Content. A necessary cost in 21st century marketing. But a complete waste of money if you don’t know how to make your content perform and produce results. That’s why we’re sharing with you the 4 stages to make your existing content perform better.
1 – Break it down
If there is one thing we have learnt it is that constant content production is a never-ending process. Instead of producing lots of little pieces of content, you should break down bigger pieces into bite-sized, “snackable” content. It not only makes the production of content easier, but it gives you a whole content box to work from.
For example, you can break down a whitepaper into 3 or 4 separate blog posts, a week worth of social media posts for each blog and topics for an auto nurture email campaign. All of that from one whitepaper can last a month. We know. We’ve done it.
2 – Promote in the right place
Next up, you need to make sure you are promoting that content in the right place. No point no one seeing it. Track which social media channels are working best and explore which options make your blogs stand out. Personally, we know that email marketing and content marketing work hand in hand to intrigue our audience. That’s why we promote our blogs in our weekly email campaigns as well as on social media – to get the best exposure possible.
3 – Make sure you can DO something with your existing content
Again, content for the sake of content isn’t worth the time and money it costs to create it. You need your content to DO something. So place plenty of call to actions within your text. For your average 400-word blog post, we’d recommend 4 links to different places on your website. This will keep people intrigued with your content and on your website for longer.
4 – Refresh your best performing pieces
There is no doubt about it. Some pieces of content will just perform better than others. Perhaps it’s a topic that’s of high interest, has a catchy subject line or is just really well written. Don’t be scared to use these pieces more than once. Rinse them for every targeted audience prospect you can. Personally, we measure the best performing content pieces quarterly and take our top six through to the next quarter.
Once you have these four steps implemented, you’ll start to see your existing content perform better. Then you’re ready to use it in a workflow!
