Your content is a key pillar of your overall success. It’s a way to impact audience decision-making, translate leads to sales and further establish yourself in the marketplace. If your content isn’t where it needs to be, there’s still hope. However, improving content performance is a long-term goal that takes some work on your end.
This work may not be easy, but it will pay off. And a year from now you’ll be in a better place than you are today. Below, we’ll cover three tangible ways to improve your content performance in the new year.
1. Be Strategic
You may think that improving your content performance simply means creating more content. But more isn’t always better, and churning out content for the sake of it isn’t necessarily the best game plan. You may not be addressing your audience’s needs or even meeting them where they are in their search journey. Being strategic about your content is the first step in improving its performance.
Why, you ask? Well, content strategy guides the creation, production, and delivery of resourceful content for your target audience. Without a strategy in place, you’ll be publishing content with no rhyme or reason. The key is to have a business objective in place and see how your content plan ladders up to your overarching goals. If your goal is product education, then your blogs and social media posts should focus on providing information. Writing about how great your product is without explaining how it works won’t exactly be useful to readers in this instance.
In order to be strategic, start by asking yourself some important questions. What are your company’s key performance indicators and how is your content going to impact those indicators? Who is your target audience and how are you reaching them through your content? What content clusters should you include in your strategy? How will your content plan be distributed and are these channels working for your business goals? Take some time to answer these questions thoroughly knowing that the answers will likely change as your business objectives change.
2. Reuse and Repurpose
Creating high-quality content takes time and resources. Depending on what you’re creating, it can take numerous hours before you’re ready to hit publish. It may require hiring freelance content creators, editors, videographers, and social media gurus. With all this effort, you want the content to be seen, heard, and/or viewed by as many people in your target audience as possible.
This is why reusing and repurposing your content can be beneficial. Repurposing content can help your main takeaways stick — thereby increasing brand recognition. This is essential to your company’s longevity, especially as competing brands are entering the marketplace every day. Repurposing content also allows you to reach more people, including those that didn’t see the content in the first place by chance or by choice.
When reusing or repurposing your content, the key is to keep the content high quality and translate it to a different channel. If you created a longform podcast, take clips of it and post them on your social channels. These short segments are likely to be shared more often than a longer form piece. Think of the various formats that resonate most to your audience, and see how the content you’ve already produced can be converted best to this new platform.
3. Drive Authentic Action
As a for-profit company, your main goal is to drive sales. Whether you’re selling homemade pottery or an online finance course, sales are what keep you in business. Creating content that drives action is going to improve your bottom line. And yet, there is a fine line between creating content that is informative and content that is too ‘sales-y.’ Readers will see right through a piece of content that seems gimmicky and will likely take their business elsewhere.
Instead of brainstorming how to get clicks, think of how you can better serve your audience through your content. Explaining why your finance course is different from all the other available online courses is a start. Reiterate how taking this course will change your target audience’s lives for the better. Be detailed about what they can expect and how the course is laid out. Give them a sneak peek with a few tips. Including real customer reviews and testimonials from individuals who have gone through this course can also be advantageous.
Once you’ve differentiated yourself in the marketplace and shown the value of your product, then you can include an actionable call-to-action. The CTA should relate to the specific piece of content. For example, “download your free budget plan now” could align with a blog post on the importance of budgeting for paying off debt. Providing this type of helpful information will prove to your audiences that your company is there for them and their needs. This, in turn, will likely translate into more leads — meaning more profit for your business.
Conclusion
Improving your content performance is a great, achievable goal for your business in 2024. Instead of looking at this as a big to-do item, break down the goal into smaller tasks. Take a look at your current content and analyze what is and what isn’t working. With these takeaways, see how you can enhance your content this year. You may just discover a new platform or content theme that aligns best for your audience’s needs and improves your overall performance.
