5 Strategies for Taming the Content Beast
By: Julia Angelen Joy & Sophie Maerowitz
February 19, 2020
Whether you’re crafting social media posts, blogs or website content, it’s become nearly impossible to feed the dreaded 24/7 Content Beast. However, not every brand can be everything to everyone, so it is crucial to spend the time needed to make your written and visual efforts truly shine—even if that means producing less content to start with.
Once you begin to pivot your content strategy from quantity to quality, you can make the most of your most potent copy and visuals (you know, the content you and/or your designer stayed after-hours to get just right?) by following these steps:
Repurpose. Any content that is created must serve more than one platform or distribution channel. For example, a blog post might transform into a brief article in your email newsletter. A white paper is source material for a YouTube tutorial. Everything you publish is developed with the expectation that there will be several iterations, used to achieve varying goals.
Repeat. You must create content that is relevant and not easily seen as old, stale, or dated. This evergreen content should appear frequently in your content calendar. The topic should be broad enough to give it a long shelf life, rather than tied to a particular event or time of year.
Reuse. With that evergreen content in hand, make a plan for when you will reuse it. For example, if you write a blog post on trade show marketing, can you re-share that post (as is) before every large trade show related to your business audience? This will help ensure that you are part of that conversation as it unfolds in real time without a major rewrite. For some industries, that could mean sharing that blog post six times per year.
Re-assess. When attempting to tame the Content Beast, it’s important to check whether your quality content meets your current marketing goals. This will help you look at the right metrics and adjust your strategy accordingly. Marketing consultant Mikaela Delia looks at (meaningful) content engagement first. “Content has the sole purpose of driving engagement within your desired audience, and if it isn’t doing that, then it isn’t contributing to your bottom line,” she says. “[Measure] social media engagement, downloads, link backs…it’s a good idea to create a central data hub or use a tool that measures this.”
Right your metrics. “You can tell that your content marketing efforts are working when you see a spike not only in organic traffic but also in the number of qualified leads your company is generating,” says Mackenzie Deater, content strategist at Michigan-based marketing agency Evenbound. She advises prioritizing lead metrics: where leads are coming from, which website pages they’re spending the most time on, and what pages they interact with after your sales or marketing team has contacted them.
Follow Julia @JuliaAngelenPR or visit her website here.
Follow Sophie: @SophieMaerowitz
