A better definition
What is a B2B Content Marketing Audit?
What is a B2B Content Marketing Audit?
A B2B Content Marketing Audit is a comprehensive assessment of a business’s content marketing strategy, execution, and overall effectiveness.
It goes beyond evaluating individual content assets to examine the entire content marketing framework. It covers strategy, management, planning, SEO, creation, distribution, measurement and resource allocation.
The goal is to pinpoint weaknesses, highlight strengths and identify opportunities for improvements so as to align more closely with stated marketing objectives.
Below is a part of our own sample framework that we follow. There isn’t a right or wrong framework. As long as you are following one that includes the whole content marketing process, that’s what counts.
A Terrible Definition of Content Marketing Audit
The typical definition of a Content Marketing Audit that you see and read online and regurgitated over and over again goes something like this:
-A content marketing audit is a process of reviewing every piece of content on a website to better analyze factors like performance, strengths and weaknesses, gaps, so as to determine new content, and optimization opportunities.-
Excuse us, but this definition of a Content Marketing Audit is, well, horsesh*t!
We wrote an article trying to explain our stance on confusion between Content Marketing Audits and Content Audits.
An Audit roadmap
What does a B2B Content Marketing Audit include?
Benefits of a B2B Content Marketing Audit
Although B2B Content Marketing and its benefits are easy to understand, executing and sustaining a successful B2B Content Marketing strategy, is not.
Conducting an Audit of your Content Marketing strategy & process will provide you with valuable insight to help you improve your current results. Some of the main benefits include:
Identify Strengths & Weaknesses
- Understand what’s working well and where your strategy & process is falling short.
- Pinpoint gaps in overall content strategy or philosophy, content management process, competitive analysis, content topic selection, formats, distribution, etc.
Align Content strategy with Business Goals
- Ensure your content supports key business objectives like lead generation, brand awareness, customer retention & engagement.
Improve Content Performance & ROI
- Analyze engagement metrics to determine which content drives the most traffic, leads, and conversions.
Enhance Audience Targeting
- Is your strategy attracting your ideal customers?
- Do you have Content-Audience Fit?
B2B Content Marketing Audit Deliverables
A comprehensive assessment of your content marketing strategy, execution, and overall effectiveness includes assessments of the following areas:
Core Philosophy: Do you have a core approach when it comes to content marketing? Is it part of your core go-to-market strategy or simply something marketing does?
Leverage Data: Are you making content marketing decision based on the right data? Data about how your audience searches, how they buy, how they engage, how your competitors market, etc, all tell a story about how you should approach your content marketing strategy
Benchmark against competitors: Evaluating and analyzing your competitors’ content helps identify content gaps and opportunities to rank better than them
Content SEO: Do you have content-market fit? Are there opportunities you are missing with your keyword analysis and selection of content to publish to attract audiences throughout the buyer journey?
Content Marketing Strategy: Assessing whether you actually have a strategy or a set of tactical efforts is a fundamental part of any audit.
Content Creation: Assess content assets, content creation workflows and internal/external team effectiveness
Content Distribution & Ownership: Assess the utilization of distribution channels (paid, social, owned) and assess how much “ownership” you have of your audience
Metrics: What gets measured, gets managed. Assess performance benchmarks for ongoing improvements
Rework: Identify areas to be refreshed, repackaged, or repurposed
Operations & Management: As part of any comprehensive assessment, executive buy-in and how your management team manages the entire content marketing framework/process must be included
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B2B Content Marketing Audit
A comprehensive evaluation of a business’s entire content marketing strategy, processes, and execution to identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities for driving engagement, leads, and growth in B2B markets.
Content SEO Audit
The practice of creating and optimizing content to align with search intent, using targeted keywords and structured formatting to improve organic rankings, drive qualified traffic, with a strong focus on increasing conversions.
SEO Audit
An SEO audit is a comprehensive evaluation of a website’s search engine optimization health, covering technical SEO (site speed, indexing, mobile usability), on-page SEO (keywords, metadata, content structure), and off-page SEO (backlinks, domain authority) to identify issues and opportunities for improving organic visibility and performance.
