How to Conduct a B2B Content Marketing Audit: A Comprehensive Guide

Here’s the overview of what you’ll read below:

1. An explanation of what a B2B content marketing audit is and why it's important
2. A step-by-step guide to conducting the audit
3. Best practices for effective audits
4. The consequences of not conducting regular audits
5. A case study demonstrating the power of content audits

To what extent does your content drive conversions and contribute to your business's bottom line? Are your blogs, videos, and social posts just noise, or are they powering your sales funnel?

In B2B marketing, content drives everything from lead generation to building long-lasting client relationships. However, over time, I’ve seen content strategies become misaligned, underperform, or lose relevance. To ensure your efforts are yielding the desired results, it's crucial to conduct regular content marketing audits. Here’s why:

• 37% of content marketers have never conducted a complete content audit mainly because they don’t understand where to start and feel like it’s time-consuming.
• Companies that regularly audit and optimize content see 7.8x more organic traffic than those that don’t.

This comprehensive guide will walk you through the process of conducting a B2B content marketing audit, complete with examples, best practices, and the potential pitfalls of neglecting this essential task.

What’s at stake if you don’t conduct regular audits?

Skipping regular content audits can lead to several issues:

1. Outdated Content: Your audience will consume irrelevant or outdated information, reducing your credibility.
2. Wasted resources: Continuing to produce content that doesn't resonate with your audience or drive results is an inefficient use of time and budget.
3. Inconsistent messaging: Over time, your content may drift from your core brand message, confusing your audience and diluting your brand identity.
4. Declining performance: As your content becomes outdated or misaligned with audience needs, you may see a drop in engagement and conversions.
5. Missed Revenue Opportunities: You may be overlooking key opportunities to address high-value customer needs.

Example: A B2B company that failed to audit its content missed out on optimizing several high-traffic pages that ranked for irrelevant keywords. Once they conducted an audit, they optimized these pages for targeted keywords, leading to a 45% increase in organic leads.

Why Conduct a B2B Content Marketing Audit?

A B2B content marketing audit is a systematic analysis of all the content assets within your marketing ecosystem. It helps you evaluate the performance, relevance, and effectiveness of your content in achieving your business objectives:

1. Identify gaps in your content strategy
2. Optimize underperforming content & which content is driving conversions, traffic, or engagement.
3. Align content with buyer personas and customer journey
4. Improve ROI on content marketing efforts - focus efforts on creating more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
5. Stay ahead of industry trends and competition.

Content marketing audit in the step-by-step process

A few quicks questions you should check:

1. How much sales is generated through content?
2. How relevant content are we producing?
3. What kind of content isn’t working for us?
4. What kind and type of content do we need to create more (ex - case studies, how-to, nurture, etc.)?
5. What does the SEO look like?

Now, keeping these questions in mind walk through the audit process.

1. Know your target customer

You’re not writing or selling to SEO. So before jumping into the SEO game, it’s important to understand your target customers - their pains, gains, what they consume, what are they looking for, etc.

2. Analyze Content Performance

Evaluate each piece of content based on relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Key Metrics to Consider:

• Traffic
• Engagement (time on page, bounce rate)
• Conversions: Leads generated, form submissions, demo requests.
• Social shares
• Backlinks
• SEO metrics: Organic traffic, keywords, backlinks.
• User Behavior: Bounce rates, scroll depth, click-through rates (CTR).

Tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and HubSpot provide granular insights into how each content piece is performing. Compare this data against industry benchmarks to assess performance.

3. Assess Content Quality and Relevance

Go beyond numbers. Review your content for quality, relevance, and alignment with your current marketing goals and buyer personas.

• Is the information up to date?
• Does it align with your brand voice and messaging?
• Is it addressing current pain points and trends in your industry?
• Does it match your buyer personas and stages of the customer journey?

For instance, content that performed well in the past may no longer resonate if your target audience or industry has shifted.

