Guide
A content audit is a structured review of the work you have already published, judged against what it was supposed to do.
Done well, it takes a week and settles arguments that have been running for a year. Done badly, it produces a spreadsheet nobody opens twice. The difference is deciding what good means before you start looking.
Pull the last two to four quarters of photo, video, and social work into one list. Where it ran, who made it, what it was for. Not the deck version - the shipped version. Most teams find work they forgot existed and three near-duplicates of the same asset.
Write down the standard first, or you will grade on taste. Four criteria hold up across almost every brand: is the message clear, does it read as yours, can it be reused without a rebuild, and did it move something someone is accountable for.
Simple beats precise. One to five on each criterion, one person scoring, a second person spot-checking. The number matters less than the pattern it exposes - and the pattern shows up fast once everything sits in the same column.
One weak asset is a bad day. Fifteen assets that all lose the message in the first three seconds is a brief problem. Sort by criterion and read the low column. That is your diagnosis.
If reuse keeps scoring low, the shoot plan is the problem, not the editor. If brand keeps scoring low, the guidelines are being interpreted rather than followed. Change the upstream decision and the next quarter of work improves on its own.
An audit that happens once is a report. An audit that happens every quarter is a habit, and the trend line is worth more than any single score.
Impressions tell you the work was seen. They do not tell you whether it worked. These four criteria are the ones that keep predicting whether a piece earned its budget.
Can someone outside your team say what the piece was about after one viewing? If the takeaway needs a translator, the work is arguing with itself.
Strip the logo. Would anyone know it came from you? Attention is expensive to rent; the point is that people remember whose it was.
Can the idea travel to another channel, team, or quarter without being rebuilt from scratch? Reuse is a production decision made months earlier.
Was an outcome named before the work started, and did anyone check afterward? Creative deserves the same rigor as media.
Auditing volume instead of effect - a spreadsheet of everything you made is inventory, not insight.
Scoring on production value alone. Polish is the entry fee, not the outcome.
Letting the people who made the work be the only ones who grade it.
Ending with a list of fixes and no decision about what changes upstream.
Start here
The fastest version of this audit is twelve questions about how your team actually works.
It scores the same four criteria, tells you which one is holding the work back, and takes about four minutes. No sign-up, nothing stored.