As the internet continuously evolves and changes, organizations that regularly fine-tune, tweak and adapt their content strategies are more likely to stay ahead of the competition.
If you keep your content strategy the same year after year, your organization might not suffer in any obvious ways. But in the long run, this stasis can undermine your organization’s overall success.
There are many ways to experiment with content, but three tactics can help: Monitoring engagement, making adjustments and setting goals for improvement.
Monitor how people engage with your content
Every once in a while, a blog post will unexpectedly take off. Traffic will flood your website, engagement will skyrocket on social media and your newsletter sign-ups will suddenly spike. It’s a wonderful feeling — and one you’ll aim to replicate.
There are many variables at play when this happens. Maybe the news cycle made your content especially timely. Or perhaps an influencer sparked a wave of engagement. But often, many factors are actually within your control.
If certain topics are consistently engaging your audience, lean into making them a focus of your content strategy. Understanding exactly what your audience responds to will help you craft content that meets their interests and needs.
Similarly, if certain types of posts rarely receive engagement, it may be best to discontinue them. Doing so will allow you to devote more energy to content that drives the best results.
Experiment with adjustments
At a certain point, you may accumulate a backlog of content that doesn’t attract much traffic or engagement. Rather than quietly removing it or charging ahead with more content, your organization should experiment to see whether simple tweaks can produce better results.
For example, a past blog post might offer helpful content in an SEO-unfriendly format. In this situation, you might identify the most important keyword, then edit the post so this keyword appears in the headers and body copy. Next, look for opportunities to break long blocks of text into scannable lists or bullet points.
Simple changes like this may help you recover the time and resources you already invested, while informing your approach to future content.
Set goals for improvement
As you begin to refine what content your audience craves and best practices for formatting it, you can establish new goals and metrics.
Initial content goals should be simple and attainable, such as maintaining a regular production schedule for an entire quarter. Once your content strategy has a sustainable workflow, the possibilities are truly endless.
Common content strategy goals include:
- Growing your list of newsletter subscribers by adding calls to action
- Improving engagement on social media by posting more often
- Launching a contributed content program to increase the frequency of posting
- Experimenting with new forms of multimedia
- Creating partnership or syndication agreements with like-minded organizations
As you reach and set increasingly ambitious goals, focus your energy on tactics that will grow your audience over time.
November 16, 2020
3 min. to read
