Whether you're crafting social media posts, blogs or website content, it's not easy to feed the dreaded 24/7 content beast. Still, it is crucial to spend the time to make your written and visual efforts shine—even if that means producing less content.
Once you begin to think about content quality as opposed to quantity, you can make the most of your text and visuals, by following these steps:
Repurpose. Content can serve more than one platform or distribution channel. For example, content from a blog post can be repurposed as a brief article in your email newsletter. A white paper is source material for a YouTube tutorial.
Repeat. Evergreen content should appear regularly in your editorial calendar. Topics should be broad enough to give the content a long shelf life, rather than be tied to a news event or time of year.
Reuse. With evergreen content, make a plan for when to reuse it. For example, if you write a blog post on trade show marketing, it might be possible to re-share that post before every large trade show related to your business audience. This will help ensure that you are part of that conversation as it unfolds in real time without a major rewrite. For some industries, that could mean sharing that blog post six times annually.
Re-assess. When attempting to tame the content beast, it’s important to check whether your quality content is meeting marketing goals. This will help you look at the right metrics and adjust strategy accordingly. Marketer Mikaela Delia considers engagement first. "Content has the sole purpose of driving engagement within your desired audience, and if it isn't doing that, then it isn't contributing to your bottom line," she says. "[Measure] social media engagement, downloads, link backs...it's a good idea to create a central data hub or use a tool that measures this."
Right your metrics. "You can tell that your content marketing efforts are working when you see a spike not only in organic traffic, but also in the number of qualified leads your company is generating," says Mackenzie Deater, content strategist at Michigan-based Evenbound. She advises prioritizing lead metrics: where leads are coming from, which website pages they're spending the most time on, and what pages they interact with after your sales or marketing team has contacted them.
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A version of this post originally appeared at our sister site The Social Shake-Up. To learn more from experts in social media, check out The Social Shake-Up Show on May 12-14.