce rate, set a target percentage that you want to achieve.
  4. Establish a timeline: Set a deadline for when you want to achieve your goals. This will help you stay focused and motivated throughout the audit process.
  5. Review and revise goals: Once your content audit is complete, review the results and evaluate whether the goals you set were met. If they weren’t, revise the goals and identify any areas where you need to improve.

It’s important to have clear goals that are aligned with your overall business objectives. This will help to ensure that your content audit is focused, effective, and produces the desired outcome.

Benefits Of Performing A Content Audit

Performing a good content audit is time-consuming, but it offers a number of benefits, such as:

  • Alignment with business goals: A content audit helps ensure that your content aligns with your business’s overall goals and objectives.
  • Improved user experience: A content audit can identify and remove confusing, outdated, or irrelevant content, which can negatively impact the user experience. It can also help make your website easier for users to navigate.
  • Identification of gaps in content: A content audit helps to bring your content up-to-date and allows you to identify gaps in your content, which can be used to inform future content strategy and planning.
  • Improved SEO: By identifying and removing duplicate or low-quality content, your business can improve its search engine rankings and visibility.
  • Evaluation of content performance: A content audit provides data-driven insights into how well your content is performing in terms of engagement and conversions. It helps identify which content is resonating with your audience and which isn’t, and makes content maintenance easier by giving your business a clearer understanding of what it is offering.
  • Cost-effective: By identifying the content that is not performing well or is outdated, your business can reallocate resources and focus on creating new, high-performing content.
  • Consolidation and streamlining: A content audit can help identify and consolidate content that is similar or redundant, areas where multiple content items address the same topic (keyword cannibalization and content topic exhaustion), areas for content repurposing or updating to boost results, and best-performing pieces of content that can be leveraged in marketing materials streamlining the overall user experience.
  • Better targeting: An audit can help you understand which pages are visited the most and by whom, giving you an idea of the audience that comes to your site, and the information they are looking for.

tip

The more data you look at, the more things you will spot that need doing. You could end up going in so many different directions and drawing so many different conclusions that nothing ends up getting done. It’s important to avoid falling into the analysis paralysis trap.

So, decide before you begin that you will:

  1. Stay focused on what’s most important,
  2. Break larger findings into smaller tasks to be done later, and
  3. Make sure that deadlines are met.

You don’t need to get hung up on getting everything done perfectly. As long as the metrics are being tracked and you’re revisiting the content audit process on a periodic basis, you should see incremental improvements in content performance. This will also help you detect and prevent issues or problems sooner.

What Are The Different Types Of Content Audit?

A content audit can be viewed from several perspectives. You can look at it from a content marketing perspective, an SEO perspective, or a combination of both.

Content Marketing Audit

A content marketing audit aims to determine how the content marketing strategy of the organization is performing across all channels.

A content marketing audit involves asking questions as you analyze each piece of content, such as:

  • What is the purpose of this piece?
  • Is it achieving its objective (e.g. prompting users to complete an action, aligning with the brand and tone of voice of the business, generating user traffic and social media shares, driving them towards an eventual conversion, etc.)
  • How well does this help readers move through the customer journey?

SEO Audit

The goal of an SEO audit is to identify how well the content is performing on search engines.

This involves cataloging content elements like keywords, word counts, optimized images, etc. for each content asset on the site, keeping track of these over time, comparing them to current page rankings, and determining what changes need to be made to improve the site’s natural search performance.

If most of the traffic coming to the site is from organic search, performing an annual SEO audit is recommended, as search engines regularly change their algorithms.

As you analyze each piece of content, consider on-page SEO elements like:

  • Article length – Content length is more important than keywords. Well-written long-form content tends to be comprehensive, useful, and full of organic keywords and phrases that people are searching for.
  • Structure -e.g. H1, H2, H3 heading tags
  • Metadata – post title, meta description
  • Internal and external linking – look at things like anchor texts and whether links are pointing to broken URLs, error pages, outdated content, etc.
  • Keywords – What keywords it’s currently ranking for (vs. the keywords you would like it to rank for).

Additionally, it’s good to have an idea of the ranking factors that Google looks for when indexing and ranking content.

Ideally, you would combine both types of audits to make sure that the content is performing optimally. This, however, can be quite an enormous task, especially if the business has been publishing content for a very long time and lacks the resources to perform an extensive analysis of its content.

Content Gap Analysis

Perform a Content Gap Analysis is another valuable tool in addition to the above.

What is Content Gap Analysis?

Content Gap Analysis is a strategic process aimed at identifying and evaluating missing content pieces that align with various stages of the target audience’s buyer’s journey.

It involves auditing existing content and devising a strategy to fill the gaps, ensuring comprehensive coverage across multiple touchpoints.

Why is Content Gap Analysis Important?

Content Gap Analysis is crucial for enhancing content performance, especially in terms of SEO and social engagement. By identifying content gaps beforehand, you can ensure that your content surpasses existing offerings, improving its chances of success upon publication.

Best Practices for Performing Content Gap Analysis

Analyze Google’s First Page

Examine top-ranking content on Google to identify common gaps such as freshness, thoroughness, usability, and the wow factor. This allows you to create content that fills these voids, potentially outranking competitors.

Utilize Tools for Scalability

Tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs can streamline the gap analysis process by pinpointing topics with significant content gaps. By analyzing competitors’ keywords and scrutinizing their top-performing pages, you can uncover opportunities to create superior content.

For example, here’s a video from Ahrefs showing how to use their tool to perform an effective Content Gap Analysis of your competitors’ site:

For additional SEO tools, see this section: Search Optimization Tools

Ways to Improve Content Using Content Gap Analysis

Audit Your Own Content

Conduct a thorough audit of your existing content to identify areas for improvement. Look for gaps such as outdated information, lack of examples, or difficulty in comprehension. By refining your content based on these insights, you can enhance its relevance and effectiveness.

Optimize Content Elements

Shorten or expand introductions as needed, incorporate more visuals to enhance engagement, and ensure that the content is easy to follow and comprehensive. By addressing these aspects, you can elevate the quality of your content and attract organic traffic.

In summary, Content Gap Analysis is an essential process to optimize your content strategy. By identifying and filling content voids, leveraging tools for efficiency, and refining existing content, you can elevate content performance and better meet the needs of your target audience.

If you need help performing an SEO Audit, we recommend downloading this guide on how to run an SEO audit.

We also provide practical methods to perform content reviews in the Content Management module of this course.

Example Of A Content Audit

Here is an example of what a content audit for a real estate company might look like:

  • Inventory: Blog posts, case studies, videos, property listings
  • Evaluation:
    • Blog post: Relevance to the audience, effectiveness of the topic, engagement level
    • Case studies: Relevance to the audience, effectiveness of the topic, engagement level
    • Videos: Relevance to the audience, effectiveness of the topic, engagement level
    • Property listings: Relevance to the audience, effectiveness of the topic, engagement level
  • Identify gaps: Lack of videos on commercial properties, no information on property management services
  • Organize:
    • Blog post: grouped by topic
    • Case studies: grouped by location
    • Videos: grouped by property type
    • Property listings: grouped by location
  • Decide on the next steps:
    • Keep: Blog post, case studies
    • Update: Property listings to include more information on property management services
    • Create: Videos on commercial properties
  • Plan:
    • Create a video series on commercial properties
    • Update all property listings to include information on property management services
    • Create a blog post on property management tips

By following these steps, the real estate company will be able to identify the areas of their content that are working well and the areas that need improvement. This will help them make more informed decisions about their content strategy and improve the effectiveness of their overall marketing efforts.

Now that you understand what a content audit is, why your business needs one, and what the goals and benefits of doing a content audit are, let’s look at how to perform one.

How To Perform A Content Audit

The steps below show you how to do a content audit.

1. Set Specific Goals

Auditing content is like opening Pandora’s box. Once you begin analyzing your existing content (especially if there is a lot of published content), it’s very easy to become overwhelmed or distracted by some of the more glaring and obvious things that need fixing, start following different trails and rabbit holes as you gain new insights and end up falling into seemingly endless circular labyrinths, as one article that needs fixing leads to many other articles that also need fixing, and so on.

