One of the most daunting tasks of any sales and marketing team is the idea of creating fresh, valuable, and ongoing content for your organization.
It’s no small order to write blogs, checklists, slide decks, and other kinds of content to keep your company’s marketing relevant.
Surprisingly enough, companies typically have an immense amount of marketing and sales material that they don’t even realize they possess.
A great way to identify what content you have is to perform a content audit.
A content audit allows you to take stock of what material you have written in your organization, where it might fall in the buyer’s journey, and how you might repurpose it for some quick wins in marketing.
Dive into the archives of files and look for any marketing brochures, flyers, one-pagers, blog posts, website content, sales or pitch decks, press releases, product descriptions, trade show content, and anything else that might be content you can reuse.
The truth is, either yourself, your predecessor, or someone else on your team has more than likely produced really valuable content in some way.
Let’s find it, and get it on this list!
Once you’ve found this content, you’re going to want to list it out in the content audit worksheet and describe what you know about it.
The Buyer's Journey
The Buyer’s Journey is the natural progression a prospect goes through before making a purchase. We're going to categorize the kind of content collected into the phases of the buyer's journey.
The following information comes directly from our friends at HubSpot:
In the Awareness stage, a prospective buyer starts experiencing symptoms of a problem and begins doing research to understand these symptoms more clearly, develop context around the symptoms, and ultimately define their problem and give their problem a name.
They are seeking educational information around their symptoms that helps them to understand the problem they experience.
The person in the awareness stage is really self-involved at this point and not ready for product or vendor specific information until later in the buyer’s journey.
At the end of the Awareness stage, a prospective buyer has now defined their problem and is committed to finding a solution to the problem.
In the Consideration stage, a prospect is researching all available solution strategies and options in the marketplace.
They consider all of the technologies, alternatives, and paths they could take to solve their problem.
At the end of the consideration stage, they’ve chosen the solution strategy that is right for their business and best suits the problem defined earlier.
In the Decision stage, a prospect is building a long list of potential vendors, products and services and seeking information to help them whittle that long list down to a short list, make a decision and based on that decision they’ll confidently make a purchase that they will not experience buyer’s remorse about later.
Content Type
The next information you’ll look through is the “content type.”
This will help you classify all the different types of content you have based on the deliverable type.
You will likely find that you have a large amount of just one type of content, for example our company has way too many checklists in my opinion.
You might categorize this using terms like:
- blog posts
- checklists
- ebooks
- one-pagers
- templates
- slide decks
By providing the content type, you’re able to see where you’re lacking in variety of content, so you can create new pieces to fill the gaps.
Buyer Personas
You may or may not have already created your buyer personas, and if not, that's okay.
For now, know that personas basically boil down to the types of people you work with.
If you find that your content is geared towards one specific type of buyer, that would be a persona.
If you have 3 different personas, but only have content geared towards 1 of them, that means you’re missing huge opportunities for capturing people that fall in the other two categories.
Content Topic
Topic is exactly what it sounds like.
What is this content about?
Try and be consistent in your naming strategy so you can filter this column down the road.
If all your content is around just one topic, you’re going to create a loss of interest for your prospects.
If you find you have content that’s heavy in one particular area, then you know where you need to build content for other components of your industry.
So to recap...
- We’re going to do an inventory and analysis of the content your company already has.
- You’re going to identify the gaps in your content that you could potentially fill in your upcoming strategy.
- You’re going to look at some of this content that might not be able to be used in its current state, look to repurpose that content in a new and improved way.
- And lastly, you’re going to make note of the kinds of content you realize you might be missing.
