How Often Should You Review Your Marketing Content?

Jana_Marketing_Maven

While I would love to provide some suggestions, this is an honest question for the entire group?

Background: We have a marketing hub of content (blog posts, PDFs, on-demand webcasts, and videos) that has been growing steadily for several years. While we internally agree that blog posts are dated, point in time items that do not necessarily need to be reviewed, our PDFs and videos tend to just get set and forgotten.

How often do you review this type of content? What about website pages? With a small team, what is reasonable if not a lot tends to change year-over-year? Do you worry if content is still valid but not receiving traffic?

I know it's a lot of questions at once, but… figured it was a good a place as any to ask. :)

Brandon McBride

We're a small team, too. We need to be better about keeping our content up-to-date, but we try to review our content annually to update anything that's out of date from a technology standpoint. Even blog posts can benefit from a "is this relevant in 202X" refresh.

If content isn't receiving organic traffic, the first thing I'm looking into is what it should be ranking for and if anything else on the site is cannibalizing it.

Melanie Brancaleone

I try to do a quick review quarterly (meaning that I check dates quarterly) for all large pieces. I use the rule of thumb that any research over 1.5-2 years old is not longer valid, and should be pulled down. For blogs, I do an annual/biannual review to see what is still garnering traffic, which topics are still relevant, and then choose some to update for ranking purposes.

In general, I try to keep my content limited- I've found that you don't need tons of it to be successful- you need small amounts of the right stuff. That helps keep the maintenance, esp for a small team, down.

Jana_Marketing_Maven

Thanks, this is helpful and validates what we're thinking (1x per year to review a lot of the 'big' content, as needed for the other stuff).

@Brandon McBride Do you use GA (or G4) for finding whether a piece is getting organic views?

Overall a LOT of our content is provided by our technical (Client-facing) team about the products we support (which is why we plan to leave it as point-in-time and not worry about review).

Brandon McBride

@Jana_Marketing_Maven Yes, I use GA4 to track that but I use Looker Studio to visualize the data.

@Melanie Brancaleone That's a great rule of thumb.

Chris Hutchins

At 6sense, we identify high-performing posts/content and prioritize them for quarterly review and revision. For content that has less organic juice or timeliness, we review about every six months. We sometimes use generative AI solutions (Writer, ChatGPT, etc.) to help us update or condense this older content. Happy to answer follow-up questions if needed!

Rachel Zerilla

Chris and team do a FANTASTIC job at this for 6sense!!!