A good content strategy can give you a strong foundation for many areas of success. When executed correctly it can take you to your correct audience, improve your brand perception and reach, and longer term – depending on the nature of your business – bring good quality leads. The purpose of this blog is to give guidance with ideas to try to help keep you on track with a compelling content marketing plan, while using data to further iterate and improve.

Initial Research – Use your Data Points

First and foremost, what does your audience like to read? You know who your market is for your product or service, and you or the wider company will know what type of content these prospects and customers like to consume. Unsure where to start? Ask your ‘frontline’ colleagues, such as your BDR Team, Customer Success function, or a cohort of salespeople. Often, these are the ones hearing direct feedback from buyers or potential buyers, and may aid you in providing some areas to look at. Equally, seeing what your competitors are getting traction on can be helpful to take a pulse – but of course no content strategy should be based entirely on competitor activity – but a mixture of insights and feedback.

Another place to source data from, is Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Even if you don’t directly use it yourself, you could ask your digital marketing colleagues to produce a report for you which shows the top most viewed pages in the last 12 months, or perhaps the most viewed blogs during that time. Do you have a YouTube channel or other social media avenues such as TikTok or LinkedIn? All of these channels will be brimming with data that you can take guidance from.

Building Foundations – Create a List of Topics

After you’ve spent a good amount of time browsing through your data, spoken with some customer or prospect-facing colleagues, you should now have a good idea of what will resonate with your target audience. Make this meaningful by creating a list of these topics, and if you can, give them a level of priority, based upon which ones are most likely to succeed. Out of these topics, are there any you can write yourself? If not, who within your organisation can aid you in writing them? It could be worth speaking to the heads of departments to get a content initiative going internally to find people in their teams who are looking for something different to get involved in.

Internal Content Initiatives for Stakeholder Buy-in

Internal stakeholder buy-in can make a big difference when building out a content plan, and can be a way for peers to work on objectives and their own development.

A few tips if you decide to make an initiative more official, see if you can use a small amount of marketing budget as an incentive. All colleagues who provide content, whether it be a blog, opinion piece, podcast, or something else, could be chosen at random for an online gift card for example. Keep momentum going by holding a monthly drop in content session. In this call – keep it short to retain attention and increase likelihood of live attendance. You can cover the most viewed content, new items that have come in, and any other interesting data points. Don’t forget to thank those on the call if they contributed in some way, whether it was with an idea or a tangible piece.

Revisit Longer Form Content to Work Smarter

No doubt you will have legacy items such as eBooks, whitepapers, previous webinar recordings, and so on. Revisit these, and see how else this content can be repurposed. Here are a few ideas on how you can add to your current content schedule by using what you already have in your arsenal:

Ebooks and whitepapers

Look for particularly insightful sections, or quotes that you can take out, add into artwork, and re-use as social content. These can be great for evergreen, softer content which isn’t about a CTA or selling message, but simply to highlight information or thought provoking content.

Case studies

Hopefully you have several of these, even if they are dated. Similarly to the whitepaper idea, pulling out any testimonials can be a fast way of getting more content especially if you pass to your graphic designer so they can be released on social media as a series of linked posts.

Previous webinar recordings

Create ‘snippets’ from the full webinar, perhaps there is a 2-minute discussion halfway through covering something exciting or particularly engaging. Even better if there are several of these that could be created. Although they may work well as a TikTok series, don’t limit the thinking to just marketing channels. Consider other avenues such as utilising these short videos in BDR outreach. It can be a great way for them to demonstrate understanding of your target audience challenges, and is a good variable to having just written content.

Older blogs

It is worth looking at older blogs to see if updates and improvements can be made here and there. Especially if they cover topics that are important to your target audience. Incorporating key search terms will help with your SEO performance too. If you have any blogs which are particularly long, consider if it is possible to recreate 2-3 shorter versions, or create new blogs which go into more detail on one particular area for those readers wanting more technical detail or tangible ideas.

Meeting notes or recordings 

Perhaps this one is a long shot. But have you been to any recent calls with the leadership team where an insightful discussion was had that could be turned into good content? Could your notes be enough of a starting point to create an outline idea? Reach out to your leadership team to add a quote or thought, to give the piece more personality.

Don’t Forget SEO

Even if you aren’t an SEO expert, there are many AI tools that can help nowadays, or, if you have a digital marketer in your team, even better. Ask them for best practice and if there are certain phrases performing well that you need to incorporate into your content.

Ensure you use H2 headings to break up the blog and make it easier to scan for the reader. In addition, if you use images, giving them an Alt Tags allows search engines to crawl and rank your page more easily – and if done right – more favourably, provided your alt tags also link to the blog content of course and aren’t named randomly. Consider SEO in every piece of content.

Keep track with a content plan

Finally, depending on your marketing role, you may be looking after many other areas beyond company content. However you choose to track activities is up to you. Perhaps you use team software such as Asana or Monday which can allow you to add in activities, their due dates and so on. But if not, even an Excel or Google Sheet, coordinated by months or weeks, depending on your content frequency, is still a great place to start. It allows you to see months where you may have little or no content scheduled, topic gaps, and more. All of which encourage continuous action to keep your content strategy going, while creating engaging content for your readers.

The final thought is don’t forget to iterate. Content doesn’t need reinvention year on year, however, revisiting your data points frequently, and making good decisions from the results, keep you on a continuous and positive trajectory to creating and developing high quality content.

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