What to Do If You’re Not Content With Your Content

Growing companies accumulate a lot of content – good, bad and ugly. Marketing generates everything from short-form materials such as blogs, posts, and web copy to long-format content such as white papers and eBooks. And don’t forget all the collateral and presentations generated out of Sales.

Content libraries need regular attention. Content can quickly become out-of-date, portions may be off-brand or off-message, and most needs alignment to a persona journey or selling stage. But your staff is busy with new projects and doesn’t have the bandwidth to audit, cull and refresh your content library. That means good content is going to waste, bad content is still in circulation, and your customers are not getting what they need when they need it. If that sounds familiar, you clearly need a content strategy.Whether you hire someone full-time or select a contractor, these are the important tasks your content specialist should tackle.

• Undertake an audit of existing assets in all formats
• Group assets based on products, messages and targets
• Evaluate and sort into “keep/discard/refresh” categories
• Improve descriptions, gating and tagging of content to be kept
• Work with digital teams to remove/replace content to be discarded
• Prepare a roadmap for processing of content to be refreshed or created
• Align existing and planned content to persona journeys and/or selling stages
• Interview internal SMEs for context on rewrites and new assets
• Rewrite content as needed, using key words to support optimization
• Work with internal teams to develop new content as required
• Work with digital teams to deploy content in accordance with plans
• Improve tracking to map content consumption, score for qualification and hand off to Sales
• Coordinate with Marketing & Sales stakeholders to maximize content usage
• Equip your internal resources to continue best practices.

If you’re not content with your content, make it a priority. You could have the best MarTech stack in the world, but without relevant content and messaging, the leads won’t flow.  An effective demand-generation engine needs constant care and content feeding.