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Content is used as a valuable marketing tool across all industries. From social media content to long-form evergreen content, marketers constantly write to build awareness and nurture  relationships. While the goal of content marketing is clear, many companies forget to track what type of content is actually working.

Even powerhouse Microsoft fell into that habit. At one point the Microsoft.com website had 10 million pages of content but 3 million of them had never been visited. By removing unnecessary and irrelevant content, Microsoft made its customers much happier and learned what type of content works in attracting consumers. And all of that happened by conducting a content audit.

5 Reasons for a Content Audit

There are a variety of reasons that a company might need a content audit. Here are some of the problems that plague companies because of the lack of a content audit.

Lots of Traffic Coming in But Not Many Qualified Leads

Here’s a scary stat: one-third of B2B marketers don’t track where their leads come from. This clearly needs to be corrected in order to figure out what marketing channels work and which should be eliminated. Once your company takes a look at lead generation, you may find that while more and more traffic comes in, none if it is really relevant to your brand.

This is oftentimes a content problem. The content could be attracting the wrong target and therefore no one converts. 56% of survey respondents said they were doing content marketing without a plan. When qualified leads are not coming in, maybe the content was not written with a clear buyer persona; therefore, the content does not address a specific need or pain point of that audience.

Unclear Value Proposition = Unclear Content

Only 7% of leadership teams can explain a clear, common value proposition, but 85% of CEOs say their employees can state the company’s value proposition. This dichotomy leads to very unclear content. If writers do not have a clear picture of the company’s value, then the content will reflect this and appear confusing to the reader. A value proposition helps build relevance for target buyer personas, helping to improve engagement, shares, conversions, and trust.  

Blog Doesn’t Play a Role in Sales

B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those who do not. Many companies, however, do not use the blog as part of the sales process, which means no leads or opportunities come through because of the blog. 

This can be because the sales and content marketing teams are not aligned. The blog should help push leads down the sales funnel, helping to produce qualified leads. A company’s blog can also help provide sales teams useful nurturing content as they help prospects navigate the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the buying process.

Leads or Sales Goals Aren’t Met

If leads or sales metrics are falling behind, surprisingly this could be because the content strategy is not tied to the sales strategy. Before revising the sales process, performing a content audit could uncover why certain goals aren’t met. Content must aid the sales process, as 41% of businesses say curated content increased the number and/or quality of sales-ready leads.

Blog Subscribers Don’t Read Your Content

If people that actively subscribed to your blog content are not reading it, then a content audit is desperately needed. By finding out why these people subscribed, you can start to get your content back on track. Perhaps with different team members writing, blog content began to drift from its original purpose, making it no longer useful for the audience.

What To Do Next

Before launching into a full scale content audit, take a step back and ask some key questions about the content being created.

• Is the Content Value-Driven? Does the content align with the company’s value proposition? What are the key value points that relate to your customer and does the content reflect this?
• Is the Content Persona-Driven? Does your content align to the needs, interests, and opportunities associated with target buyer personas or an ideal buyer profile?
• Is the Content Results-Driven? Does your content assist in the conversion of leads and sales opportunities? Does the marketing team align efforts with results? Which content assists in conversions of leads and which content does not? Using Hubspot, identify which content directly influencers sales qualified leads.
• Have You Invested in a Content Strategy? Have time and resources been fully invested to craft the best content strategy? Has this content team continually updated and improve and build upon top-performing content?
• Are the Sales and Marketing Teams Aligned? Content can play a huge role in sales, so identify the weak points in the sales process and align marketing strategies along those points. Have you found opportunities to support, educate, inspire, and guide buyers through the sales funnel? Content can help with each step, so marketing and sales teams should meet on a consistent basis.

You Probably Need a Content Audit

If you answered no to any of these questions, then it is time for a content audit. A content audit can help improve sales, make your customers happier, and get rid of unnecessary pages that can be bogging down your website, so if you have fallen into any of the traps listed above, it’s time to audit the content on your website.

View more content marketing stats and trends.  

Most conversion rate optimization experts you’ll meet would agree: Copywriting first. Design second.

The idea is that copy (and the message you’re trying to convey through that copy) should dictate design – not the other way around. Now, this is in no way meant to underestimate the importance of design. Design can breathe life into the story the copy is telling, and done properly, great copy plus great design will always outperform great copy alone.

The point is, it’s not hard to find examples of “ugly” pages outperforming beautifully designed pages – and in those cases, it usually boils down to the copy.

Copy first. Design second.

We’ve been chatting about this a lot lately on HubSpot’s marketing optimization team. In the past, our marketing team has typically followed a design first, copy second order of operations when designing web pages. And it’s hard to blame us. We try to move fast and ship projects quickly, and the design before copy approach is definitely the quicker of the two, since copy can be written in tandem with the development of the design.

