Is your content driving pipeline, or hurting it?
Too many content programs aren’t just underperforming. They’re unassigned. Nobody ever decided what any individual piece was supposed to do, so the calendar became the strategy and volume became the metric. Two years in you’ve got a library, a wordpress instance groaning under it, and no way to tell which twelve pieces are carrying the pipeline and which ninety are decoration.
The Content Effectiveness Audit answers that. Not with a grade out of 100 — a number that averages good work and dead weight into a meaningless middle — but with a read on what the portfolio is doing as a system, and how well your handful of load-bearing assets actually perform the job they were built for.
There’s a lot of ineffective B2B content
There are some shocking stats out there about “content waste” in B2B. Let’s start with Forrester (SiriusDecisions):
- 60–70% of B2B marketing content goes unused, sitting on sales portals and website shelves — a figure Forrester has published since 2013.
- Their 2018 report Sales Content: It’s Time For An Overhaul puts it at 65% and names the cause: the content is outdated and unusable.
- A later Forrester analysis repeats the 65% figure and traces much of it to findability — sales can’t locate the asset, so they build their own.
Ahrefs found even more:
- Across a study of roughly 14 billion pages, 96.55% get zero traffic from Google, and another 1.94% get ten monthly visits or fewer.
- URLs cited by AI assistants run 25.7% fresher than what ranks in organic results.
- Which means a stale page loses the citation before it loses the ranking.
Two tiers of assessment
Tier one is portfolio-level. What’s this body of work for? Which stage of the buying process does each cluster serve, and does that map to how deals actually move? Where are three pieces saying the same thing to the same person, and where is a segment or a stage covered by nothing at all? Coherence is the question — whether the portfolio reads as one argument made in sequence, or as forty months of individually reasonable decisions.
Most portfolios fail here. Not for lack of quality. For lack of assignment.
Tier two runs on the assets that turn out to be load-bearing. The pages a real buyer hits before a real conversation happens. Those get evaluated on execution: does the piece make a claim or survey a topic, is there evidence a skeptical buyer would accept, does the next step match where the reader actually is, and does the thing sound like a person who has done the work or like a category summary anyone could have written.
Running tier finds the content assets that matter so we can diagnose why they’re working.
What comes out?
We deliver a dimension profile across these tiers, so you can see the shape of the problem rather than a score you’d have to interpret. Then the single highest-leverage finding, clearly stated in actionable terms.
Every MSMC diagnostic lands on a key recommendation that’ll make a real difference, because a list of nineteen recommendations gets skimmed, filed, and never executed.
You also get practical insights about which clusters to retire, which to consolidate, which gaps to fill first, and the rewrite of whichever load-bearing asset is furthest from doing its job.
Have you locked-in your messaging?
The Content Effectiveness Audit assumes you already know what your messaging and GTM pillars are supposed to be. If that’s unsettled, our Messaging Friction Audit can tell you how your messaging might not align with ICP needs.
Most clients start with the MFA and expand into this one once the message holds. If your content already converts well but nothing gets cited in AI answers, that’s a different problem. It’s one we can tackle in our AI Visibility & Citation Gap Audit.
Why MSMC?
A typical agency content audit is usually a spreadsheet of every URL with a traffic column and a “refresh / keep / retire” dropdown. That’s inventory management, and you can do it yourself in an afternoon.
With us, you get a senior operator who has built these programs, not scored them from outside. No account layer, no junior analyst working through a rubric.
Proof of our approach: Mitratech went from 0% content-sourced MQLs to 40%. Vendavo’s content-driven MQLs grew 5,815%, and their Trillion on the Table campaign pulled 80-plus MQLs and 1,200-plus press mentions. Crownpeak’s content asset downloads grew over 400% and blog traffic 230% in a year. Evisort’s blog organic traffic grew 316% in about a month off a near-zero baseline.
None of those came from publishing more. They came from deciding what each asset should accomplish before delivering it.
Scope and timing
Two to three weeks depending on portfolio size, with a working session to walk the findings.
Find out which pieces are doing the work
Send me the URL and your analytics. I’ll tell you what the portfolio is actually for, which assets carry it, and the one thing worth fixing first.
Why isn't there a score?
Because averaging a strong asset and a dead one produces a number that describes neither. You get a dimension profile showing where the weakness sits, and one finding to act on.
How many pieces do you evaluate in depth?
However many turn out to be load-bearing. Usually between eight and twenty. Tier one determines that, which is why tier two comes second.
How long does it take?
One to three weeks, depending on portfolio size, plus the working session.
Do we need to have done the Messaging Friction Audit first?
Not required, but recommended. If your message is unsettled, this audit documents a portfolio built on the wrong foundation. Cheaper to fix the message first.
What if our content is fine and the problem is traffic?
Then this is the wrong audit. Traffic and citation problems route to the AI Visibility & Citation Gap Audit.
Do you rewrite anything?
One asset, the load-bearing piece furthest from doing its job, is rewritten in full as part of the deliverable. Further rewrites are separate work.