Yep, it’s that time of year again – spring cleaning – out with the old and in with the new. As much as we all dread the process, be it your house, apartment, garage, attic, etc. … the same should be applied to your business as well. It’s an opportune time to revisit your marketing plan and fine-tune your strategy for the months ahead. Here are four tips to clean out your content “closet” and make room for new ideas, new concepts, and new channels.
Conduct a Content Audit
We say this a lot, but you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Conducting a content audit seems daunting, but it’s critical to evaluate the performance of your content marketing strategy – and ensure you are setup for success moving forward. What content do you have, what’s in the pipe, how does it resonate with your target audience – and most importantly, how has your content been performing against your business goals? Are you looking to build awareness, generate new business leads, strengthen industry positioning? Throw out what is not working, make a list of what is needed to improve, and revamp your content calendar accordingly.
Extend the Shelf-Life of Your Current Content
Have a piece of content that is performing exceptionally well? Identify ways to transform it to extend its shelf-life. If it’s a long-form data-filled blog post, consider modernizing it into an interactive infographic. An e-book? How about a Slideshare, checklist, and quiz? A written case study? Try a video highlighting the campaign success or a webinar to discuss the creative strategy and results. If you know a certain piece of content already resonates, may as well make the most of it.
Bring Back Your Evergreen Content
Very often marketers spend a ton of time, energy, and resources on creating new content instead of going into their arsenal of battle-tested posts that may just need some minor tweaks to bring them back to life. Just as you try to get the most out of your popular pieces, the same should be done for your more general thought leadership. Surely, you have content that provides counsel based on longstanding industry principles – don’t just post once and give up. Identify those pieces – contemporize the medium and key takeaways so they are contextually relevant – and bring in the latest data and insight from new key players to breathe new life into it.
Take a Closer Look at Your Channel Performance
Less is often more – and so is the case with the number of channels you use in your content marketing program. A very common mistake is trying to be everywhere at once – not only is this an insurmountable challenge, it leads to ineffective marketing. First, re-examine where your audience is spending the most of their time, and then develop content specific for those outlets. If the majority of your audience is using LinkedIn, there’s no reason to spend a ton of time on Twitter and Facebook. The results you will get with a concentrated effort on one channel will far outweigh the results of an unfocused campaign spread across multiple less meaningful channels.
Now that wasn’t so painful, was it? With a clear path to follow, you’ll have your content closet cleaned out and stocked with just the right wardrobe in no time. And if you’d like a little help going through it, we’d love to help. Reach out to us at dbl@hotwireglobal.com or Tweet us @HotwireprUS.