The best way to avoid becoming trapped in this never-ending process is to start with one or more clearly defined goals in mind. This will also help you to better categorize your audit later

Think about what you want to accomplish. Your goal might be to:

  • Identify ways to improve organic search performance and determine which pages, articles, blog posts, etc. need to be optimized or improved.
  • Find which content pieces on the website have performed best (e.g. Top 20, 50, 100 most visited pages) and look for ways to improve these, or increase their visibility (e.g. email newsletter roundups, social media posts, etc.).
  • Highlight and troubleshoot content pages with high impressions and low conversions.
  • Determine which content topics audiences seem to prefer.
  • Discover pages or topics that can be consolidated because of overlapping content.
  • Make sure that all pages have an effective and compelling CTA (Call To Action) to help increase leads and conversions.
  • Identify and locate gaps in the existing content for different stages of the sales funnel
  • Make sure that all content aligns with the corporate culture or a new branding strategy, or has a cohesive voice (especially if the content is created by multiple authors, e.g. freelance or guest contributors), and remove content that no longer reflects the values, goals, or culture of the business.
  • Select content that the business wants to move/migrate to a new website or section of its website.
  • Generate ideas for future content pieces.

Also, it’s important to keep in mind higher-level goals such as company goals and objectives, content strategy goals, etc., and align your content audit goals to these.

Once you have defined specific goals for your content audit, the next step is to gather an inventory of the content.

2. Make A Content Inventory

Depending on the size of the website, you may want to start with a spreadsheet and manually add each content item, or use online tools to automate this process for you.

Screaming From - URL scan results screen.
You can use tools to automatically scan your site and generate a list of exportable URLs.

If your website runs on WordPress, you can use a plugin to export the URLs of all the site’s pages, posts, and custom post types to a CSV file, which can then be easily imported into a spreadsheet.

If you plan to perform a more comprehensive content marketing audit that includes analyzing other digital channels (e.g. social media and email), many platforms allow you to download a CSV file of your content and metrics (e.g. you can do this from Facebook’s Settings or MailChimp‘s Reports sections).

Note: You can also analyze printed publications, but you’ll have to collect this information manually (from customer surveys, focus groups, etc.).

If you are collating data from various sources and adding these to different spreadsheets, you can merge your spreadsheets into a master document and use a tool like Power BI or Tableau to analyze the data and look for patterns.

3. Categorize The Content

After making an inventory of your content, the next step is to categorize it on a spreadsheet. These categories will help keep things organized and make the content audit more efficient.

Some online tools can categorize information for you, but it’s just as easy to set up a spreadsheet and add these yourself.

At a minimum, your spreadsheet should list your content URLs, various useful categories, metadata, and metric data.

Add each content item as a new row on your spreadsheet.

Here is a list of suggested column headings and descriptions for your content audit spreadsheet:

Content

  • Page Title
  • Page URL
  • Date of publication
  • Date last updated
  • Content summary
  • Word Count
  • Type of content
  • Content owner
  • Supporting Content (images, videos, or infographics)
  • Accessibility
  • Quality score

SEO Data

  • Meta title
  • Meta description
  • Internal and external links
  • Image ALT Tags
  • Target Keywords
  • Keywords Ranked
  • Calls to action (if any) and where they lead

Performance Data

  • Bounce rate
  • Average page views
  • Average time on page
  • Backlinks
  • Number of comments/social media shares
  • Main traffic source
  • Conversion rate

Action Columns

  • Action
  • Notes
  • Inventory date
  • Review date

Source: HardieGrant.com

If you don’t want to create your own spreadsheet, here are a number of freely available content audit templates you can use:

Source: SingleGrain.com

Content Audit Template
Create your own content audit spreadsheet or use a content audit template. Image: GoInflow.com

3. Analyze Your Findings

This step is where you take a critical look at the data to make a true assessment of the content’s performance.

Go through your spreadsheet and start asking questions like:

  • Which topics or themes are you mostly focused on writing about?
  • Which content types are you mostly focused on creating?
  • How often are you producing this type of content?
  • What is the purpose of the content (e.g. educate, entertain, generate leads, etc.)?
  • Who is its intended audience?
  • Which stage of the buyer journey is this content aimed at?
  • Which types of content perform the best?
  • Which types of content are most popular with your audience?
  • Are there any obvious gaps in the content that you are producing?
  • etc.

For each content item listed on a row, work through each of the columns and record the results of your analysis.

This will provide insights to help you decide if any further action needs to be taken with the content, or if it can be left as is.

As you analyze the data, make a note of the following:

  • Missing content – Are there any topics that the content hasn’t covered which would be of interest to the audience?
  • Underperforming content – Looking at the numbers, are there any items that aren’t performing as well as they should?
  • Outdated content – Can the information be refined (i.e. updated or reworked) to remain optimized and relevant to your audience?
  • Hit Content – This content is performing well and its metrics and results are meeting or exceeding all targets and expectations.

It’s important to not only analyze the content but also to organize it in the spreadsheet. Having a clear classification system in place to organize all the analyzed content should help make the auditing process actionable (see the next step).

An effective way to do this is to assign colors to different categories in your analysis, then highlight the rows with these colors as you go.

This will help you (and anyone you share the spreadsheet with) understand which category each piece of content is assigned to, and what predominant categories your analyzed content falls into.

The descriptions below may help with your analysis.

Content

Page title

This is the first thing people see when they read your content. Does the page title accurately describe the content? Is it compelling and attention-grabbing (and not clickbait)?

Page URL

It’s best not to change your URL without a good reason (if you have to change the URL, see the tutorial on redirecting links in the Link Management section). Check that the URL is well-structured and that there aren’t any spelling mistakes. Generally, a good URL is short and clear – it shouldn’t contain symbols or long strings of numbers.

Date of publication

This helps you decide if the article is too out of date.

Date last updated

This lets you see when the content was last edited or updated.

Content summary

Copy and paste this from the article excerpt or write this information manually. It will tell you whether the content is relevant and up to date.

Word Count

Is the article’s word count consistent with other articles on the site? Keep in mind that longer content improves SEO ranking as it’s usually more comprehensive and helpful.

Type of content

If you’re doing a complete website content inventory, you may want to note down what type of content you’re assessing (e.g. article, blog post, landing page, user documentation, product description, infographic, etc.)

Content owner

Does the website or blog have multiple authors? If so, it may be worth logging who is responsible for writing, editing, or fixing it.

Supporting Content (images, videos, or infographics)

Note down any other content format types present in the content (e.g. images, videos, etc.). Look at content quality. Does the content conform with branding or style guidelines? Has the information dated? Also, check for missed opportunities (e.g. can you add a video, downloadable report, etc.)

Accessibility

Is the content accessible on desktop and mobile devices? Are images and tables responsive on smaller screens and different browsers?

Quality score

Is the content accurate, well written, and well structured? Give the content a quality score (e.g., 1 = poor, 5 = excellent) then use this score to decide whether to keep or discard the content. If the quality score is a 4 or 5, it may be worth keeping. If it’s a 2 or 3, consider improving it with an update or rewrite (depending on how time-consuming it would take to fix it). If the content scores only a 1, consider retiring or trashing it.

SEO Data

Meta title

This is the title that displays on Google searches. It doesn’t have to match the page title. Make sure that it is enticing for readers to click on, and try to keep the character limit under 60 characters to avoid having cut-off titles displayed on Google search results.

Meta description

This is a brief summary of the content. Make sure that the page has a meta description under 160 characters so it displays fully on Google search results. Meta titles and descriptions make users click through from search results to your site, so make sure they are both compelling. Note: Google sometimes chooses to display a different excerpt from the content, so your meta description won’t always show up, but you should still write one.

Internal and external links

Check that all links are working. Broken links are commonly found on older content. Also, make a note of any new or existing website articles that the content could link to internally.

Image ALT Tags

ALT text (Alternative text) is used to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. Alt tags in images can help to improve SEO. Does the content have images? If so, do these images have properly-written alt text?

Target keywords

Compare the keywords the content is trying to target with the search terms it is actually ranking for. If these are not the same, make a note to review and optimize the content.

