It doesn’t sound very sexy, adventurous, or world-changing, unless of course you’re into content marketing, but it may change your business!
Let’s start with a little … quiz.
The end of the year is a great time to:
- Rethink your garden plantings for the spring.
- Review your entire life and make drastic life changes.
- Do a content audit of the past year.
Really, you can do all three if you want.
But for now, let’s take a look at #3…content audit.
Going back over the content that you created over the past year is a key element to looking at the effectiveness of your marketing. Wow, that sounds very dry doesn’t it?
As I said before, it may not be an exciting topic but it is one that can create real excitement for your marketing strategy for the coming year.
So, get out your EXCEL spreadsheet and let’s begin by creating a super simple content audit worksheet.
It’s really pretty easy actually…
On the left side of your spreadsheet, write down the types of content you created… Blog post, e-books, white papers, email series you get the idea.
It may take you a little time to go through your content but don’t worry it’ll be worth it!
Take a look at your topics? Across the top you can create categories of interest. (Make sure your first column is the date of your content.) Did you write about a lot of inner feelings? Was that engagement content? Did you write a lot of cornerstone content as your attraction content? (If you don’t know what that means I’ll go over that later.) Did you give your readers something they could use right away? (Informational or even conversion content?)
Next, we’re going to take a look at the responses to each post, each email, and each piece of content.
What type of responses did you get?
If you got raves and comments that made your people take action, that tells you one thing. If you received comments that triggered some less-than-positive responses, that’s good. It’s similar to a sales objection. It gives you something to respond to in order to clarify a question or help the commenter. (Comments from Trolls – those are the rages, the combative comments and the negative responses meant to trigger you – just need to be ignored.)
What does that mean? This is great research for you to find out what content was read, what content got shared, and what content didn’t really go the distance.
You can guess at why you received certain comments, or why your audience decided to take action, or you can use this valuable information to engage your audience, and ask them to help you.
- What would they be interested in learning?
- What do they find valuable in your content?
- What would they like to see more/less of?
I want to clarify, this information isn’t meant for you to kowtow to readers, or change who you are to please the nay-sayers.
This information will help you create better content, work on your headlines, and create copy that helps with your conversion. Afterall, the reason to use content marketing is to create a community of ambassadors that love what you do, want to share it, and help you create sales to grow your business.
This is the very, down-and-dirty, super simple version.
If you want a bit more detail, I’ve created a template you can use, just CLICK HERE to go to the FREE Member Library. Grab your template, as well as other content marketing and small business free stuff.
Happy New Year and here’s to your content marketing adventurer! 😉
Christine
