You are (or should be) sitting on a content gold mine

What content do you have? You can probably name a few posts, blogs or videos that have been created in the last few weeks but go back 6-months, do you know what you created then?

Your existing content is playing a huge part in your customer journey, your brand building, your reputation, but too often once we hit publish, we forget all about it. 

It’s time to change that and to take full advantage of the content gold mine the majority of businesses are sitting on.

The value of content

The importance of content but not any old content, targeted, specific, valuable content

Key stats to know

What content do you already have?

The key to extracting every morsel of value from your content is through a detailed audit. You need to understand where you are now, in order to chart a plan to take you forward. Start by categorising all your existing content into type, date, CTA or next steps, a judgement call of where it sits in your customer journey and whether it’s up-to-date or not.

That isn’t always a simple thing to do, but once you’ve created this epic spreadsheet you’ll be able to add to it whenever you create more blogs, articles, reports, white papers or email sequences. It also creates a source of truth, a place where you can go to see exactly what content you have.

The beauty of this is that you can also use it to assist with your internal links, or to save time next time someone asks you to create a resource on X. You can check through your list and go ‘oh we’ve already got it’.

Auditing your content really needs to be done alongside, or after mapping your customer journey. You need to have an idea of what touchpoints you have, what questions your audience are asking, and what’s the trigger point for converting. With that clear journey in one hand and your audit in the other, you’re in the best possible position to capitalise fully on your content.

Optimise, update, bin

Many people think that once they’ve hit publish the hard work is done. But the work’s only just beginning. For content to be truly doing its job we need to monitor, analyse, optimise, update in a continual cycle. Otherwise we’re sending our content out into the ether and crossing our fingers it performs. 

Sadly, content isn’t a one and done job. Once you understand what content you have and how it’s performing you can create a schedule to regularly update and optimise your content to ensure you’re getting as much value from it as possible.

In the case of social media, the analysis might mean adapting your posts going forward rather than retrospectively tweaking. Or it might mean posting the content again but with a different image or a video. 

When it comes to longer-form you might want to play around with different headings, or keywords. For blogs that refer to dates, events or specific stats, you might want to diarise updating them with the new dates or time references, and check if newer, more relevant and timely stats are available.

I’ve mentioned binning content, which is always controversial but hear me out. When you’re going through older content you might find something which hasn’t performed or is totally misaligned with your current messaging and values. In those cases don’t be afraid to remove it. Then you can rework it or just leave it to one side. I heard a horror story of a business periodically deleting all of their content, definitely don’t do that! But sometimes it’s necessary to cull your content for the greater good.

There’s always something more you can do to improve your existing content. 

Plug the gaps

With your audit to hand you can begin to identify gaps in your content. You might realise that you’re posting too much about a certain topic and neglecting another, or that all of your content is geared towards the top of the funnel and you need to develop some weightier content. 

Being able to plug the gaps will help create a web of content tackling each audience segment at whatever stage of the buying cycle they’re at. That way there’s something for everyone, not only helping your audience identify with your brand but equipping your sales team with the right information.

Ideally, your content should create what I like to refer to as a tube map approach, clearly defined journeys with different junctions that all end at the right place. But to do that you need different touchpoints, at different content and knowledge depths, to the right audience. 

Use your audit to map each piece of content to your buyer’s journey to make sure they’ve got the support and information available when they need it.

The power of repurposing

Hands up if you’ve ever created a blog, hit publish and left it to gather dust? That’s what I thought, pretty much everyone. An effective content creation process should allow you to repurpose as much as possible. That means turning your blog into social media posts, emails, videos, podcast topics and so much more. 

Getting into this habit of repurposing content is the best way to extract every bit of value from whatever you create. Not only are you saving your time, because you’ve already done the hard work, but you’re making that idea fit for purpose across different channels and audiences. Not everyone likes to read, but take that blog and turn it into a few videos and voila! You’re targeting a different audience preference.

Auditing and spotting these opportunities will save you time. It will save you money, and it will make your content more effective.

It’s a date

Just like creating content isn’t a one and done process, neither is your audit. You need to establish a continual review cycle. There are two ways you can do that…

Approach 1

Have a content day every month. Put it in the diary and use that day to look at your gap analysis and update content accordingly, or create it. You can also use this day to track content performance and note recommendations going forward.

Approach 2

Diarise it. When you publish a blog or white paper, mark in your diary in 6-months time to check it over and update when needed. This approach makes it easier to streamline your content review process while ensuring nothing slips through the net.

If you can think of another approach, great! What’s important is that you find a schedule and process that works for you and that you stick to it.

When it comes to content, blogs, social posts, emails, there’s always a pressure to create more. That can often mean that we’re creating content faster than we can fully utilise it and we forget what we came up with last week. Working in that way, is exhausting and it means we never get the full value from our content. 

The content you’ve already existed is gold. It’s had your time, attention and resources spent on it and you need to make more of it. But until you look at what you’ve got, you can’t plug the gaps in content to support customer journeys, you can’t repurpose, you can’t target different audience preferences. 

You need to create a content process which includes those opportunities, because then you’re creating more high-value content that brings higher-value rewards. That’s when you’re truly sitting on a content gold mine.

Struggling to find the time, or the motivation to trawl through your content? Well this is your lucky day! I work with businesses, like yours to audit and create a strategy, to get you started.