Content Marketing: The Benefits of Content Evaluation

In a war against spammers, Google has been getting smarter over the years, especially since the Quality Update. Since keyword stuffing won’t cut it anymore, creating valuable content on a regular basis is key to growing your business online.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 88% of B2B marketers currently use content marketing as part of their marketing strategy, yet only 32% have a documented content marketing strategy.

Content marketing can be tricky because of all the different concepts under it:

• content curation
• content evaluation
• content optimization
• content creation
• content repurposing

In this blog, I’m going to focus on the most underrated aspect of content marketing: content evaluation.

The Benefits of Content Evaluation

76% of B2B marketers say they will produce more content in 2016. But creating fresh content can be tedious and intimidating, even for large organizations.

However, we often don’t realize how much content is already around us. This is why the process of content evaluation is crucial.

Here are some of the benefits I’ve identified:

• Determine strong areas of expertise
• Set up the base for a successful content marketing strategy
• Identify existing performing content

My Content Evaluation Process

When I worked for Greenway Health, content evaluation was one of the first tasks I decided to tackle. It took me a while, but it wasn’t as difficult as I thought.

During the process, I discovered some great pieces of existing content. A lot of them were studies conducted by our market research team. They were originally created for internal purposes, but we realized some info could benefit to our customers as well. With the help of our team, I was able to repurpose some of it into snackable content like these graphics shared on Twitter.

I repurpose the crap out of it!

After finding and repurposing these studies, I didn’t think it could get any better, but I was wrong.

When digging into our Google Analytics, I saw a blog called What is Revenue Cycle Management?. This post was created in 2013, but was still generating hundreds of monthly visits in 2015!

Why?

Turns out the keyword “Revenue Cycle Management” (RCM) was a new concept in 2013 that became very popular since. Being ahead of the curve helped tremendously with authority and search rankings.

The number of people searching for “Revenue Cycle Management” has almost double since 2012!

A big part of the success of the post was also due to the expertise shared by the author, Greenway Health’s VP of Revenue Services. Using the proper keywords is one thing, but keeping your readers in mind and educating them is essential.

Besides its good performance, I noticed the post could be more SEO-friendly. I decided to revise the copy by adding relevant links to other resources on the website without compromising the essence of the ideas. I also updated the meta description so it would include the main keyword, while inviting users to read more.

On top of that, I added a call-to-action at the end of the post. The goal was to generate leads by inviting readers to download a white paper with more info.

By optimizing this piece of content, I created a long-term impact by increasing the number of visits to this post.

Since the optimization, the traffic generated by the post has gone through the roof!

Takeaways

Creating new content is great, but it can be time consuming. Starting from scratch isn’t always the best use of your time. Remember you most likely have existing content ready to be tweaked and optimized.

Here are some common existing pieces of content we tend to forget about:

• Sales or spec sheets
• Brochures
• Recorded sales calls
• Internal webinars
• Emails

That content is usually shared from one person to another. Why not share it with thousands of people at a time?

This is when content repurposing comes into play.

Here are some of the ways you could repurpose existing content:

• Turn a brochure into a blog post
• Turn a sales call into a live webinar
• Turn a FAQ into an infographic

When evaluating content, what was your biggest challenge? What type of content have you repurposed? Leave your comments!