For this episode of 🎙The 4am Report🎙 we bring you (🥁drum roll🥁) a panel of experts on content audits. Yes, most people hate the idea of a content audit. It can feel like a lot of work. But these bright minds in the world of marketing all agree that a content audit is crucial – not only does it help you figure out what content your customers are consuming, it saves you time and energy as you can repurpose content – ultimately, amplifying your reach👏.
Together with Will and myself, on this episode we have Amber Khan, founder of Amplifyology, a repurposing content marketing agency in London; Romina Buchle, marketing manager of a B2B lead nurturing firm in Zurich called Aioma; and Kira Tchernikovsky, an international marketing consultant based in Toronto.
We started off speaking about our pet peeves and how they keep us up at night. Mine is the sheer amount of new content out there.
In most cases, without there being any kind of plan for that content.
Kira agrees that creating content for the sake of content isn’t a great strategy. ” If you know why you’re creating content and audit and repurpose content, you can measure it and do what needs to be done to achieve your goal.”
For Amber, what keeps her up at night is when people use content out of context. “If we don’t start from a place of context, it’s basically saying, well, I’ll just throw something out on the web, and hopefully, it will work, hopefully, it will get you the kind of attention you want. And maybe you’ll gain some followers. If the clients come from a non-marketing background, it’s hard to explain to them that the audit is required in the beginning to select content that is contextual. And then work with it, create your goals, repurpose it, whatever, but start from there.”
“A lot of people think content auditing is just one thing they do one time and then they forget about it,” Romina added. “They don’t do the work afterwards; they forget about the actual things they created and about all the rough diamonds they have that just need to be polished a bit” 💎.
Here’s four content auditing things you should be thinking about according to our worthy guests:
- Focus on your Ideal Client Profile (ICP)
It is tempting to be all things to all people but targeting your ideal client profile is crucial – and an audit can help you narrow down your focus. Romina tries to go into each stage of the customer journey. “I want to see how I can optimize this stage or go into different topics and how I can really nail the touch points in the topic area along the journey a customer takes.”
“ICP is very, very important.” Amber related. “I feel that a lot of times we are writing, or the companies are writing, for so many different ICPs. And it gets confusing. For example, they might be targeting pet owners, but they may also be targeting cat owners. So first you need to figure out the ICP, who is it speaking to, then you have to figure out the topics for that ICP. And categorize them.”
Kira suggests choosing two or three ICPs to run tests on to find the best performing audience. “You have to nail the journey for that specific ICP, be it pet lovers or cat lovers, because otherwise you won’t be able to measure.“
- Test by running ads
According to Amber, running ads are a great way to establish patterns and find audiences. “In our case we run Facebook ads for a particular piece of content from a webinar or training. It’s long form content, an hour long at the minimum. By running ads, we figure out very quickly if the concept and topic resonates with our client’s audience. And if it does, we take that big piece of content and repurpose it, not only for different types of content, but for various spots in the customer journey as well.”
- Use public domain content
Kira feels that a content audit can also include looking beyond your own content to repurposing content from people who have published in your field, in the public domain. This can include auditing the news to include relevant content (aka newsjacking).
“I’ve started to do third party relevant content lately. Say we’re talking about digital transformation. There are these sources, like Boards of Trade here in Canada, for example, who run webinars with amazing experts that are publicly available. If it’s an hour-long panel discussion, why can’t you take that and do a quick bulleted post? It will be so helpful to other business owners, as they don’t have to go through the whole hour. And you don’t have to create that content, you just repurpose, it is publicly available.”
- Trawl your own company for content
According to Romina, it’s important to think about auditing the content from within a company. “A lot of companies have so much content flying around in different departments, and you can use all this content for your marketing, of course. So, I feel like the first step you need to take is going internally and saying, ‘hey, I need to know stuff, guys’. And really also checking how you can get the content from your audit departments and then repurpose it. There is a lot of potential just lying around.”
For more on the specific strategies and tools these experts use, you’ll have to 👂listen to the episode👂.
Want to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!)? Give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!
Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem or if you would like to suggest a guest on the 4AM Report, let us know.
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And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!