Keywords ranked

Search optimization tools can tell you what search terms are being used to find your content, and where it is ranking on Google SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). If the content is bringing in decent organic traffic, you might not need to do anything. If there are wild card keywords bringing in significant traffic, however, you may want to look into further optimizing the content for these newer terms.

Calls to action (if any) and where they lead

Does the page have a clear call to action? Is it driving users to its intended destination? Consider updating this if your content strategy has changed or if there is a newer or better resource to promote.

Performance Data

Note: We recommend gathering at least 3 months of data for the items below.

Bounce rate

Your bounce rate represents the number of people who immediately leave after visiting the page. Ideally, you’ll want the bounce rate to be under 40%, although anything up to 70% is often no cause for alarm. If it’s above this, however, consider ways to make the page more readable, attractive, and engaging for users.

Average page views

High page views mean that users are interested in your content. Low page views don’t necessarily mean that the content is bad. It could mean that users are having difficulty finding the content. Look for ways to increase the content’s visibility using different content promotion methods. This could be via using social media or improving SEO for better organic search results.

Average time on page

How long do people spend reading the content? The average time on page across all industries is 54 seconds, so aim for that as a benchmark. If actual time spent on the page is significantly less, look for ways to increase content engagement (e.g. expand the content, add a video, etc.)

Backlinks

What websites are linking to this page? (follow these tips to generate a backlink report in Google Analytics). If any of them look spammy (here’s how to tell), you’ll want to disavow them so they don’t impact your SEO. Also, check out this article on how to get high-quality backlinks to your site.

Number of comments/social media shares

Are users interacting well with the content? Comments and shares are sure signs that users are resonating with the content. If a content piece is not getting much traction, try to work out why and identify ways to improve it (e.g. repurpose it for other channels).

Main traffic source

This metric is valuable. It tells you how and where people are finding the content and where more focus on promotion is needed (learn how to find this information quickly in Google Analytics).

Conversion rate

Set up conversion events on Google Analytics to track page conversions. A low conversion rate (under about 2%) indicates that users aren’t resonating with your message.

Action Columns

Action

Record here what needs doing with the piece of content.

Notes

Add notes here if required. Use this column to list suggestions and ideas, and to prioritize tasks for the content.

Inventory date

Add the date of the content inventory here.

Review date

Add a date for the next content review.

Note: People in organizations come and go all the time, so make sure that everything you record in the spreadsheet is accurate and can be easily understood by any new person hired to make sense of the data.

Adapted from: HardieGrant.com

4. Classify The Content

This step is important if you plan to rank content by priorities or include a timeline for the audit.

Add a priority column to your spreadsheet.

After analyzing results, implement a system to prioritize what needs to be executed first.

You may want to prioritize content from “1-5” or “A-E”, then define what happens to the content in each of these levels. Use the goals defined in Step to help you decide.

For example, if your goal is to improve conversions, your classification system could specify that all items ranked “A” are your top-converting content and should be given top-priority treatment.

“Priority treatment” could then be defined to mean looking for ways to:

  • Improve the content (e.g. make sections clearer or more detailed, add supporting media like explainer videos, downloadable reports, etc.)
  • Improve search ranking through different SEO methods (e.g. internal linking, more helpful content, etc.)
  • Improve traffic through social media, email newsletters, paid ads, content repurposing, etc.
  • Improve the call-to-action.

Similarly, your classification system may specify that all items with a score lower than “C” (or “3” depending on your rating system) should be transferred to a separate spreadsheet, analyzed in more detail by the marketing and SEO team, and assigned different highlight colors to determine whether to update, rewrite, or trash the content.

See the Content Reviews lesson for an example of using colors to highlight content based on what needs doing.

Depending on how much content there is, you may also want to schedule it using a content production tool or editorial calendar.

5. Take Action

Ultimately, the objective of the content audit is to decide whether to keep, discard, refine, or develop content based on the analysis of each content item inventoried.

Classifying your content should help you with this step.

Here are the specific action steps you want to take after classifying each inventoried content item:

  1. Keep vs Trash
  2. Discard (if ‘Trash’)
  3. Refine (if ‘Keep’)
  4. Develop

Refer to the flowchart below as we go through each of these briefly.

Chart - Content Audit Actions
Content Audit Actions.

1. Keep vs Trash

As you examine each content item, ask yourself questions like:

  • Is this piece of content well-written?
  • Is the topic/information still relevant to the audience?
  • Is it getting good results?

If the answer to the above is mostly “yes”, then you will want to keep the item. However, it doesn’t end there. There are further steps you will want to take, based on a review of the item. (See the ‘Refine’ step further below).

If the answer to the above is mostly “no”, then you will want to discard (i.e. trash) the item. Before trashing the item, however, there are additional criteria we recommend taking (See the ‘Discard’ step below).

2. Discard (If ‘Trash’)

Creating web content requires a significant investment of time and resources, so it can seem counterproductive for an organization to discard any piece of content that it has spent time and effort creating.

Keeping low-quality content alive on a website, however, can have a negative impact on user experience and search rankings.

If a first-time user lands on a piece of content on a website with information that is completely outdated, irrelevant, obsolete, or filled with links to pages that no longer exist, their first impression of the website (and the organization behind it) will probably be negative and they will most likely move on never to return.

Also, if Google deems your content to be unengaging due to factors like little to no visitors or time spent on the page, high bounce rates, etc.,  it will push the page down in its search results, which can impact the overall performance of the website.

If the content is no longer useful to its intended audience, then consider discarding it.

Before discarding any piece of content, however, we recommend doing an SEO analysis of the item to see whether it has any traffic or backlinks. If the content still has significant traffic and/or backlinks, then it’s probably best to try and redirect users visiting that content to another related article or blog post on your website before trashing it.

3. Refine (If ‘Keep’)

If you decide that the content is well written, performing well (e.g. generates traffic, has significant backlinks, has a reasonable conversion rate), and worth keeping, the next step is to review the item in more detail.

Could the content be improved with additional sections to provide readers with more in-depth information, update facts or statistics, maybe add a video, infographic, or downloadable guide, or just improve general readability or SEO?

If a lot of the work has already been done and you have a solid foundation to work with, then it’s better to preserve and salvage the content with a little bit (or a lot) of editing.

After reviewing each item, the next step is to classify the content into one of the following categories:

  1. Leave As Is – This is the “if it ain’t broken, why fix it?” option. If the content is fine and performing well, you may simply want to leave it as is.
  2. Quick Fix – If most of the content is fine but there are some minor glaring issues (e.g. spelling or grammatical errors, a sentence or paragraph that should be removed or added, links that need to point to different pages, etc.) and it would take no more than 15-30 minutes to fix this, then mark the item as a “quick fix” (or just fix it on the spot).
  3. Update – If sections of the content are outdated, irrelevant, or obsolete and it would take more than an hour or so to fix these, the item may need to be scheduled for an update.
  4. Rewrite – If the topic is worth preserving but the content contains mostly outdated, irrelevant, or obsolete information that would require a complete rewrite to fix, then the item may need to be scheduled for a rewrite.

For a more in-depth tutorial on this section, see the lesson on Content Reviews.

3. Develop

Seeing everything that the business has published makes it easier to identify and prioritize other content areas that the business may have missed.

For example, often, a content audit will help to uncover content that is missing on topics that haven’t been written about or addressed yet.

Another benefit of performing a content audit is that it can help to identify opportunities for content repurposing.

Often, a content audit will also uncover multiple articles covering the same topic. This is not good for SEO as it can lead to keyboard cannibalization. When you uncover a cluster of articles all covering the same topic, a simple check of traffic and backlinks will tell you which of these articles is performing better than the rest. You should then consider consolidating these articles into a single authoritative piece of content, as Google loves useful, long-form articles.