Content Audit
An inventory and performance review of all existing content assets to assess quality, relevance, accuracy, and alignment with business goals.
The difference amongst 4 types of Audits
There is a clear difference amongst the following four types of Audits. It is important to understand the differences when potentially purchasing these services. Our primary focus is on B2B Content Marketing Audits and Content SEO Audits.
Find out what is and isn’t working
You must audit your current content marketing process and get a deeper understanding of how you reach your audience and how they engage with you.
Is your content selling or teaching? Is it random or with purpose?
The goal is to pinpoint weaknesses, highlight strengths and identify opportunities for improvements so as to align more closely with your stated content marketing objectives.
Lead with a value-first content mindset
How businesses communicate with audiences is both confusing and rather condescending.
Trust is the new currency in today’s marketplace. A VALUE-first mindset is the foundation of trust-building content. It means delivering content your audience genuinely needs — long before they’re ready to buy — and continuing to support them throughout their decision-making process.
This isn’t about promoting features. It’s about serving. It’s about caring enough to provide value before expecting attention.
What your audience cares about should drive what you create. Not the other way around. When your content makes people better at their jobs, they begin to trust your brand before a single sales conversation ever happens.
The result? Your business becomes a go-to resource. Trust grows. And that trust becomes your strongest competitive differentiator — ultimately rewarding you with qualified leads.
We guide our clients through a step-by-step content process so they can apply this VALUE-first approach in a practical, repeatable way—helping them consistently deliver the kind of content that earns attention, respect and long-term engagement.
Follow a structured approach
Following a framework brings clarity, consistency and scalability to your efforts.
There are many good frameworks you can follow, including ours. The point is to actually follow a structured approach to your content marketing process. The framework we follow guides clients step-by-step through the entire B2B content marketing process, not just content creation—from research to strategy and planning, including content SEO, content creation, distribution, measurement and operational support.
In short, a framework can transform your B2B content marketing process from a set of random activities into a repeatable, results-driven system that drives growth without depending too heavily on paid ads to generate leads.
Own Access to Your Audience
Owning access to your audience is truly a competitive advantage; owning your audience distribution channels builds your moat; a protective barrier around your brand. A durable asset that amplifies your content, lowers your acquisition costs and gives you independence from platforms you can’t control.
If you don’t have direct access to your audience and you keep “renting” access from ad networks, search engines or social networks, then you don’t have real control. And without control, you can’t build long-term value from your content efforts.
If you want your marketing to have a direct relationship with your audience and to reduce dependency on third-party platforms then investing in Audienceship is becoming a competitive necessity.
- Start by auditing how much access you actually have
- Identify gaps and prioritize strategies that give you more control
- You don’t have to do it all at once, but you should definitely start.
Read a little more on the subject in an article we published titled: Owning Access to your Audience is the new Marketing Moat
Next Steps
Four simple steps to position yourself for success.
Simplification leads to execution. Yes, our methodologies and frameworks are thorough. However, they are straightforward and effective so you get the content marketing results you are targeting.
Content Marketing Audit
Process & Pricing
Review our process and pricing to determine if we are the right B2B Content Marketing Audit service for what you’d like to achieve.
What does our process look like?
Service provided? Consulting Audit (we tell you what to do)
Output: Audit + Recommendations
Features: Short term, one off project
Book a Call: Let’s kick things off with a conversation to understand where you are in your content marketing journey, what challenges you’re facing and goals you want to achieve. We’ll also figure out if our audit service is the right fit for you—no pressure, no hard sell. And whether or not we work together, we are sure you will leave the call with insights you can start using.
Customized Proposal: Let’s be clear, we do NOT simply audit your content. We audit your entire content marketing process. Every client is different. We’ll send you a proposal clearly outlining our Audit details, fees, and agreed upon deliverables.
IF WE DECIDE TO MOVE FORWARD
Step 1 – Initial Discovery: If we decide to move forward, the first step is discovery. We will begin working with your leadership team to learn about your challenges, constraints and evaluate the current state of affairs.