4: Map Content to Buyer's Journey

Categorize your content according to the different stages of the buyer's journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

Example Content Mapping:

1. Awareness Stage:
   • Blog post: "5 Challenges Facing the Manufacturing Industry in 2024"
   • Infographic: "The State of B2B E-commerce"
2. Consideration Stage:
   • Whitepaper: "Comparing Top ERP Solutions for Mid-sized Businesses"
   • Webinar: "How to Choose the Right CRM for Your Sales Team"
3. Decision Stage:
   • Case Study: "ROI Analysis: Company Y's Implementation of Our Software"
   • Product Demo Video: "Features and Benefits of Our Cloud-based Solution"

5: Identify Gaps and Opportunities

Analyze your content inventory to find:

• Topics not covered
• Outdated content that needs updating
• Underperforming content that can be optimized
• Successful content that can be repurposed

Best Practice Example: A B2B SaaS company audited their content and found they had plenty of top-of-the-funnel awareness content, but lacked decision-stage content like case studies and product comparisons. They created additional case studies, which increased their lead-to-conversion ratio by 35%.

6: Develop an Action Plan

Based on your findings, create a prioritized list of actions to improve your content marketing strategy.

Example Action Items:

1. Update the "Top 10 Industry Trends" blog post with current data and examples
2. Create a new whitepaper targeting the CFO persona
3. Optimize the underperforming "Product Features" page for better SEO
4. Repurpose the successful webinar into a series of short video clips for social media

Best Practice Example: Hubspot regularly repurposes its high-performing whitepapers into multiple content formats, like blog posts and video series. This tactic has resulted in 3x more engagement from target audience members.

7. Revisit the goals you want to achieve through content

Once you know what’s working and what’s not working, revisit and set goals. For example:

• Improving lead generation
• Enhancing brand awareness
• Increasing customer engagement
• Boosting conversion rates
• Amount of traffic
• Top SERP position with targeted keywords

Each goal may shape how you analyze content and write them. This will give you a chance to place action items on each piece and prioritize which subjects mean the most to your readers.

For example, if SEO improvement is your goal, the audit may prioritize keyword research, content structure, and metadata optimization. If lead generation is the target, focus on analyzing how well content attracts and nurtures leads.

Best Practice: Set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to keep the audit focused and actionable.

8. Lastly, understand your content library

Inventory Your Content

Create a full inventory of your content assets, including:

• Blog posts
• Whitepapers
• eBooks
• Case studies
• Webinars
• Infographics
• Videos
• Email newsletters

Once you have your content inventory, categorize each piece by the following criteria:

• Content Type: Blog post, video, case study, etc.
• Buyer Persona or Audience Segment: To whom is this content targeted? Is it for decision-makers, influencers, or end-users?
• Content Stage: Map each piece to the customer journey (awareness, consideration, decision).
• Publication Date: Older content may need updating or repurposing.
• Metrics: Include key performance indicators (KPIs) such as traffic, engagement, bounce rate, conversions, and lead generation.

Best Practices for B2B Content Marketing Audits

1. Conduct audits regularly: Aim for at least once a year, or more frequently if your industry changes rapidly.
2. Use data-driven decisions: Base your content strategy on concrete metrics rather than assumptions.
3. Align with business goals: Ensure your content supports overall business objectives, not just marketing metrics.
4. Optimize for search engines: Include an SEO analysis in your audit to improve organic visibility.
5. Consider the entire content ecosystem: Don't forget about email newsletters, social media posts, and other auxiliary content.
6. Frequency: Aim to audit your content at least once or twice a year. Major business shifts, new product launches, or rebranding may warrant more frequent audits.
7. Automation Tools: Use tools such as SEMrush Content Audit, HubSpot, or Google Analytics to automate content performance tracking, saving time and improving accuracy.
8. Focus on Quality, Not Quantity: It’s not about producing more content; it’s about producing better content. By evaluating your current assets, you can ensure every piece serves a strategic purpose.

Case Study: The Power of a B2B Content Marketing Audit

Company Z, a B2B software provider, had been consistently producing content for years but saw stagnating results. After conducting a comprehensive content audit, they discovered:

• 30% of their blog posts were generating 80% of their traffic
• Their most successful lead magnet was two years old and contained outdated information
• They had no content specifically targeting the C-suite, a key decision-making audience

Based on these findings, Company Z:

1. Updated and expanded their top-performing blog posts
2. Refreshed their popular lead magnet with current data and examples
3. Created a new executive-focused whitepaper series

Results:

• 50% increase in organic traffic within 6 months
• 75% boost in lead generation from the updated lead magnet
• 25% growth in sales-qualified leads from the new executive content

In the end,

Conducting a B2B content marketing audit ensures that every piece of content is aligned with your business goals and continues to deliver value to your audience. By regularly reviewing content performance, identifying gaps, and refreshing your assets, you set the stage for long-term content marketing success.

Don’t skip the audit – your strategy, leads, and sales depend on it.