Additional action steps that can result from a content audit include making decisions like:

  • Assess which content supports different stages of the buyer’s journey (e.g. awareness, consideration, decision).
  • Create evergreen content pieces or skyscraper articles related to best-performing content topics.
  • Implement a new content marketing method (e.g. set a regular schedule to create and publish videos).
  • Assign team members to review the results and identify patterns in the data that will help to improve areas like content quality, content performance, customer experience, etc.
  • Reuse the content: Combine different items to create new content or publish it in a different format (slides, ebook, infographics, etc.).
  • Rewrite the content: Rewrite underperforming articles and blog posts with new examples, tips, step-by-step tutorials, etc.
  • Expand the content: Look for ways to add more detailed information to the existing content. Research shows that longer articles of 3000+ words get 3x more traffic, 4x more shares, and 3.5x more backlinks than articles of average length.
  • Refresh the content: The content may simply need updated or relevant information like newer stats, the latest trends, or updated product details.
  • Structure the content: Make sure the content has a clear and logical structure with relevant H2 and H3 tags. Adding heading tags and a table of contents can help users and search engine bots interpret content better, which can help to boost traffic. Well-structured how-to articles are more likely to rank on featured snippets.
  • Update CTAs: Review and replace outdated banners on your blog or other web pages with relevant offers. This will help reactivate your content marketing funnel and improve conversion rates.
  • Add videos: Adding videos to content increases web traffic and engagement.
  • Add images: Images not only make web pages more attractive and engaging to users, but they can also increase traffic from Google Images. Consider integrating videos and images on web pages to increase the content’s chances of appearing in SERP features.
  • Optimize metadata: Review your titles, meta descriptions, and sections with SEO tags (h1, h2, h3). Ideally, try to use keywords in a natural and compelling way to make the content more attractive to users and search engines.
  • Optimize internal linking: Have new articles or blog posts been added to the website since the content was last written or edited? If so, look for related content to link to internally. This can help improve website organization and decrease bounce rates. Internal linking can also be used to optimize the buyer’s journey, sending users down the funnel from top-level content aimed at raising user awareness, through to decision-making content.
  • Use 301 redirects to avoid users running into “not found” error pages and having poor user experiences when searching for content on pages that have been removed from the website.
  • Inform Google about content updates using Google Search Console.

Some content adapted from: SemRush.com

tip

After performing a content audit, list 5-10 immediate action steps to be taken based on the results and the content audit goals defined in Step 1 and set a deadline for completing these tasks.

Keep in mind that some actions that require little effort can deliver big results (e.g. improving page structure or adding links), while other actions require a lot of effort but could deliver poor results (e.g. creating a downloadable guide or eBook).

After performing your initial content audit, schedule subsequent content reviews to be done regularly (e.g. annually). This will deliver valuable insights for the continuous improvement of your business, website, and your content marketing strategy.

5. Taking Your Content Audit Further

A content audit doesn’t have to be limited only to content on your website.

You can also perform audits on areas like:

Offsite Content Assets

When assessing the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts it’s a good idea to include as much data as you can gather on any external content pieces you’ve published (e.g. infographics, slide decks, etc.) if these are relevant to your audit goals.

Other Marketing Channels

Do you run email marketing campaigns? Is the content in your autoresponders up-to-date? Are there messages with higher open rates than others? Many email services provide analytics and reports that can help to improve the performance of your emails.

Social Shares

If your site displays share counters on pages, you can measure social shares by looking at the post itself, or by entering the URL of the page or post into various online services. This should provide plenty of actionable data about areas where your competition is currently outperforming your site. Think about approaching sites that are linking to your competitors who could potentially link to your site if you approached them with a better piece of content or guest post idea on that topic.

Competitors’ Websites

You can use many of the same tools used to analyze your own site to perform competitive analysis on your competitors’ sites. This can help to improve your content performance, especially in areas like SEO or driving more traffic to your site.

While you won’t be able to access certain metrics about their website (e.g. bounce rate, average time on page, and conversion rate), there are things you can track, like who is ranking higher for the keywords you are targeting, the number of backlinks, etc.

See the Search Optimization Tools section for tools that can help you do this.

Adapted from: SingleGrain.com

Summary

A content audit is a process of reviewing, evaluating, and organizing the existing content of your business in order to understand what is working well and what needs to be improved.

By conducting a content audit, your business can identify gaps in its content strategy, make sure that your content is aligned with your overall marketing goals, and decide which pieces of content to keep, update, or delete.

A content audit of your website content and other marketing channels also gives your business a high-level view of everything it has published and provides an opportunity to realign your content with your current strategy.

Creating an inventory of your existing content can also provide valuable insights into your business and your audience. It lets you assess data and make informed marketing decisions that can help grow your brand, reduce costs, and improve ROI.

A well-executed initial content audit and subsequent content reviews (e.g. done annually) can deliver significant insights into your business, website, and your content marketing strategy.

Action Steps

Use the checklist below when performing a content audit for your business:

  • Inventory your content: Make a list of all the content your business currently has, including the format, title, and location of each piece. This can include blog posts, videos, podcasts, whitepapers, social media posts, etc.
  • Evaluate your content: Review each piece of content and assess its effectiveness based on factors such as quality, relevance, engagement, and alignment with your business goals.
  • Identify gaps: Look for gaps in your content, such as missing topics or underperforming pieces, and make note of them.
  • Organize your content: Group your content into categories, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, whitepapers, etc., and create a spreadsheet to keep track of each piece of content and its assessment.
  • Decide on the next steps: Based on your findings, decide which pieces of content to keep, update, or delete.
  • Create a plan for improving your content: Use your findings to create a plan for improving your content, including how you will fill gaps, create new pieces of content, and update existing content to better align with your business goals.

Notes:

You don’t need to get everything done in one go. A content audit can be a monumental task, especially if there is a lot of published content to analyze and no prior audit has been done.

Ideally, it’s best to perform a complete audit of your content. However, it’s completely up to you to decide which content you will audit, how you will do it, and what goals you are trying to achieve with it.

If time is a limiting factor, for example, you can break things down into smaller goals and audit only content that falls within a certain period (e.g. the previous 6-12 months), or content that meets only certain metrics (like your 50 most popular articles ranked by traffic or conversions) or auditing only your website’s blog posts.

You also don’t have to undertake the entire audit process by yourself. You can delegate some of the data-gathering steps internally to another employee in the organization or to an outsourced worker.

Resources

  • Search Optimization Tools – Free and paid tools that will help automate parts of the content auditing research process.
  • How To Run An SEO Audit – Download this free template, checklist, and 9-step guide on how to run an SEO audit for your organization.
  • Moz: On-Site SEO – This is a great site to help you learn all the fundamentals of on-page SEO.

Visit our tools and resources section for additional courses, guides, and helpful tools and resources for content managers.

References

Next Lesson

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Source: Office workers

How To Create A Content Strategy

Learn how to create an effective content strategy for your organization.

How To Create A Content Strategy

Learn how to create an effective content strategy for your organization.

Business meeting.Managing content effectively for an organization requires working with a solid content strategy that will guide and drive all the content it creates to achieve its goals.

If your organization already has a well-defined content strategy in place, great! Learn how to work within the existing framework.

If your business doesn’t have a content strategy, however, then you will need to help them create one. Otherwise, all the effort that goes into planning, creating, promoting, and managing content will probably lead to ineffective results and a waste of valuable resources.

This lesson will show you how to create a content strategy for your business if there isn’t one already in place.

Note: Part of the content featured in this lesson was sourced from an excellent tutorial on how to develop a content strategy published by Alexa.com on its blog.

This site, however, shut its service on May 1, 2022. (You can view the original article here).

Fortunately, we have a downloadable copy of their customizable content strategy template and worksheet, which you can access by subscribing to our free email lessons.

Alternatively, check out the excellent guide on how to create a content strategy with a downloadable content strategy workBook from HubSpot.

Watch our free video course on how to create an effective content strategy for your business.

Before You Begin

Please review the Content Strategy Overview before starting this lesson.

How To Develop A Content Strategy

Developing a solid content strategy starts with:

  1. Assessing the scope and the extent of all the content that your organization is and will be responsible for creating and managing, then
  2. Understanding the inputs and outputs that will shape its content strategy.

1 – The Scope And Extent Of Your Content

Chart: The scope and extent of your content strategy.
Every area of your business needs content, so the scope of your content strategy extends to all areas of your business.

The deeper you look into your business, the more you will realize that every area of your business needs content, so the scope of your content strategy must extend to all areas of your business and encompass every process from planning to creation to promotion, and management.

