Your content should always help to move your business forward. But with long-term content strategies, it’s easy to fall into a rut.
Outdated approaches to content marketing can slow down the impact you’re making and make it more difficult to grow your business.
You could be pouring your energy into content that just doesn’t perform the way it used to or resonate with your audience anymore. Plus, you could be missing out on content opportunities that have much greater potential!
There’s nothing that makes me more uncomfortable than thinking my business and content strategy is getting stagnant. That is why we’ve got systems and review processes in place to make sure that our content strategy is always the best it can be.
In this post, I’m sharing the three ways you can give your content strategy a boost so it keeps propelling your business forward (and stops holding you back). I also reveal a little behind-the-scenes look at how we keep our content strategy fresh at Content 10x.
Is your content strategy the best it could be?
In episode 190 of the Content 10x Podcast, I shared four of the most important lessons I’ve learned since starting my business. One of which was “what got you here won’t get you there”.
Actually, the direct quote was “what got you here will catastrophically prevent you from getting there”.
I want you to think about this in terms of your content strategy. When was the last time you took a good look at how well it was working?
It might have been the best strategy for your business two years ago — but you could be unknowingly investing time and energy into an underperforming strategy today.
When I think about content strategies, I see them as constantly changing. The world of content marketing is always morphing in small yet significant ways, and so your content strategy should be too.
New platform features and content types can change the ways audiences behave and what types of content they prefer to consume. If your content strategy can’t keep up, you could lose the attention of your current audience, and miss the opportunity to engage others too.
So it’s crucial to stay on top of what content you’re providing to move your business forward, and prevent it from holding you back.
3 ways to revitalize your content strategy
At Content 10x, we make sure that our content strategy is at the forefront of what is best for our business. We put systems in place to regularly check that our content is working for us and our audience.
While every business will approach their content strategy differently, there are three tips we use which apply to any business investing in their content.
If you’re new to the world of content, these tips should hopefully help you create systems to always have a winning content strategy. If you’re a long-term content creator, you might already have some of these in place and be more interested in the insights into how we do it at Content 10x.
Now let’s get into it!
1. Review your content strategy
This might sound really obvious — but you’d be surprised how many businesses don’t take a step back and look at their strategy from an eagle-eye perspective.
It’s much harder to work out where you’re going when you don’t know where you are. So the first and most crucial step of reworking your content strategy is to be ruthless about what’s working and what isn’t.
If you’re very close to your content, this might be difficult for you. Perhaps you love writing blog posts, but they’re just not bringing in clients. This is why data is vital. It can help you make those hard decisions.
Here are some things you can do to ensure a really thorough content review:
- Collect as much data as you can and carefully review your analytics
- Involve your team and bring in external experts, such as a marketing strategist
- Consider what new opportunities are out there and what content your competitors are creating
Reviewing your content isn’t just about looking at what you already have. It’s also about spotting the gaps. Maybe you’ve got some content gaps that you need to fill or perhaps there’s a new content type that your audience is taking an interest in or that others in your industry have started to create content for.
At Content 10x we do a thorough quarterly review of all the content we produce. We look at what we create and analyze what’s performing well and what isn’t. This information becomes a springboard for what to create in the next quarter. Then we draw up a plan and meet monthly to review our progress.
Checking in with your content regularly is vital to a high-performing content strategy so make your review a regular occurrence. Put in at least one content review every quarter and periodically evaluate how it’s going.
2. Analyze your internal systems and processes
I strongly believe that slick systems and processes are integral to running a successful business. They can make running your business feel like overseeing a well-oiled machine. They make it easier to recruit people into roles, easier to train them, and even easier to sell your business (if that’s your goal).
Having a content repurposing process in place is one of my top recommendations for businesses that rely on content as it makes you faster, more consistent, and helps you produce better content.
It’s the same for almost everything in your business. A good process will help you achieve a great outcome.
But just like content types, things change over time. Your services, clients, and tools that you use will all look different today to how they did when you first started your business. As these things update, your systems need to as well.
Don’t wait for external factors to trigger an internal response. We believe it’s important to take a proactive approach to updating your processes. Ask yourself these questions regularly:
- Is there an easier way of doing this?
- Is there a faster way?
- Could outsourcing parts of this process help achieve your goals or get it done faster?
- Would outsourcing the entire process increase your ROI?
At the beginning of 2021 we conducted a deep dive into our processes. We reviewed, developed and updated every client and internal process to optimize our day-to-day workflows and provide a slicker service across the board. It was a long project but has saved us so much time in the long run. We check in with each process every month to ensure it still suits our needs and make any necessary changes.
3. Experiment with your content
What’s the scariest idea you have for your content right now? Maybe you want to launch a podcast, but you’re not sure you can dedicate the time to it each week. Or perhaps you want to create video content, but you’re worried about what you’ll be like on camera.
Taking leaps of faith with your content requires a lot of time, effort, and bravery. When they don’t pay off, it’s disappointing, but when they do, the results are well worth that initial risk.
I’ve taken plenty of leaps of faith with my content. The most recent was doing our rebrand. It was something I’d been thinking about for a while, when I had the thought “what if our current brand image is actually holding us back”? That’s when I decided to go for it, and we set the wheels in motion.
Now, you don’t have to rebrand your whole business to move forward like we did — the point is to embrace the big ideas to see how they can get your business get to the next level.
But if you’re apprehensive, here’s a step-by-step way to approach the scarier content ideas…
1. Stop thinking about it as a risk and instead consider it an experiment
2. Create a comprehensive plan to produce and repurpose that content over the next quarter
3. Dedicate yourself to executing that plan — if you don’t go all-in, you’ll never see a true representation of what you can achieve
4. Monitor your experiment’s progress in your content review meetings and adjust as needed
5. At the end of your trial period, consider whether it’s worth continuing with your new content, if you need to change it, or it’s not working for your business
Remember, content is a long game, so the longer you can commit yourself to it, the greater chance you’ll see positive results.
However experimenting is a great way to test out your content theories or get a more realistic picture of what it’s like to create different types of content. So don’t be afraid to try!
In summary
Keeping your content strategy fresh is all about being proactive and ready to embrace new ideas. It’s not always easy to change how you do things, but it’s definitely worthwhile to try.
So, book your content review meeting in now, and give reviewing, analyzing, and experimenting a go! I can’t wait to hear how you get on.
For more help and advice on how to create a content strategy that works for you, check out our library of blog posts and podcast episodes all about creating and repurposing content.
If you need help implementing your content repurposing strategy, look no further. We’re industry-leading content repurposing experts with services to suit your content needs. Find out what they are.
