Do you know what content assets your business already has? Content can get lost in company archives due to new projects, change of staff, or simply time passing. Even if your brand is new to the content marketing pursuit, it’s likely you have existing content with unfulfilled potential.
So often brands come to us asking for a content strategy and content creation without considering what they already have in the bank. Despite our initial questioning, a few months into our relationship they will remark,
“Oh, by the way, did we mention we have a library of original images/academic studies/series of infographics?�
This information totally changes the range of what we can produce within your budget.
Even if you hate those dated corporate videos you made five years ago, it’s important you don’t let them get buried in old drives. Consider the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, as you can repurpose old content to increase your ROI. Could you use some grabs from old footage in new videos? Could your images accompany a blog post on your website? The possibilities for repurposing content are vast if you assume a creative mindset.
So how should you go about digging up old content? A simple and comprehensive way to get a view for your content across all channels is to conduct a content audit. If you keep your audit in a format that is easily accessible by everyone in your management team, it can be used as a single source of information and added to as time goes on.
Content audit: where to start?
Your content audit should begin by looking through what your brand has published externally. Your external sources should include all your social media pages, press releases and pages of your website. Even things such as testimonials should be gathered in your content audit, so it’s worth taking a look at online review sites too.
Although you don’t own the space, it’s important to consider your social media pages as assets themselves within your content audit. How are you portraying yourself? What language do you use? What does your audience respond to the most? These are questions you should be asking as you look for ways to improve.
What have you got internally?
Your content audit should also take a focus internally, yet this is where the process can get a little complicated. Your brand may have content stored in shared folders; however, there may also be content stored on personal computers or on external storage devices such as hard drives and USBs.
The most time effective way of collecting all this information is to reach out to your colleagues and ask everyone to take a log of what content they have in their own sources. Print a table for your colleagues to fill out with details such as ‘Name’, ‘Purpose’, ‘Date created’, ‘Date distributed’, and ‘Size’. Anything important that comes back on these forms should be saved to a secondary, communal source.
What to look for
Although every content audit will be different depending on the nature of your business, you can expect that your content audit should cover the following aspects as a minimum:
- Title of content
- Location and URL where relevant
- Description – What is this? Who is it for?
- Engagement – Who has commented, what did they say? How many shares and how many likes?
- Suggestions for improvement – What could this be used for in the future? What changes could be made to this content today to improve it?
- Additional comments – What other aspects are of importance to this content?
Conducting a content audit can be a time-consuming task, so it’s understandable if it exceeds the workload of just one person. If you’d like help running a content audit for your brand, contact Lush Digital Media. We often conduct audits for businesses looking to take a new direction with their content.
By Carla Young