It also must take into account the interdependence of all these areas and processes and define how the people in your business will interact with this content.

For example, your products and services need content. There’s content in their names, their descriptions, their packaging, their promotion, etc. Different teams and areas of your business may handle different aspects of these (e.g. Development, Production, Marketing, etc.) yet everything needs to be in complete agreement with respect to the content that is attached to your products and services.

For example, your marketing team may handle the product’s name, description, branding, promotion, etc. but this needs to translate into non-physical processes (e.g. feedback from users back to product developers) and physical processes (e.g. creating labels for packaging) and all of this must be communicated to your content team.

This all requires content management and is part of your content strategy.

Similarly, your business uses technology to store and process content (e.g. a website), and while you may not need to understand how to build a website or look after servers, you (and your content team) need to know how to interact and use this technology to add, edit, and manage all the content being stored and processed via the technology, tools, and solutions used by the business.

Additionally, all of your business’s internal processes utilize content to communicate with and train its staff, partners, vendors, suppliers, etc.

Finally, there is the type of content most of us are familiar with, which is the content used to promote and sell your company’s products and services via content marketing methods and content distribution channels.

2 – Inputs And Outputs

Your content strategy will be shaped by your business goals, the audience it intends to reach, the competitive landscape, resources, tactics, costs, and how results will be measured.

Content strategy inputs
Content strategy inputs

The major inputs that build the foundation of an effective content strategy include:

  1. Goals: What does the business want to accomplish using content?
  2. Audience: Who do you want to reach with content?
  3. Competition: What other content is already available in your industry or niche?
  4. Resources: Which internal assets can the business leverage?
  5. Tactics: What activities will help the business meet its goals?
  6. Investment: What budget is available for content-related activities?
  7. Measurement: How will content results and performance be tracked and measured?

Let’s go through each of the above inputs of a content strategy in a little more detail.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

Developing a solid content strategy begins with defining what the business wants to accomplish using content.

Some things to consider when setting goals for a content strategy include:

  • Needs, goals, and objectives already defined by the business through its business strategy and marketing strategy.
  • Company values, vision, mission, and other considerations affect what the business or brand stands for.
  • Getting buy-in from all major stakeholders.

Some of the goals that a content strategy may address include:

  • Growing awareness of your products
  • Supporting customers
  • Changing how people think about something
  • Attracting and retaining employees
  • Encouraging free trial signups
  • Nurturing leads into conversions
  • Building repeat customers and loyalty

It’s also important to build a periodic review of the content strategy into the overall strategic plan, as goals can and do shift as an organization grows and these should remain aligned with the needs of the business.

For example, businesses that are just starting out may want to focus on building brand awareness. As the business becomes more established, it may then shift its attention toward nurturing leads.

In addition to having goals that can shift over time, it’s important to understand that different businesses and organizations adopt different models to set, measure, and achieve goals.

As a content manager, you will need to work with whatever goal model the business uses.

Examples of different goal models include:

  • OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
  • MBO (Management by Objectives) or MBP (Management by Planning)
  • OGSM (Objectives, Goals, Strategies, and Measures)
  • KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
  • SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-constrained)
  • Balanced Scorecard
  • etc.

SMART Goals

SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Here’s what each of these elements means:

  • Specific: Your goals should be specific and clearly defined. Instead of saying “I want to increase website traffic,” say “I want to increase website traffic by 25% in the next 3 months.”
  • Measurable: Your goals should be measurable, so you can track your progress and determine whether you’re on track to achieve them. In the example above, “25% increase in website traffic” is a measurable goal.
  • Attainable: Your goals should be attainable, but still challenging. If your goals are too easy, you won’t be motivated to work toward them. If they’re too difficult, you may become discouraged.
  • Relevant: Your goals should be relevant to your overall business objectives and audience needs. If your goals don’t align with your business or your audience, you won’t see the desired results.
  • Time-bound: Your goals should have a specific timeframe for completion. This helps to give you a sense of urgency and helps to keep you on track.

Regardless of the model used to achieve goals, keep in mind that goals often also tend to be aspirational (i.e. they will push the team to try and achieve ambitious outcomes), so some degree of flexibility may be required in this process.

Setting Content Goals

It’s important to align your content goals with your business goals and document these in your content strategy.

Here are the steps you can follow to set goals for your content:

  1. Identify your target audience: Understand the demographics, interests, and needs of your target audience, as this will inform the types of content you should create.
  2. Define your business objectives: Determine how content can support your overall business objectives, such as driving website traffic, increasing conversions, or building brand awareness.
  3. Establish specific, measurable, and actionable goals: For each objective, create specific, measurable, and actionable goals that align with the objective. For example, “Increase website traffic by 30% within the next six months.”
  4. Prioritize your goals: Prioritize your goals based on importance and feasibility. This will help you focus your resources on the most impactful content.
  5. Regularly review and adjust your goals: Continuously review your goals and adjust them as needed. The digital landscape can change, what worked well before may not work as well now. Make sure your goals are current and feasible.
  6. Measure and analyze your performance: Use analytics tools to track your performance and measure the success of your content against your goals. This will help you identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions.

By following these steps, you can set clear and measurable content goals that align with your business objectives and help you achieve your desired outcomes.

Prioritizing Content Goals

When prioritizing content goals, it’s important to consider both the importance and feasibility of each goal.

Importance refers to how closely a goal aligns with the overall objectives of the organization or project, while feasibility takes into account the resources, time, and other constraints that may impact the ability to achieve your goal.

Eisenhower Matrix
Use the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize your content goals.

One way to prioritize content goals is to use a method such as the Eisenhower Matrix, which separates goals into four categories based on their importance and feasibility:

  • Important and Feasible: These are the goals that should be prioritized and tackled first, as they will have the greatest impact and can be completed within your available resources. For example, creating product announcement blog posts when new products are released or existing products are updated would likely fall into this category.
  • Important but Not Feasible: These goals are important, but cannot be completed given your current constraints. These may need to be put on hold or reevaluated to determine if they can be made more feasible. For example, producing a high-budget video ad campaign with a low budget would fall in this category.
  • Not Important but Feasible: These are goals that are not critical to the organization’s objectives, but could still be achieved with the available resources. These goals can be completed if time allows but should be given lower priority than more important goals. For example, translating website pages into another language that is not critical for your target audience would probably fall into this category.
  • Not Important and Not Feasible: These are goals that are neither important nor feasible and should not be pursued.

When using a method like the Eisenhower Matrix, list all of your goals, then evaluate each one,  add them into one of the four categories, and make a decision based on the category selected.

Keep in mind that the digital landscape is always changing, so what worked well before may not work as well now. Feasibility and importance can change over time, so it’s a good idea to regularly review and re-evaluate your goals and priorities to ensure these remain current, feasible, and aligned with your overall objectives.

Step 2: Know Your Audience

A critical component of developing and implementing a successful content strategy is knowing your audience.

Understanding who your ideal customer is, their needs and wants, their buying patterns, how much they are prepared to spend, how they prefer to consume the information they are looking for, etc. is an in-depth process that requires focused effort and time spent on research.

This step is crucial to other content-related processes like content planning, content production, and content promotion.

If you don’t know where to start, begin by spending time talking to everyone in your organization that has insight about your audience, (e.g. CEO, the sales team, product managers, customer service dept., etc.) to glean as much insight as you can about your audience.

Screenshot from Slack conversation about identifying target audience.
Talk to people in your business who know who your audience is.

Identify all the audience groups in the decision-making process that your content needs to reach.

Often, this may include multiple people. For example, with B2B, your audience may include the business owner, buyers, end-users, experts, consultants, etc.

With B2C products or services with less complicated buying cycles, it’s important to find out who makes the purchase and who can help to amplify your content.

Here are some questions that can help you identify your target audience(s):

  • What does your audience care about?
  • What are your prospects’ pain points?
  • What problem(s) does your business help to solve?
  • How and where does your audience like to consume information? For example, do they mostly watch videos or reviews when searching for information? What are the predominant social media platforms they gravitate towards? Are they likely to subscribe to a newsletter?

