How Often Should You Conduct a Content Audit?
Categorized in: Content
It’s all too easy to coast through your content marketing without giving strategy a second thought. Some never developed a strategy in the first place. Others spend some initial time developing a strategy, but never follow up to ensure things are working as they should be. No matter how long you’ve been working your content marketing, there comes a time when a content audit is necessary. However, how often you do one will depend on a variety of factors. Here is some information that will help you explore the options:
You Have Never Created a Content Strategy
Do you fall into the category of someone who has been working at your content marketing, without realizing that it might have been a good idea to have a strategy before you got started? It’s all too easy to fall into this category. The good news is that now, you will have plenty of data to work with, and can use this information to pivot into a workable strategy.
If you realize that you fall into this category, you can perform your content audit at any time. It’s usually the precursor to creating a content marketing strategy, and the data that you have will be useful.
You Have Been Working Your Content Strategy for a Long Time
When did you first create your content marketing strategy? Was it several years ago? If it was over two years ago, you should do a content audit as soon as possible. Let’s say you put a lot of thought into your initial content strategy. You told yourself you’d give it some time, then you’d assess the data and make adjustments after some time passes.
Well, it’s all too easy for other things to get in the way, and for more time to pass than you may have realized. If this is you, it’s time to do another audit. In this case, you will want to perform all the usual activities, but you’ll also want to dig out the details of the original strategy so that you can properly assess if things are working or not.
Your Existing Content Marketing Strategy is Fairly New
In the case where you have been working your content marketing strategy for less than a year, it’s generally a good idea to wait until at least the year point before you do another content audit. In this case, you will need to give it enough time to collect data so that you can assess if it’s really working. For the most part, waiting at least a year will give you more data to analyze.
From there, you can use the data and analysis to make some tweaks to the content strategy. In fact, this might be the ideal scenario, but it does depend on the industry and the business. For most businesses, doing a full content audit every 1-2 years is the perfect scenario. You want to give things enough time to get the data, but you also don’t want to wait too long that you don’t uncover issues in time.
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