Nobody likes an audit – but here’s why your video content needs one

If your company has been building up video content over the last while – good for you. It’s the best and most engaging form of content to be investing in right now, and no doubt you’re reaping the benefits of that.

If you have a huge amount of video content racked up, it’s probably worth your while to do a video audit and see what’s performing well, what could perform better and what, at this point, is dead weight in your video content library.

Why do you need to do a video audit?

As with other forms of content on your website, it’s important to keep on top of what you’ve done, and what you want to do with your video content. The easiest way to do this is to keep track of content as you publish it, but we all know even the best intentions to keep on top of monitoring content performance often gets subsumed by other day-to-day tasks.

But all is not lost

It’s never too late to run a video content audit on your site, and the good news is you don’t have to go back too far to get a sense of where you’ve been and where you’re going. Looking back two to three years is enough to get a good sense of what you have.

(And if you don’t have video content on your site yet, bear in mind that it is the highest growing form of content going, so worth taking a look at your site and seeing how you can incorporate it.)

So how do you do a video audit?

It’s as simple and as tedious as going through every piece of video content you have and taking a look at how it did from various key metrics – views, shares, play rate, click through rate, conversion and rate and any action you wish to take on the video. You should create a spreadsheet showing where the piece sits, if it’s been reused, what it was about, what keywords it used and if it performed the way you wanted it to. Then you can make a decision about whether to keep it on the site, repurpose it, reuse it or update it.

Post-audit actions

Moving forward, this means that you have all the hard work done now, and any future audit will be much easier. It will also mean that you can keep track of your content – what you’ve covered, plan what you will cover, and how to make the most of it, especially in other media. Can your video be supported by a blog post or case study write up? There are endless ways to repurpose both your written and video content to get the most out of it.

So what are you waiting for? Get auditing.