Content analysis explained

Content marketing means sharing free content that the consumer finds useful across your digital real estate - be it blogs, websites, mobisites or apps. It's an ongoing process that involves creating and frequently updating unique content - "how-to" guides, news articles or videos, for example - specifically targeted to your audience. The content is designed to keep them coming back for more, drawing them to your brand via pull rather than "pushing" products at them.

Content analysis is an essential part of a content marketing campaign. Without analysing your content, you have no way of knowing if it's any good - and if it's working for your target market.

Identifying "ROT" content

Analysing content can easily become a complicated process if you take into account all of the elements that make good content (these include, but aren't limited to, usefulness, relevance, format, SEO, delivery channel and branding). A great way to simplify the process is to identify "ROT" ("redundant", "outdated" and "trivial") content. ROT content could include outdated news, repeated content, unrelated links, mislabelled headers or outdated contact information.

One way to do this, if you have a smaller website, is to take a manual inventory using a simple spreadsheet, recording all relevant information for each URL. Once you know your content, you can start managing it. A ROT analysis will tell you where your content is stale or unimportant, allowing you to take steps to change your strategy over time to make it more relevant and appealing to your audience.

In an upcoming piece we'll look at the way your content marketing strategy is affected by SEO.

For more:

• Bizcommunity: What is content marketing?, 9 November 2012
  
• Bizcommunity: Difference between content marketing, SEO, 21 November 2012
  
• Bizcommunity: Content marketing and social media, 26 November 2012