Maintenance, Repurposing, and Growth

Once you've put all that content out into the world, are you done? Of course not. But you aren't stuck back at square one either. There are three primary ways to build off your previous content successes (and failures): repurposing content, maintaining evergreen content, and then scaling up to capture more of the market.

Maintaining your content efforts

The feeling of creating and launching content is great: the excitement! The anticipation! The projected results! But, inevitably after launch, the time comes where performance reporting gets more and more staggered, you’re sending out fewer promotional tweets about it, and the content seems to fade away.

Keeping content updated

The lifecycle of a piece of content doesn’t end at its launch — it’s best to see it as Phase I of the process. Planning to iterate and update content is key to seeing continued success on investments you already made.

This post covers some techniques to stay on top of updating content. Before you dive in, though, know that it probably doesn’t make sense to take this approach with all of your content. Anything that you’ve published that’s related to one-off news or that’s meant to act as a “snapshot in time” post probably shouldn’t be updated on an ongoing basis (maybe except to add an internal link to a newer post in a series). On the other hand, evergreen content is imperative to keep updated, so users have the most accurate information possible.

Promoting content over time

If content you’ve created is evergreen, then by definition it is considered valuable over a long period of time. Why, then, do most of us only promote new content? If you’ve answered “because I worked on it recently, so it’s top-of-mind,” then ding ding ding, you are correct!

If content is kept up-to-date and still valuable, there’s no reason not to promote it over time. Talk to your social team about queuing up some older, but still very relevant, content pieces on your social accounts. Are you launching new content that’s related to the same topic you already have a few content pieces on? Promote these all together around the same time — before and during the new content launch — and you’ve got yourself a topical campaign! Keep in mind that evergreen content can age, but still be every bit as useful as the day it was published.

Repurposing content (using the same idea or content in more than one way) can be a very smart move if you find you're reaching different audiences on different channels; have invested heavily in content assets that you really want to share with a wider audience than usual; and/or want to increase ROI on the piece.

If you hit on an idea during your brainstorming process that seems like it's too awesome to be contained on one channel, consider the following:

• Have original research that could be turned into a valuable presentation? Write that white paper, illustrate it with some groundbreaking graphs, and then turn the highlights into a presentation for SlideShare. Cross-link between those content pieces.

• Developed an infographic that's too pretty to keep to yourself? Make sure to plan for social when it's in the design phase to create right-sized excerpts. Then post the whole shebang on your blog and feature those tantalizing highlights on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget about email! These nuggets of information could be great to use in your email newsletters, too.

• Created a highly visual how-to guide? As you're shooting photos, plan not just for how they'll look on your site but also think about if you want to create a brochure or flipbook using the same assets for your next trade show.

• Worked with a client to design a fantastic interactive piece? Document the "making of" process for your blog so future clients can see what it's like to work with you.

The possibilities are endless, and often one content idea can be spun out in a multitude of ways. Note that all is not lost if you realize you've got a chance to repurpose something that's already been published. But after you see how hard it is to go back and recreate some of those assets, you'll make "can we repurpose this?" a part of your ideation conversations moving forward.

Don't miss this classic Whiteboard Friday detailing 4 steps to refurbishing your top content:

So, you have a content strategy and have launched a few fantastic guides… your work here is done, right? Obviously, the answer to that is a big ol' NOPE. Like pretty much anything in the digital marketing world, the only constant is change. Outside of maintaining existing content and repurposing what you have in a creative way, you need to think about how to continue growing your content program. This could either mean by performing more content audits or competitive gap analyses, adding more people to your team, increasing the amount of content you produce, getting more visibility on your work, or even expanding your execution to new, exciting formats and approaches.

Revisiting your content strategy

The first way to grow the impact of your content efforts isn’t super-suave, but it works. Take a look back at the last three, six, twelve months of creating content, and ask yourself the following questions to determine your next steps:

• Have your goals for content changed? If so, you’ll need to revisit your strategy to make sure it’s equipped to hit the new objectives.

• What performed well overall? What were the stories that garnered the most traffic? Conversions? Social engagements? Was it a certain format, topic, or content type? Was it targeted to a certain part of the funnel? Take a look at these successes and compile insights on what has worked for you, then continue to improve in those areas.

• Did anything decidedly not work? Are there any opportunities for it to work if you pivoted it slightly?

  • If you think you can salvage a certain approach, try small-batch testing your assumptions, so your risk is limited. If it’s still not working out, take the hint and stop prioritizing those concepts. Some ideas just aren’t going to be worth your time.

• Is there anything that you tested that seemed to have a positive impact? Continue testing that particular approach or subject and include it as a larger part of your content mix.

• Did the content you created do its job of solving a need for your audience? Are there new needs you see in the industry for you to solve?

• Did your company identify a new audience to target? How similar or different are they to the audience your current content is geared towards?

• How do you compare to competitors? Are there any new content gaps to pursue?

As you can see, there are many things to consider regarding your content strategy as time goes by. Talk about job security!

Syndication

Getting your content syndicated by a more authoritative site with a larger audience is a really good way to expand your audience and grow your content efforts. The first step to making this happen is to write really killer content that people might actually want to syndicate.

One of the main worries people have about content syndication is whether it'll create a duplicate content issue for the search engines. That's a valid concern, but you're in the clear if you get your SEO tagging right. We've got a primer on duplicate content here, if you need it.

For that reason, you'll want to make sure you're pairing with a site you can trust, and that's willing to work with you on that tagging.

Scaling content marketing

After several months, you can now know what's working for you, as well as your audience, and how to demonstrate the ROI on your content. At this point, you may be ready to start scaling up your efforts. Don't panic. Scaling up doesn't mean you have to go from five blog posts per week to 20.

It does mean that you might have the info you need to push for hiring an additional writer or more freelance help. With those extra resources, you can experiment with new types of content, launch more pieces, expedite your process, and more.

As you’re evaluating your content plan, you not only want to look back to examine what has happened, but look forward and plan out the future. We’ve talked at length in this guide about creating, shaping, and getting your company’s content strategy and execution process on the right track.

As you look to the future, develop a cadence to review your efforts via the approaches described in this chapter. Planning ahead is the best way to stay on top of things, so set up reminder periods to revisit the content strategy, maintain your evergreen content pieces, revisit your goals, and review performance on an ongoing basis.

Phew, that was a long guide! Thanks for sticking with us to learn more about content marketing and how you can create and improve your own strategy.

What's next, you ask? Well, you're well-prepared to take on all the aspects of planning, creating, promoting, and tracking your content. We suggest building a strong foundation to analyze and iterate on your efforts using an SEO toolset like Moz Pro:

Start my free trial

We can't wait to see what you accomplish — we believe in you. Now, go forth and conquer your content!

Written by the Moz staff and our good friends at Seer Interactive.