Content Audit Best Practices for the Medical Device Industry

As a medical device marketer, an added responsibility is maintaining compliance and ensuring content consistency. Because of the highly regulated nature of the medtech industry, it’s critical that you produce compliant content, analyze performance and usage, and ensure that content is up to date.

It’s estimated that up to 70 percent of all content produced by business-to-business marketing teams ends up unused, according to FierceCMO. Content serves many purposes; however, if your customers aren’t engaging with it, it serves no purpose at all.

How do you ensure that content is compliant? By performing an audit.

A content assessment is the cornerstone of any effective medtech content strategy—and the foundation of any successful content marketing team. Audits take a qualitative, comprehensive look at the sales and marketing material created by your organization. They determine relevancy and compliancy—both to customer needs and your company. They also analyze current content, assess your needs, and help determine future projects.

To ensure your team is firing on all cylinders, let’s review content audit best practices for the medical device industry.

Create a Process Strategy

Preparation is key when it comes to selling in a crowded, complex medtech landscape. Sales reps must have access to the right content at the right time—and you must know what and when to deliver. It’s up to marketing to create a roadmap for success.

Content audits are designed to not only give you an overview of what already exists, but also to let you see what topics you’ve covered. Collect every piece of content you’ve created over the past 18 months and devise a grid or spreadsheet system for listing and labeling them according to criteria such as:

• Title
• Type
• Application
• Audience
• Key sales messages
• Location

It’s important to designate a timeline for how often you will archive, update, and delete content. Before you move forward, it’s also important to ensure you have the necessary amount of resources to perform an audit—and that all team members are aligned with your processes.

Have a Technical Plan

Once you’ve outlined high-level goals and expectations, it’s time to consider the technical details. A content inventory analyzes overall content effectiveness and helps uncover any gaps in your processes. Organizing your content in a logical fashion provides you with an overview of existing content and lets you see what topics you’ve already covered.

Pull an inventory of your existing content using the process outlined above. Start by transferring all content into a spreadsheet organized by your predetermined categories. It’s crucial to understand how your SEO or 404 errors will be impacted by your audit and cleanup—and it’s important to have a plan in place to address this.

Internally cloning your intranet does not suffice. This is the time to thoroughly analyze your existing content. While the structure of your spreadsheet is a matter of personal preference, this inventory process will set the stage for the remainder of the audit.

Keep in mind that this document should be comprehensible and digestible—not only for your marketing team, but for anyone else who needs to access it. Make it easy to understand and navigate, as you can use this as a reference point during future audits.

Leverage Technology for Continuous Improvement

Marketing must bring campaigns and content to life to ensure that account and customer needs are met. This is made possible by linking your audit processes with technology.

Sales enablement tools align marketing and sales to enhance productivity and effectiveness with cloud-based planning solutions. Paired with an effective content audit, technology enables teams to build key account sales plans that win. This in turn increases accountability and visibility into plan progress and improves your team’s relevancy to customers.

Most medtech teams have a customer relationship management (CRM) system to host data and manage customer interactions. However, many CRM systems are underutilized and outdated. Working in conjunction with your new discoveries from your content audit process, sales enablement tools synchronize data to ensure visibility across your organization.

Technology eliminates unused content investments and helps guarantee that reps are equipped to sell with relevant, compliant collateral. Sales enablement tools help teams track which pieces of content are being consumed and at which part of the buying stage they’re being read. Not only do they build on the findings of an organization’s content audit, they can help uncover and develop new content ideas—which can drive future success.

Content audits help medical device organizations sell effectively and efficiently. By auditing content, you are ensuring that everything available is not only compliant, but also that your marketing materials are effective sales tools for reps. When executed properly, audits show exactly which pieces of content are working and what types of content your team can develop to reach your end users.