If Forbes and others are right, it’s time for most of us to change up our content marketing strategy. This week we’re sharing the most efficient way to audit your current strategy and suggestions for changing your content to meet the needs of a changing digital audience.

How To Audit Your Content Marketing Strategy

If you know how to use a spreadsheet, you’re well on your way to conducting an audit of your site’s content. But before you do that, try to broaden the traditional definition of content to include any words, images, video or interactive items you share anywhere on the Internet. This will help you create content that is far more valuable and cohesive.

Step 1: Pick a Typical Three-Month Span

If you post regularly, you don’t need to start with a full audit of everything you’ve ever posted. Instead, just pick a three-month span and look at that content. List every landing page you’ve altered, all blog posts, all social media posts on Facebook and Instagram and all YouTube content. You can list these in a spreadsheet or even by hand. Count up the number of posts in each of these four categories and then list the total separately.

Step 2: Code your Posts

Pick a color or symbol to represent the following types of content on your website:

• Text only
• Contains video
• Video only
• Contains audio
• Interactive

Next, go through your social media posts for that time and color code them to show content that is:

• Proprietary video with captions/text
• Proprietary video without captions/text
• Shared video with captions/text
• Shared video without captions/text
• Text-only

For social content include a separate to note whether the post goes back to your site or not.

Step 3: Create a Plan to Address Deficits

If everything you’re creating and sharing is text, it’s time to step up your game. This doesn’t mean you have to change everything immediately but it does mean that if you want to continue to keep your current traffic and expand, you’ll need to offer more diversified content.

Start simply. Look at how much you post to each platform in a three month period and start by adding one piece of video, audio or otherwise interactive content once a month. As you get the hang of things, increase the amount of interactive content until all of your content includes non-text, non-static images. To get the most bang for your buck, read on for tips about what type of content to post where.

Tips for Building a Better Content Marketing Strategy

Create screencasts or simple instructional videos. If you offer how tos, one of the easiest ways to increase the number of videos you’re sharing is to produce short ones yourself. Screencasts are some of the easiest, but most popular, videos to create especially if you work with anything digital: show how to navigate a site, code a look, or anything else. In the kitchen it’s also easy to create videos with nothing more than decent lighting and a cell phone.

If you’ve already got video content but it’s not captioned, do some post production magic. Lots of people watch videos without sound. If you’ve got videos but they have sound and no captions, consider adding important text to engage more viewers. It doesn’t have to be a full caption – imagine the bullet points of your video.

Adding video to social media is simple. It’s easy to find great videos to share, just remove everything pointing people elsewhere and instead link back to related content on your own site. You can still credit the source in the your post – just don’t leave all of the text from the original poster.

Digital Firefly Marketing can Help

Want someone to give you the nitty gritty on how your content stacks up to your competitors and the emerging trends in content? Contact us today for a free content audit by our content experts.