Evaluating content
To ensure your content – and therefore your content strategy – is effective and meeting user and business needs, you should evaluate the content regularly.
To do this effectively, you need to have a baseline measurement – that is, something to compare it to. This can be informed by your discovery research on user needs and business needs.
Evaluating your content’s performance can be difficult when your content is not directly actionable – for example, if your content goal is to inform people about what they can do to help improve biodiversity in their garden, as opposed to selling them native plants online.
What you measure depends on your content goals. Some suggestions are to:
- review analytics data (such as Google Analytics) and observe changes in
- time spent on pages compared to expected reading time
- traffic to your website – such as number of users or number of repeat users
- number of downloads for PDFs (if this is desirable)
- overall pages viewed in a session
- include descriptive prompts at bottoms of web pages (‘Was this information clear and easy to understand?’) and track responses
- conduct follow-up surveys, interviews or usability testing with users
- conduct follow-up surveys or interviews with internal staff (to evaluate workflow and content development processes)
- monitor the results of calls to action (e.g. increases in newsletter subscriptions)
- monitor changes in the number of follows and likes (for social media content).
You should aim to do this regularly – perhaps every 6 or 12 months, depending on your content goals and resourcing.
You can also review your content strategy’s implementation – are your content developers following the strategy? Is it being used in the way you intended?
Also see Implementation.
Maintaining your content strategy
A content strategy is a living document. Although it should not be altered on a whim, it does need to stay relevant and current.
In general, when you review your content’s performance, you should also review your content strategy to ensure it still need meets your business needs and user needs.
A content strategy should be updated if:
- your organisation undergoes a restructure. A good content strategy should withstand some changes to a business, but large changes may result in teams changing, or new business goals or a new approach being introduced, and your content strategy will need to reflect these
- your content is not performing as expected. This could be due to a range of factors, but may be an indication that the content strategy is not as effective as it could be
- your business goals or user needs change. For example, if you know your users are becoming more educated on a certain topic, your content strategy will need to reflect this
- you launch a large initiative or campaign. A good content strategy will guide new content and does not need updating every time you publish a new webpage. But if you are planning to launch and publicise a campaign or other initiative that will include substantial new content, it is important to ensure that your content strategy supports it. You may need to create a specific content strategy for large initiatives or campaigns.