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, Ai Search, 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:
Ultimately, content effectiveness is probably due to one, some or all of 4 fundamental factors:
- Quantity – Are you publishing enough content
- Quality – Are you publishing the right content
- Audience – Is your content reaching the right audience
- Attention – Are you getting enough attention
We audit your current content marketing situation and performance to uncover the realities of the above 4 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 Ai search: Is your content structured for Ai search engines? Do you have enough authoritative digital footprints? Did you implement structured data? Does your content have original research? Is your content easily accessible by Ai crawlers?
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, do you have the right content types, 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
Get your B2B content marketing SCORE
- It's FREE
- Quick Strategy Audit
- Get Recommendations
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.
It includes everything from content research, content selection, SEO, Ai Search, Content Optimization, Content Distribution, Measurement and operational issues.
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.
Ai Search Audit
An Ai search audit is a comprehensive evaluation of how a business’s content, citations and information is best optimized to be read and referenced by Ai platforms.
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 5 types of Audits
There is a clear difference amongst the following five 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.
Strategy 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
A content audit reviews individual content assets to assess performance, strengths, and weaknesses. A content marketing audit is far more comprehensive. It examines your entire content marketing framework including strategy, management, planning, SEO, AI search optimization, creation processes, distribution channels, measurement systems, and resource allocation. The distinction matters: one evaluates your content pieces, the other evaluates whether you have an effective content marketing system in place.
Three primary factors contribute to poor content performance. First, an overemphasis on keyword-driven content has led to excessive fluff and unnecessarily long articles. Second, AI tools have flooded the market with mediocre, repetitive content that lacks originality. Third, many organizations misunderstand content marketing fundamentals, resulting in sales-focused or overly technical writing instead of audience-focused value. These issues explain why approximately 96% of content receives little to no traffic.
No. While search visibility is important, limiting content creation to only what ranks or what gets references by Ai platforms ignores valuable opportunities. Content created for email subscribers, existing contacts, or social networks like LinkedIn can drive significant engagement and leads even without ranking. The key is providing value across the buyer’s journey through multiple channels. Content should be created based on the value it delivers to your audience, not solely on its ability to rank or be referenced in search engines.
