Do you know where your content is?
When was the last time you took a serious look at your own content marketing? You’d be amazed at what you can forget about in the midst of the weekly grind. An ebook project you began but left half-finished six months ago, a social media channel you left on auto-publish but haven’t looked at since, that account you forgot you signed up for but which is still linked to your home page…
If it’s been a while, we recommend doing a content marketing audit solidify your strategy for the coming year and tie up any loose ends you may have forgotten about. Here’s where to look and how to start.
Review your social media profiles.
Start with where you know you are. Are you on Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? When was the last time you looked at your profile page? It’s easy for your business description or your cover photo to look dated or forgotten. Or you may have included links an inaccurate business address. Maybe you have old employees listed as administrators of your account, or references to an old promotion. Take some time to clean everything up and get it looking fresh again.
Take a close look at your home page.
Your home page is not only the face of your business—it’s also the worst culprit for outing your failed social media initiatives. Remember that social widget you added to link to all your channels? The ones you forget to update? They’re still there, and that widget is sending your visitors to them… where they see those two tweets you made eight months ago, and nothing else. Remove links to dead social channels, as well as any other dated promotional material, such as a banner in you carousel for an even that ended last month.
Search social media channels you’re not on, just in case you are.
Sometimes people open accounts and forget about them. But they’re still there, waiting for someone to stumble upon that dated YouTube video you made a couple years back, or that Tumblr account you posted to before you switched to a more conventional blog. These may not seem important, but it’s better to clean them up or shut them down. It’s unlikely to cause any serious embarrassment, but you’d rather they weren’t the first impression anyone had of your business.
Clean up old blog posts.
Most content is good content. However, sometimes you publish a post and after a little while it becomes obviously dated, or simply awkward in light of later events (like a glowing review of the Galaxy Note 7, for instance). You want your blog to showcase an archive of quality knowledge, but you also want that knowledge to be accurate and valuable. If some of your old posts don’t live up to your current standards, it’s time to delete them.
Keep track of what you learn from your content marketing audit.
Conducting a content marketing audit is a little like cleaning house: you tidy everything up, throw away some junk, and put everything else into its right place. So once you’ve gone through all the trouble of putting your house in order, you want to establish a system to make it easier next time. Create a file where you record all your current marketing initiatives, and write down when you last updated everything. Next time you start a temporary promotion, set a reminder to go take down any time-sensitive references once it’s complete. And make sure to check it every six months to a year to keep everything looking fresh and up to date.