WORKWEEK

As this newsletter has talked about often, managing content is like managing a garden. 

• You plant some things, and tend to them, so that you’ll have new buds and fruit in six months to a year. 
• In other places, you’re working on upkeep, making sure your perennials are well watered and fertilized and without pests so you can continue enjoying their beauty and abundance as they come back season after season.
• And still, in other places, you need to scrap your work, understand what went wrong, prep the soil for something new, and begin the process all over again (heck, maybe you’ll repurpose some of those perennials over here!).

Right now, at the end of the year, you are likely in the upkeep and scrapping phase. And I often like to focus on my perennials here. 

Your evergreen content needs pruning, and this slower season is a good time to do it. Not just because things are slower either, but because many brands get a big traffic boost after the holidays once the world comes back online. And your updated content is what they will see. 

So, here’s what to look for:

Do a content audit:

• Where do you have overlapping content? Can you combine or reduce?
• Where do you have content gaps? Can you work with the larger marketing team to fill those in Q1?
• How does your brand look & feel across the blog? Do hero images have a clear style? Do some of them need updating based on creative updates throughout the year? 
• What about tone, voice and messaging? Has any of that changed throughout the year? Do you need to update CTAs, or positioning in content across your blog, case studies or resources? 
• How is your blog categorized, and could that be improved? Are you categorizing by content topic or format? How well organized is it from an outside perspective (you can ask your sales team for help on that…you’ll likely find it isn’t well organized!), and how can you update it for a better UX? 

Prep for 2024:

Evergreen content may last a lifetime, but it needs updating, too. Now is the time to go through all of your content and update stats, benchmarks, years, quotes, whatever it is that was time-based when you went live, or relevant when the piece first went live, but that needs a bit of a clean up now. 

This includes updating any years in your content to the new year––as well as within your metadata. 

Be sure you are actually updating the content, though! Even if you are just pulling new stats for your intro. Freshness matters. 

Launch a themed retro: 

This isn’t a party, unfortunately. No, a themed retro is when you go back through your content over the year, see what performed best, and narrow those best performer down to themes. 

Were they about a similar topic, in a similar format, what was it about them that did well––and can you uncover insights about what works and what doesn’t and report those out to your larger team?

Sync with sales:

Content’s job is to serve your audience and your marketing needs and to help your sales folks do their job better and faster. 

Are you hitting it out of the park with that last one? 

Now is a good time to sync with your sales team to understand common sale objections, the content they wish they had, and to show them your content library, where to find new pieces and see the calendar, and plan on how you will keep them up to date on new pieces moving forward. 

When sales is stoked about a piece, and actively leverages it, you’re in a fantastic place. 

All right folks, that’s it for this week. Short & sweet––let me kno what you think! 
P.S. for folks paying attention––last week I said that this week’s newsletter would be about how to do a data piece. Here is what is what we published. I swear, this newsletter is coming!