The more accurately you can answer questions about your audience, the more accurately you will be able to pinpoint things like:

  • Which types of media you will need to create to reach them (video, audio, images, long-form blog posts, influencer or celebrity endorsements, etc.),
  • What topics to address in your content
  • What stage of the sales process the audience is at (top, middle, or bottom of the funnel)
  • Which content delivery channels your content strategy should focus on for the best ROI (SEO, social media, paid search ads, email, forums, PR, print, etc.).

You can also gain a better understanding of your audience by creating and adding documented buyer personas and customer journey maps to your content strategy.

For more information, go here: How To Identify Your Target Audience

Step 3: Examine Your Competition

Looking at what the competition is doing with their content can tell you a lot about which content strategies are working in your industry.

It can also help you identify gaps that no one else seems to be filling and incorporate these into your content strategy.

See the content research tools section for tools and resources that will help you research competitor data (e.g. where most of their website traffic comes from, paid and organic keywords, backlink profiles, audience interests, etc.)

Step 4: Assess Your Resources

Most businesses have limited resources, so it’s important to review and assess these to determine the capabilities and limitations of the business to implement a content strategy.

It almost goes without saying that the fewer resources a business has, the more resourceful it needs to become.

This step involves evaluating resources like:

  1. People – As covered in earlier lessons, it takes a sizeable team to fill all the roles required to plan, create, promote, and manage content. Who will help to fill all these roles in your organization?
  2. Budget – As we’ll explore further in this lesson, without resources like people or money, there’s very little you can do to successfully implement a content strategy (it can still be done, however…it just takes longer and requires more effort, commitment, desire, and resourcefulness – this site is an example and its content will show you how to get things done with little to no budget and starting with just one person…you!).
  3. Systems – What systems, tools, and applications does the business have in place to help leverage and automate processes and tasks in content-related areas? For example, will you need to implement an editorial calendar and create documentation and training for internal staff and users? This course will show you a number of cost-effective systems and tools you can use to get more things done in less time.
  4. Content – Look at the existing content of the business. How much of it needs updating? Can any of it be repurposed? What new content needs to be created? A content audit can help to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in this area.
  5. Differentiators – Is there anything your business does better than anyone else in your industry? Does it have a unique perspective or an outspoken founder whose voice you can leverage? Is there a unique point of differentiation that you can use to cut through the noise and the clutter and hook customers in?

Assessing resources will not only tell you what you can do, it will also tell you which constraints you’ll have to overcome or accept to move forward, which opportunities, tactics, and angles aren’t worth pursuing, and the choices and options you will have to narrow your content strategy down to.

Step 5: Explore Tactics

As mentioned earlier, most businesses have limited resources, so it’s important to evaluate the benefits and costs of using different tactics before investing any time, money, or effort in pursuing them.

Before looking at tactics, however, it’s important to understand the difference between strategies and tactics.

Wikipedia defines this difference as follows …

“Strategy is undertaken before the battle. Tactics are implemented during battle. The terms tactic and strategy are often confused: tactics are the actual means used to gain an objective, while strategy is the overall campaign plan, which may involve complex operational patterns, activity, and decision-making that lead to tactical execution.”

Source: Wikipedia

Tactics, then, are what you do in the middle of a battle. Your strategy, on the other hand, is how you prepare beforehand to win the war.

Strategies help the business decide on the tactics (i.e. the methods) that it should or shouldn’t use to achieve its objectives.

For example, a content strategy can help the business decide whether to invest its small advertising budget on social media or pay-per-click ads, which product(s) it should promote first, what type of keywords it should target, etc.

Step 6: Estimate Your Investment

According to research done by the Content Marketing Institute, businesses increased their average budget spending on content marketing after the pandemic but the size of their content marketing teams did not increase.

Chart: Percentage of Total Marketing Budget Spent on B2B Content Marketing
Percentage of Total Marketing Budget Spent on B2B Content Marketing. Source: ContentMarketingInstitute.com

So, businesses are prepared to spend more on content marketing but they also expect their staff to take on more responsibilities in content-related activities.

As a content manager, you will need to become more resourceful and learn to work with whatever budget you’re given.

Start by estimating the cost of your strategy. What areas need more shoring up internally? Which areas need outsourcing? Which areas of content marketing are worth investing more time and money in?

Chart: Areas of B2B Content Marketing Investment in 2022
Areas of B2B Content Marketing Investment in 2022. Source: ContentMarketingInstitute.com. Click on the above image to view a larger version.

When assessing costs, keep in mind that content also has a ‘lifespan’ and that there is a cost to maintaining and retiring it.

Before finalizing your strategy, make sure you have considered all the resources you will have at your disposal to make sure you will have the budget to implement it.

Step 7: Plan How You’ll Measure Results

Once goals have been set, it’s important to decide on the metrics and KPIs that will be used to evaluate your content strategy. Here are some common examples.

Examples of Content Marketing Metrics
Examples of Content Marketing Metrics. Source: Alexa.com

It’s important to keep in mind that a content strategy plays out over the long term and will take time to show returns and results. For example, if SEO is part of the strategy, you can measure progress by looking at keyword rankings, backlinks, page views, and leads, but expect at least six months to a year before you begin to see actual results that will allow you to make a decision on its effectiveness.

See the content planning module for more information on how to create a plan to measure the results of your content strategy.

Content Strategy Examples

Businesses with different values and cultures selling different types of products and services in different industries need a customized content strategy that will work for them.

For this reason, some organizations hire content strategists to create, document, and oversee their content strategy. Smaller businesses, however, may need to assign one or more people to create their content strategy internally.

Here are some examples of how a content strategy can work for different types of businesses with different needs.

Retail

The content strategy of a retail business can focus on areas like:

  • Using content to help the business reach target clientele, overcome the barriers to buying products online, and build loyalty for repeat purchases.
  • Using a blog and building an audience for distribution via email subscription
  • Using short copy content for a time-strapped audience.
  • Using images on its social media, website, and blog to make products more relatable to buyers and convert site visitors
  • Using videos to demonstrate product uses and features.

Manufacturer

The content strategy of manufacturing businesses can focus on areas like:

  • Using content to reach buyers at various stages. For example, using a blog and SEO to attract top-of-funnel traffic and leads, educating site visitors with a library of resources, and helping customers and encouraging referrals in an open forum.
  • Producing detailed content that is easy to consume with engaging images, video, short paragraphs, and clear, simple writing instead of using dry technical copy.

Consumer Service

The content strategy of a consumer service business can focus on areas like:

  • Using content to gain awareness, build trust, educate, and help show consumers how to use the service.
  • Connecting with the audience using an empathetic, authentic voice that flows from the business team’s experience and supporting this voice with appropriate images and captions.
  • Building an extensive library of deep, long-form helpful articles with downloadable worksheets.
  • Creating partnerships and active contributor placements on industry websites to help build brand awareness and garner backlinks to boost site authority.

Technology Company

The content strategy of a technology company can focus on areas like:

  • Using content to build awareness for its products and affinity for its culture.
  • Encouraging free trials among marketers, product managers, and UX designers.
  • Focusing on purpose-driven content that embraces company values.
  • Attracting search traffic with deep content organized in a ‘hub and spoke’ structure.
  • Building its email subscriber list to encourage repeat engagement and nurture leads.

As you can see, there is no “one size fits all” content strategy that will work for every business. Every business has its own unique needs and, therefore, needs its own unique content strategy.

Content Strategy Checklist

  • Define content strategy goals: Clearly define the goals for the content strategy, such as increasing brand awareness or driving website traffic.
  • Audience research: Conduct research to understand the demographics, interests, and pain points of your target audience.
  • Competitive research: Analyze the content of your competitors to understand what topics and formats are resonating with your target audience and how you can differentiate your content.
  • Define content themes: Define the themes that align with your business goals and audience interests.
  • Create a content calendar: Create a content calendar that outlines the topics, formats, and publishing schedule for your content.
  • Establish a content workflow: Establish a content workflow that outlines the process for creating, reviewing, editing, and publishing content.
  • Set metrics and KPIs: Set metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of the content strategy.
  • Optimize for SEO: Optimize the content for search engines by including relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and alt tags.
  • Allocate budget and resources: Allocate budget and resources for creating, publishing, and promoting the content
  • Collaborate and communicate: Collaborate and communicate with other teams and stakeholders to ensure the content aligns with the overall company goals and objectives.
  • Continuously monitor and improve: Continuously monitor and improve your content strategy based on the results and feedback.

