Spruce up your Content Marketing with Spring Cleaning

Dust off your Content Strategy

Ah, the first official full day of spring. If you are a New Englander like me, you count down the days until the sun shines longer and the snow no longer flies. (Unfortunately, mother nature did not cooperate today and Boston saw snow flurries for a greater part of today). Regardless, during this time of year I look forward to thoroughly cleaning my apartment and starting anew. I recently got to thinking that this clean slate mentality – spring cleaning – can be applied to content marketing.

Just think about it. Just like that pile of clothes, books, magazines, etc. your content marketing strategy can get a little dusty, a little stale. You may be in a rut, executing the same practices or tactics day in and day out.

As you think about doing a deep clean of your entire home, keep these “To Do’s” in mind in order to achieve a clean content marketing strategy:

• Ensure you are focused on the right SMART goals. Since we are approaching Q2 quite rapidly, now is a good time to reevaluate your progress against your annual marketing goals and re-align. Don’t know where to start? Ask yourself, “what do we want to achieve?”
• Always keep your customers as top of mind. Remember, you are participating in content marketing in order to communicate with your customers. Ultimately you aspire to build high levels of customer engagement. If your existing tactics and strategies are missing the mark, take a step back and conduct some research on your target personas. Don’t know where to start?  Take some time to talk with customers or prospects and try to understand their main issues and pain points.
• Evaluate your messaging. While it is important to maintain a small percentage of your content development efforts on content types that sing and shout your praises, it is even more important to balance this. You don’t want your entire pitch to be full of goobledygook, or “Frankenspeak” as our friend Ann Handley calls it. Don’t know where to start? Grab the feather duster and clear away all of the non-sense words that have gathered around your messaging and content in general like dust bunnies. Keeping it simple and focused on what really matters to your audience is all that matters! And most likely they don’t care about your goobledygook!