Step 2 – Audit Research: Our Audit continues by learning further details of your business and content marketing process. We don’t just look at screens and charts or simply run a website SEO audit that software can spit out in a few minutes. That’s silly. We conduct detailed research into your industry, your website, your process, your content, your SEO, your teams. We interview key staff to understand nuances of your process/industry/company. We follow our framework and evaluate your content process based on the same framework we use will all our clients.
Step 3 – Audit Report: Once we have finalized our research. We start putting down the final stages of your Audit report. We include our findings, their implications and our recommendations.
Pricing for Audit Services
Our pricing for audit services can vary, as there are a few factors to consider. These factors include:
- Size of Company
- Revenue or Startup stage
- Industry Complexity
- Timeline & Urgency
- Amount of Content Assets
- Size of Website
- Quantity of products/services for sale
With that in mind, audit budgets will range from a one-time project fee of $3,500 for smaller organizations, up to $38,000+ for larger organizations that require far more in-depth involvement and audits.
We encourage you to contact us for a discussion and proposal.
Discovery Call
You’ll know if we’re a fit after just one call
Discovery & Fit
Speak directly with our principal consultant. You’ll talk through your current situation and how we can help.
Proposal
Every client is different. We’ll send you a proposal clearly outlining services, fees and agreed upon deliverables.
Fine tune
We will fine tune the proposal based on further discussions, decide on a start date and finalize our agreement.
FAQ
FAQ: B2B Content Marketing Audit
More detailed information about our audit services
When reading about B2B Content Marketing Services, we often come across the statement “If it won’t rank, it doesn’t get built.” We believe this statement is rather dramatic and missing a significant point, frankly, it’s nonsense.
The goal of content is to get your audience to consume your content and engage with it. Creating content that only ranks on search engines is a limiting strategy. Meaning, how about all those contacts your company has in their email database? Creating content for your email marketing list is extremely valuable. This content may not rank, may be difficult to rank, but if of value, your audience will consume it, use it, and it will deliver more leads for you.
Content should be created based on the value it provides to your customers. There is content that helps with ranking and traffic and there is content that is only consumed by those in your mailing list or other private contact lists or on social networks like LinkedIN. As long as you focus on providing value across your buyer’s journey, you will be fine.
Where do we start?
There are 3 major reasons for bad content.
- It’s Google’s fault! That’s right. Google has put such an emphasis on content production, keywords, length of content, etc. Companies write 2000 word articles on topics that should take one paragraph. This has led to a massive amount of fluff content that is turning people off.
- Simply put, as great as Ai is, it’s a problem! It has brought a tidal wave of mediocre content. This has led to flimsy link bait and repetitive content.
- It’s marketers’ fault. Many companies and teams simply do not understand what content marketing truly is and how best to leverage it. Many erroneously believe that its simply about publishing blog posts or about their products/services. This leads to technical writing, or sales writing, or writing for search engines instead of writing for their audience. Making content not very relevant.
Despite advances in content strategy and understanding, the above 3 reasons have led to a serious lack of content quality, which all leads to poor traffic and engagement from potential buyers.
A reminder that about 96% of all content receives little to no traffic from search engines.
Content must provide value to your audience above all. Only then can their engagement turn into trust which turn into qualified leads.
We absolutely work with other marketing agencies. Marketing agencies and consulting firms that require a specialization in B2B Content Marketing ask us to work with them and their clients. Many marketing agencies do not focus on this specialization as deeply as we do. They are busy providing an entire range of other marketing services.
B2B Content Marketing comes in many forms. The goal of which is to provide value to your audience. This value will generate more authority and more trust, which will improve engagement and interest from your audience.
The skill is NOT only to focus on what type of content to provide, but rather, a combination of what is provided, why it’s provided, when is it provided and to whom is it provided.
Here are some examples of effective content pieces. As always, its the execution that counts.
- Educational Content
- Articles & Blog Posts
- Whitepapers
- eGuides, eBooks
- Reports & Checklists
- Pillar Content
- Infographics & Data Visualizations
- Spec Sheets
- Case Studies
- Web Copy
- Buyer Guides, Price Guides
- Surveys, Polls & Quizzes
- Online Learning
- Presentations & Webinars
- Interviews & FAQs
- Tools & Templates
- Press Releases
- Videos
- Training
- Books