Summary

A content strategy is essential for any organization that intends to grow using content, as it will guide and drive all the content it creates and set the business on the path to success.

A content strategy will also show the business how to do more with less, when to embrace a new idea (and when to say no), and determine when the strategy should be periodically revisited to achieve its goals.

Developing a content strategy looks at inputs and outputs to the company that will shape its strategy and includes defining goals, understanding the audience it intends to reach, analyzing the competitive landscape, reviewing its resources, evaluating tactics, budgeting costs, and deciding how results will be measured.

There’s no one size fits all solution and building a successful content strategy won’t happen overnight. Online content is at an all-time high, and the only way to get ahead of the competition is by developing winning strategies. And, while there’s no one size fits all solution, identifying and including the three key elements — brand focus, user experience, and content distribution — will help develop a plan for business’ success. Remember, messaging should be unique and always on-topic. Content must meet customers’ needs at different stages of the sales funnel. And, effective distribution is essential for exposure to high-quality content.

Action Steps

If you need help creating a content strategy for your organization, check out the resources and references below.

To access and download a customizable template and worksheet that will help you with your content strategy, allow you to collaborate with your team, and record your content research, make sure to subscribe to our free email lessons.

Resources

Visit our tools and resources section for additional courses, guides, and helpful tools and resources for content managers.

References

Next Lesson

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Image: Business meeting

Content Strategy

Learn what a content strategy is, why it’s important to have one, and how to develop an effective digital content strategy for your business.

Content Strategy

Learn what a content strategy is, why it’s important to have one, and how to develop an effective digital content strategy for your business. 

ContentManagementCourse.com - Content Strategy Module

In the previous module, we looked at the role of the content manager and various setups that a content manager may need to operate within the digital structure of an organization.

In this module, we provide a practical overview of content strategy as it relates to the role of a content manager. We recommend going through the links, resources, and references in this section for a more in-depth understanding of the key concepts presented here.

This module covers the following topics:

  • What is a content strategy?
  • Why do you need a content strategy?
  • Key elements of an effective content strategy
  • Who is responsible for creating a content strategy?
  • How do you create a digital content strategy?
  • Content strategy – useful stats

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Before You Begin

Make sure to review The Role Of The Content Manager and Business Basics before starting this lesson.

Additionally, we recommend subscribing to our free content management course email lessons if you haven’t already, as these provide a practical step-by-step way to implement the lessons in this course.

As a subscriber, you will also get notified when new posts containing practical information and valuable content management tips are added to our blog.

What Is A Content Strategy?

A content strategy helps you define your target audience, understand their needs and interests, and create content that addresses those needs and speaks to their interests.

It also helps you determine the most effective channels for distributing that content, such as your website, social media, email marketing, or even offline channels like events or print materials.

A simple way to think about content strategy is to ask the question “how do we achieve our business goals using content?”

A content strategy presupposes that the business already has in place a business strategy and a marketing strategy to achieve its goals.

This is important because a content strategy is a component of the business marketing strategy and specifies who, what, where, when, and how it plans to connect with its audience.

Chart showing relationship of business strategy, marketing strategy, and content strategy.
Businesses need a business strategy and a marketing strategy before creating a content strategy.

A content strategy can be defined as…

“Getting the right content to the right user at the right time through strategic planning of content creation, delivery, and governance.”

Source: ContentStrategyAlliance.com

Also…

A content strategy is your brand’s game plan to drive traffic, leads, engagement, sales, and other business outcomes through content.

Source: ContentStrategyAlliance.com

A content strategy is also much broader than coming up with a list of content formats and topics. It includes buyer personas, customer journey maps, editorial calendars, content audits, and content governance.

Watch our free video course on how to create an effective content strategy for your business.

Now that we have a basic understanding of what a content strategy is, let’s take a look at why businesses need one.

Why Do You Need A Content Strategy?

Businesses need a content strategy to:

  1. Set And Reach Goals – A documented content strategy helps define marketing goals, set priorities plan the work, and ensure that all marketing efforts translate into tangible results.
  2. Track Progress – A strong content strategy outlines the metrics to track, analyze, and determine if the content marketing efforts are producing results.
  3. Identify New Opportunities – A good content strategy outlines all the avenues that can be used to follow news and trends and find story ideas and prevent the effort put into discovering new opportunities from being uncoordinated and reflecting poorly on a brand’s publications and tone.
  4. Cut Costs – Content strategies help define how much money to spend per project, how to spend it, and how to find ways to cut costs if required to avoid excessive spending on individual projects.
  5. Optimize Its Marketing Team – A documented content strategy sets out performance metrics for team members, and defines a work schedule for content creation, guidelines on the management of social media accounts, maintenance of marketing automation system, and other content-related processes. Without this, the marketing team won’t know how much content to produce, where to post it, how to repurpose it, and how to work as productively and effectively as possible.
  6. Produce Content That Converts – Content that consistently converts comes from a content strategy that understands who its target audience is, what type, style, and format of content its audience wants to consume, its ideal content tone, and how to leverage different distribution and promotional channels.

Source: Kontent.ai

In simpler terms, a content strategy can help your business realize its vision.

Chart: Business cycle
A content strategy gives a measurable and quantifiable way to help your business realize its vision using content.

If your business has a clear vision with clearly defined objectives and a sound business and marketing strategy, a content strategy provides a measurable and quantifiable way to determine how using content can help you achieve those objectives.

Your content strategy drives your content plan, defines the focus of your content production efforts and content promotion activities, and specifies what systems your business needs to put in place to manage all of your content-related processes effectively, including the content itself.

Content Strategy Goals And Objectives

Common content strategy goals and objectives include:

  • Audience understanding: The goal is to understand the target audience and create content that meets their needs, interests, and preferences. This can be achieved by conducting market research, creating buyer personas, and analyzing website traffic data.
  • Brand alignment: The goal is to align content with the company’s brand messaging and values, and to create a consistent brand voice and visual identity across all content. This can be achieved by creating a brand style guide, conducting a brand audit, and training content creators on your brand’s messaging and tone.
  • Content creation and distribution: The goal is to plan, create, and distribute high-quality, relevant, and engaging content to reach and engage the target audience. This can be achieved by creating an editorial calendar, creating and publishing blog posts, creating and publishing videos, and creating and publishing infographics.
  • Content optimization: The goal is to improve the visibility and performance of existing content through search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. This can be achieved by researching and including relevant keywords, optimizing meta tags, and creating internal and external links.
  • Content measurement and analytics: The goal is to track and measure the performance of content in terms of engagement, conversion, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). This can be achieved by using Google Analytics to track website traffic, using social media analytics to track engagement, and using A/B testing to optimize conversion rates.
  • Content governance: The goal is to ensure that all content is accurate, up-to-date, and compliant with legal, ethical, and brand guidelines. This can be achieved by creating and enforcing a content style guide, regularly reviewing and updating content, and ensuring that all content is accessible and inclusive.
  • Continuous improvement: The goal is to continuously improve your content strategy by analyzing performance data, gathering feedback, and making adjustments as needed. This can be achieved by conducting regular content audits, gathering feedback from stakeholders, and testing and implementing new content formats and distribution channels.

Benefits Of Having A Content Strategy

There are many benefits to having a clear content strategy, including:

  • Consistency: With a content strategy in place, you can ensure that your content is consistent in terms of quality, tone, and style. This helps to build trust with your audience and establish your brand as a reliable source of information.
  • Improved audience targeting: A content strategy helps to identify the target audience for your content and ensures that the content is tailored to their interests and needs.
  • Increased brand awareness: Consistently publishing high-quality content can help to increase awareness of your brand and establish it as a thought leader in your industry.
  • Greater customer engagement: By providing valuable and relevant content, you can engage and build relationships with your customers, leading to increased loyalty and customer retention.
  • Higher search engine rankings: A content strategy can help to optimize your website’s content for search engines, leading to higher search rankings and increased organic traffic.
  • Enhanced reputation management: A content strategy can help to proactively manage your brand’s reputation by ensuring that all content aligns with your brand values and message.
  • Increased sales and conversions: By providing valuable and relevant content, you can drive traffic to your website and convert visitors into customers.
  • Improved internal communication: A content strategy can help to align the goals and messaging of different teams within your organization, improving internal communication and collaboration.
  • Streamlined content creation: A content strategy helps to define the types of content that will be created, who will create it, and how it will be distributed, streamlining the content creation process.
  • Reduced costs: By having a content strategy in place, you can avoid wasting time and resources creating ineffective or redundant content and focus on creating high-quality content that resonates with your target audience.

