Let’s do a bit of spring cleaning. That’s right, it’s time to take a look at your content strategy!
As with everything in life, if your content strategy isn’t up to date, it’s easy to get behind. As soon as things get a bit busy, creating content often falls on the backburner and it can be really tough to get back up to speed.
But you need to be consistently providing your audience with high-quality content in order for your content strategy to work at all - to keep getting new visitors to your website and socials so that you can convert them into customers.
In this article, we’re going to be telling you everything you need to know about how to review your existing content, get rid of the stuff that isn’t working for you and put more focus on the high-value content that your audience will love.
The best place to start when your content is in a mess is categorisation. Take stock of everything that you have and put it all into a spreadsheet, split out by content type (e.g. if it’s a blog post, podcast, infographic, or video) and then subject matter. This will give you a really good idea of where your gaps are and the best place to start when it comes to getting your content plan back up to scratch.
The chances are there will be content that you created a while back that is no longer serving a purpose. Whether your products or services have moved on, your audience’s needs have changed or there’s been an update in available technology, it’s time to pull it. But that content doesn’t have to be wasted completely - there could be an opportunity to repurpose it, either by updating the information to make it more relevant, or using it as a basis for a new piece of content.
Repurposing your content is the key to any great content marketing strategy. Once you’ve created something, even if it’s no longer serving its original purpose, there’s always scope to turn it into something new and useful again. A good example of this is using successful blog posts and turning them into social media posts. Never let any of your content go to waste - there is always something it can be used for!
Some of the best content comes from analysing customer feedback and creating pieces that are designed specifically to answer their questions. If you use social media, analyse the comments and messages that you receive and include this as part of your content strategy. If you want more insight, go and speak to your customers! You can use surveys and questionnaires, phone calls, focus groups - whatever works best for your audience to gather information and find out more about their needs and wants. You can then use this to flesh out your content strategy.
Once you’ve documented the content you have and tidied up what you need and don’t need, you’ll have a really good idea of areas that you’re currently lacking in. This is a great starting point for building your new content strategy, with clear outlines of the topics you want to cover, the content formats and an idea of how frequently you want to create them. It’s really important that you keep on top of your content strategy to ensure fresh information is always going out to your audience, on topics that they’re interested in and want to engage with.
While it may be tempting to just give vague outlines of what you want your content to cover, you’ll find it’s way more effective when you come to creating each piece to have as much information in there as possible. It may be useful to get down into more finite details such as titles, headers, conclusions, calls-to-actions etc. to ensure you stick to the parameters of the content you’re creating without going off topic or repeating subjects that have already been covered.
Once you’ve spent all this time getting your content strategy back in order, the last thing you want to do is let it slide again. Schedule in regular maintenance checks to ensure you keep on top of the plan and have backups in place for when time isn’t on your side for content creation. This could be hiring a freelancer to take on some of the work on your behalf, or working with an external marketing agency. It’s also worth reviewing your content every 6 months or so to make sure it’s still relevant and in-keeping with the content strategy.
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic for your business and improve brand awareness, but it can be a big task to take onboard for any marketing team. Not only do you have to know exactly what to create, but you also need to have a pretty regular posting schedule to keep your audience engaged and interested.
At CopyHouse, we are the experts when it comes to building specialist content for businesses within the fintech and technology industries. We create high-quality content that connects you with your audience, starts important conversations and builds better relationships.
Working with CopyHouse is a partnership, and we’ll be invested in your business every step of the way. When your business succeeds, we succeed.
To find out more about how we can work together and build content that you’re proud of, get in touch.
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