But when copywriting comes first, design can’t even begin until copy is complete. And because development can’t happen until design is done, this definitely extends the timeline of project execution. The problem is, this means you’re crafting copy under the limitations of a fully baked design, handicapping your ability to tell the story in the best way possible. 

Now I’ll admit: All this “copy before design” business always sounded great to me in theory, but conversion rate optimization experts also warn against the dangers of “best practices,” so it was really enlightening to find an example of this theory proven out on one of our very own web pages. 

The Experiment

In addition to our main free trial landing page, we also have a bunch of targeted, tool-specific free trial landing pages that the marketing team uses for more segmented campaigns. Below you’ll find an example of one (image B), which is targeted to specifically promote HubSpot’s Blogging tool. And here are the two compared to each other …

A. Main Free Trial Landing Page (Above the Fold)

B. Tool-Specific Free Trial Landing Page (Above the Fold)

As you can see, these tool-specific landing pages were built using an older template, and when we redesigned our main free trial landing page to look the way it currently does, its tool-specific counterparts remained in the former design. Seeing this as low-hanging fruit from a conversion perspective, I converted three of our most trafficked tool-specific free trial landing pages into the newer template. To be sure the newer design was still in fact the better converting design, I A/B tested each page against its pre-existing design. 

The Initial Results 

When I first analyzed the results of these three tests, the variation (i.e., the design using the newer template) only won for two of the three pages. Naturally, I tried to understand why. When I took a closer look at the third one (the free trial landing page for our Keywords tool), I noticed a difference. Can you spot it?

Older Template (Control)

Newer Template (Variant)

Okay … obviously there are a few differences here, considering the design is completely different. But the one that stuck out to me immediately was that the positioning of the header/subheader copy in the control was very different than that of the variant. 

Control Header + Subheader Copy:

Find Out Which Keywords You (And Your Competitors) Rank For

Instantly access SEO data with HubSpot’s Keywords tool by starting a 30-day free trial.

Variant Header + Subheader Copy:

Try HubSpot’s Keywords Tool Free for 30 Days

Get found in search for the keywords that matter.

The positioning in the control was primarily focused on the value of the Keywords tool, specifically emphasizing the competitive intelligence the tool provides, whereas the positioning in the variant was focused on clarifying what the offer was itself (i.e., a free, 30-day trial). And while I had made sure the variant still mentioned the competitive intelligence value of the Keywords tool, I had buried it lower down on the page … below the fold. 

Isolating Variables

The problem with this test was that I wasn’t isolating the variable I was trying to prove. In this case, I wanted to prove that the new design for the page performed better than the existing design, yet I was manipulating more than one variable: design and copy. So after I had my “duh” moment, I decided to tweak the positioning in the header copy of the variant to match the control, and let the test run for a few more weeks. This way I’d be doing a better job of isolating design as the variable I was testing.

Here’s what the header and subheader copy in the control and variant looked like after I tweaked the variant. Note that I made no changes to the copy in the control …

Control Header + Subheader Copy:

Find Out Which Keywords You (And Your Competitors) Rank For

Instantly access SEO data with HubSpot’s Keywords tool by starting a 30-day free trial.

Variant Header + Subheader Copy:

Find Out Which Keywords You & Your Competitors Rank For

Get SEO data instantly with a free trial of HubSpot’s Keywords tool.

And here’s how it looked in each template variation … 

Older Template

Newer Template

Final Results 

A few weeks after making those tweaks, I re-evaluated my test. Bingo! 

The variant was the new winner with 99.07% confidence and a 20% increase in conversion over the control.

Aside from the fact that this was (ultimately) a successful test, what I love is that it proves how influential copy can be. The only reason the control originally outperformed the variation was because people preferred the copy in the control — even though the design of the variant ultimately performed better. 

So there you have it: Don’t underestimate copywriting in favor of design. In fact, copywriting can be even more influential than design when it comes to conversion rate optimization.

There’s no denying it: Blogging for your business works. According to our 2016 State of Inbound report, B2B marketers who blog receive 67% more leads than those who don’t, and marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13X more likely to enjoy positive ROI.

Blogging is a crucial part of inbound marketing because it allows you to quickly disseminate helpful information to your followers and new site visitors, which, in turn, helps build credibility, SEO juice, and helps you become more of a thought leader in your industry. Best of all, blogging is super cost-effective, because the only thing you need to spend is time.

But despite all of the advantages that focused blogging can net businesses, some marketers balk at the time commitment required. They’re not wrong — launching and maintaining a blog isn’t a one-day task. In fact, you’ll need plenty of planning, resources, and good old-fashioned effort to gain adequate ROI.