Content Strategy Vs Marketing Strategy Vs Content Marketing

It’s also important to distinguish between Content Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Content Marketing and the differences between a Content Strategy vs a Content Marketing Strategy.

Content Strategy vs Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy outlines the marketing steps you’ll take towards your ultimate goals, like growth and increasing revenue, a content strategy focuses on defining which content is created to support this marketing strategy, as well as how you’ll promote it.

Source: Kurve.co.uk

Content Strategy vs Content Marketing

Content strategy is the roadmap that guides your content marketing. Content marketing is the process of organizing, scheduling, creating, publishing, and promoting content pieces. Content marketing is the tactics that follow from the content strategy.

Source: Terakeet.com

An effective content strategy needs to specify:

  1. What goals the business wants to achieve using content,
  2. What type of content will be used to achieve these goals,
  3. How to create and distribute this content, and
  4. How to measure its performance.
Content Strategy
An effective content strategy needs to specify the above.

Let’s go briefly through each of these steps:

1. Business Goals

Some of the main goals a business may want to achieve using content can include:

  • Increasing search rankings
  • Driving traffic
  • Reaching a specific target audience
  • Increasing brand awareness
  • Building engagement
  • Boosting conversions
  • etc.

In The State Of Content Marketing Global Report (2022), for  example, a survey of 1,500 marketers cited the following as their key content goals for 2022:

  • 45% want to increase brand awareness
  • 37% want to attract more traffic to their website
  • 36% are focused on generating leads through content marketing
  • 27% of respondents want increased sales and revenue
  • 23% strive for improved customer loyalty and engagement with their brand

Here are a few examples of strategic business goals and objectives using content and content marketing:

  • To create a content marketing strategy that increases website traffic by 50% within the next six months.
  • To develop a content calendar that consistently delivers high-quality, relevant content to our target audience.
  • To increase brand awareness and engagement through social media by creating and sharing engaging content on a regular basis.
  • To establish our company as a thought leader in our industry through the creation and distribution of educational and informative content.
  • To improve search engine rankings through the optimization of our website content and the creation of high-quality backlinks.
  • To develop a content marketing campaign that generates at least 100 qualified leads within the next quarter.
  • To create a content marketing strategy that increases customer retention and loyalty through the creation of personalized and valuable content.
  • To establish ourselves as the go-to source for industry news and trends by creating and sharing timely and relevant content.
  • To improve customer acquisition and conversion rates through the creation of targeted and persuasive content.
  • To create a content marketing strategy that supports the overall goals and objectives of our business.

2. Types Of Content

After defining goals and objectives, the next step is to decide what type of content the business will use to achieve these.

This can include using blog posts & articles, social media posts, how-to guides, videos, email newsletters, ebooks, whitepapers, and reports, podcasts, infographics, webinars, case studies, etc.

Graph: Content Formats That Produced The Best Results In 2021
Content formats. Source: Semrush.com. Click on the image to view an enlarged version.

We cover this in more detail in the content planning and content production modules.

3. Content Creation & Distribution

After specifying the type of content the business needs to create to achieve its goals, the next step is to define how it will create and distribute this content.

Chart: Channels used to distribute and promote content.
Content distribution channels. Source: Semrush.com. Click on the image to view an enlarged version.

We cover this in more detail in the content planning, content production, and content promotion modules.

4. Measuring Content Performance

The last step of an effective content strategy is to be able to track and measure the performance of your published content.

This step lets your business know if the content has helped it achieve its goals.

Content Performance Measurement
Key metrics used to measure content performance success. Source: Semrush.com. Click on the image to view an enlarged version.

We look at ways to measure content performance in the content planning, content management and content promotion modules.

Key Elements Of An Effective Content Strategy

According to Kurve, the three pillars of a successful content strategy are brand focus, user experience, and content distribution.

Brand Focus ensures that the content is consistent with the brand strategy of the business and that it remains on-topic and relevant to both the business and its customers.

User Experience involves developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) so that you can create highly targeted content.

Content Distribution defines where and how you will publish content to make the most out of the media types you will publish and deliver your content in. We cover this in more depth in the Content Promotion module.

Who Is Responsible For Creating A Content Strategy?

In the Content Manager Mindset lesson, we discuss the three decision-making levels of a business and how these are responsible for creating, implementing, and managing different areas of the organization.

This includes the overall business strategy and its digital strategy.

Digital Strategy Structure
Different decision-making levels are responsible for creating, managing, and implementing different aspects of a Digital Strategy.

If we apply the three decision-making levels to the digital strategy of a business, for example:

  • The executive level creates its digital content strategy.
  • The management level implements and manages its digital content plan.
  • The technical/tactical level performs the work required to create the content specified in the content plan (e.g. writing articles, recording videos, etc.)

Ideally, executive-level roles of the business would create a content strategy for the organization as part of developing its overall business strategy and digital strategy.

The Content Manager would then take the content strategy and use it to create and implement a content plan.

This content plan would then be used to drive the content production process.

As we have seen in the Digital Business Setups lesson, however, many small and startup businesses do not have the resources to either create a digital business strategy or hire a content strategist to create one for the organization.

In this case, the content manager will need to be directly involved in the process of creating a content strategy before creating and implementing a content plan.

How Do You Create A Digital Content Strategy?

We cover this process in a separate lesson here: How To Create A Content Strategy

Content Strategy – Useful Stats

We mentioned earlier that there are key differences between a content strategy and a content marketing strategy. Many businesses confuse these two.

Keeping this in mind, it’s good to know and keep up with the latest content marketing statistics, as these can be helpful when creating or reviewing your content strategy.

Infographic: What makes a content strategy successful?
Infographic: What makes a content strategy successful? Source: Semrush.com. Click on the image to view an enlarged version.

Summary

It’s important that businesses have a clear content strategy, as this will guide and drive all the content it creates to achieve their goals.

Without a content strategy, planning, creating, promoting, and managing content can lead to ineffective results and wasting valuable resources.

Action Steps

If you are the person responsible for managing content in your organization, make sure that there is a content strategy in place. If not, then you will need to help create it.

Useful Resources

In addition to completing the lessons in this module, we recommend the following resources:

Visit our tools and resources section for additional courses, guides, and helpful tools and resources for content managers.

References

See the articles below for additional useful information related to this lesson:

Content Strategy

Also…

Business Strategy

Marketing Strategy

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This concludes our overview lesson on content strategy.

Please complete all lessons in this module before proceeding to the next module (Content Planning).

Next Lesson

Go here for the next lesson in the Content Strategy training module: How To Create A Content Strategy or click on one of the other lessons in this module in the section below.

Content Strategy – Module Lessons

This module includes the following lessons:

Content Strategy

Content Strategy

Learn what a content strategy is, why it's important to have one, and how to develop an effective digital content strategy for your business.
Digital Business Basics

Digital Business Basics

This lesson looks at some of the basic steps your business should complete before it can grow using content.
How To Create A Content Strategy

How To Create A Content Strategy

Learn how to create an effective content strategy for your organization.
Target Audience

Target Audience

Identify your target audience's demographics, interests, and pain points to create a more targeted content strategy.
Buyer Journey

Buyer Journey

Learn how your customer's buyer journey impacts your content strategy. 
Customer Surveys

Customer Surveys

Use feedback from customer surveys to create a more targeted content strategy and improve your content creation.
Content Audit

Content Audit

Learn why businesses need a content audit and how to perform a content audit for your organization.
Web Content Accessibility

Web Content Accessibility

Learn about the importance of making your web content more accessible and inclusive for all of your website's users.

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Image: Coffee and Notepad