When’s the last time you took a step back from planning and creating content to evaluate the content you already have? Conducting a content audit is an important part of maintaining your content library and optimizing your future content.

While there is no single content audit template for every team’s needs, there are four major steps that any team or business can use. Plus, there are certain content audit tools that can help facilitate your process – just like this free, downloadable content audit spreadsheet that you can use to get started right now!

In about 15 years social media has gone from an entirely new concept to an integral part of everyday life. Now, any marketing mix that doesn’t include social media is unusual. With nearly 80% of Americans possessing a profile on a social networking platform, marketing through social media is one of the best ways to reach members of your target audience — no matter who they are. Plus, almost all prominent social platforms have paid advertising options that brands can leverage to increase exposure to relevant audiences. If you want to reach potential customers and key stakeholders, you need to be using social media.

But that doesn’t mean that social media marketing is easy, or even altogether straightforward! You and your team have probably struggled with how to create the right kind of content to engage the right people, and how to best measure success online. Don’t worry, you’re not alone — social media is a difficult and confusing tool for many marketing teams. A great step toward demystifying social media marketing is to streamline your social media workflow.

Sandra De Biasi is the project manager of digital assets and graphics at Varian, a Fortune 500 company and provider of radiation oncology treatment software and hardware.

At Varian, she manages their digital asset management system, which has played an integral role in managing the company’s brand assets during their recent corporate rebrand. Here’s her exciting story about how monitoring content analytics in their DAM system helped secure their valuable brand assets.

Nearly half of Americans use digital voice assistants, according to the Pew Research Center. This new channel presents opportunities and challenges for brands, one of which is delivering audio content straight into the home or office via voice command.

As a marketer, it’s your job to get to know the people you are trying to reach. You likely know a lot about them already, and that is valuable. But, audiences are complicated. Over time, they grow and evolve. Their wants, needs, goals, and pain points change right along with the environment around them. And, while it’s tempting to rely on audience assumptions that have taken hold over the years, you need to know what content and information they need from you today. To get you started, here are six not-so-complicated ways to get to know your complicated audience!

Between endless marketing channels, new technologies, and responsibility overload, it’s easy for businesses, large and small, to lose sight of the big picture. As a content marketer in this busy world, you need to step back, pop your head out of the nitty-gritty and tactics of the day, and think about the rationale behind your actions. To do this, and to do it consistently, you need a content mission statement.

Smart businesses of every kind know that they need a content strategy to succeed in the information-overloaded world of today. They need a guiding beacon, a grand vision that’ll steer the development, delivery, and management of their content. But where do you begin?