A better definition
What is a 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 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
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.
Start with clarity
Audit your current content marketing situation and performance to uncover what’s working, what’s not, and how aligned your content efforts are with business goals. This diagnostic step lays the foundation for focused improvement.
The goal is to pinpoint weaknesses, highlight strengths and identify opportunities for improvements.
Our B2B Content Marketing Framework further describes the steps required for Content Marketing mastery.
Buyer & Market Intelligence
Most content strategy is lost right here! In fact, about 96% of all content gets little or no traffic at all.
An effective content marketing strategy starts with deep audience insight. This ensures your strategy is built on data, not assumptions.
Success, and ultimately what it takes to rank, follows those that understand their audience’s needs, target winnable keywords, aligns content with business value and shows Google that their content gives audiences the answers they want consistently.
Our B2B Content Marketing Framework further describes the intelligence steps required for Content Marketing mastery.
Strategy
Content Strategy is the thinking and planning that guides how you engage your audience through content, not just in the moment, but over the long term. A strong strategy ensures that what you publish supports buyers at every stage of their journey, fuels real engagement, captures demand, and positions your brand as a trusted resource.
Our B2B Content Marketing Framework further describes the steps required for Content Marketing mastery, including strategy questions to consider.
Execute, Create, Optimize
With a clear understanding of your current situation through steps 1, 2 & 3, you’re now ready for the crucial fourth step: execution.
Execution isn’t merely about producing content; it’s about systematically leveraging insights from prior steps and following best practices around content creation, optimization of content, distribution & promotion of that content, and operational considerations to help deliver measurable, meaningful results that drive your sales forward.
Our B2B Content Marketing Framework further describes the steps required for Content Marketing mastery, including points to consider.
Next Steps
Four 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 don’t just win short-term attention, you create the conditions for long-term customer growth.
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