That’s why HubSpot and General Assembly have teamed up to create the new 10-week planner, How to Start a Successful Blog in 2017. It’s got tips on:

• How to identify your target persona and anticipate what they want to read about
• Building a bank of evergreen content ideas to keep your audience engaged year-round
• How to design your blog to delight and engage your visitors
• Using SEO and promotion to attract and scale traffic
• Which metrics to analyze to measure the success of your launch
• And more!

Click here to download How to Start a Successful Blog in 2017

When it comes to devising solutions to challenging problems, a room full of bright minds working towards a common goal is almost always more effective than working alone.

Under the belief that the composition of a group influences the quality of its work, Google has spent years hunting for the key to what makes teams truly great. The tech giant is known for tapping its prodigious brainpower to solve complex problems with creative solutions.

Whether it’s revolutionizing search, email, or exploring the possibilities of driverless cars, Google provides a welcome example of a company focused on maximizing the potential of collaboration.

Project Aristotle

Over the past five years, Google has been engaged in an extensive undertaking to engineer the most productive groups possible. This endeavor, referred to as Project Aristotle, involved years of extensive observations of how employees at Google collaborate in group settings, according to The New York Times.

Project Aristotle’s findings suggest that many of the factors we’d expect to influence the outcome of a project actually didn’t actually have a significant impact on whether or not the group was successful.

Having a shared versus designated leadership structure, including employees from diverse employment backgrounds, and whether or not group members socialized outside of work did not necessarily determine a group’s chances of success.

Overall, there was one central trend which appeared in almost every successful group: feelings of psychological safety.

Psychological safety, according to Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, is the “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking,” and “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.”

In the majority of successful groups Google studied, participants identified feeling comfortable sharing ideas and asking questions. These feelings of psychological safety were not unique to any type of group or leadership dynamic. As Charles Duhigg wrote in the New York Times, the most productive teams listened to — and were respectful of — the ideas, feelings, beliefs and suggestions of their peers.

Early Education as a Model

The corporate model of psychological safety is not all that different than the one you had in grade school. When students are comfortable enough to share their ideas freely and don’t feel afraid of being rejected, they are able to learn better and take interpersonal risks.

While businesses and elementary schools are certainly not universally comparable environments, the importance of ideological and interpersonal safety is universally paramount.

To make a space safe for intellectual exploration, agencies must make concerted efforts to foster an open atmosphere of acceptance. As discussed in a 2014 TED Talk by Harvard Business School professor and author Dr. Amy C. Edmondson, individuals are often very worried about appearing incompetent or ignorant, and thus are more likely to keep their questions and ideas to themselves.

This not only stifles an individual’s creative potential, it also limits the potential for innovation in collaborative group settings. Imagine trying to learn new skills or ways of working in an environment where it’s intimidating to admit what you don’t know, much less share ideas that challenge established norms.

In competitive agency environments built on creative critique, often only a few leaders make decisions on ideas, clearly limiting the potential voice and contribution of team members.

With participation from more team members comes more ideas — and quite possibly a better product. Expanding critique and other opportunities requires that employees feel safe to speak up and participate within groups.

Applying Psychological Safety at Agencies

Maintaining an open and safe dialogue often goes against the grain of both corporate culture and human nature, but the companies that will thrive in the coming years will do so through their collective creativity and ability to innovate, rather than relying on the opinions of a few individuals.

Almost paradoxically, to survive in the ever-increasing competitive environment of today’s digital economy, agencies need to create intellectual safe havens that are more akin to your third grade classroom than any scene in AMC’s Mad Men.

Sweeping organizational culture shifts will not occur overnight, but change can start tomorrow. Here are five steps to start fostering a safe, productive workplace:

1) Stop the unhealthy practice of responding to new ideas with unproductive negativity.

You do not have to love every idea your peers put forward, but demeaning the idea and its creator is unnecessary, counterproductive and sometimes downright hurtful.

Research and personal experience tell us that sometimes we don’t voice our opinions because we fear embarrassment, looking dumb or feeling intellectually inadequate.

2) Always celebrate good ideas.

This is the counter approach to the previously mentioned unproductive behavior. The merit of this step applies for both teams and individuals. But seriously, who doesn’t appreciate being complimented for their hard work?

3) Acknowledge that the entire team effort goes into good work.

Great ideas, regardless of size, often come about because of the genius and hard work of at least a handful of people. So, when celebrating new ideas and innovative work, recognize the whole team, not just the manager or creative with the highest title.

4) Get those in power on board with psychological safety.

While change does not always have to come from the top, the behavior that managers, directors and executives model directly impacts and influences the actions of those below them. Therefore, change is only sustainable with a commitment from those in power.

5) Break down organizational silos to promote collaboration, communication and progress.

This is not to say everyone must work equally on all projects, but rather that teams should consider themselves multidisciplinary so employees of varying titles feel comfortable contributing. Organizations with healthy interpersonal relationships are more likely to have uninhibited idea sharing, increased collaboration and a better end result.