It’s been an action packed year, and when you’re constantly pushing out content, time certainly flies by. The festive season is fast approaching and soon we’ll usher in the New Year. And with it brings the opportunity to continue the momentum of the past 12 months.
A lot of people make New Year resolutions and it’s definitely the perfect time to start with a clean slate, implement changes to your content strategy and review the performance of your content.
For inbound marketers this means looking back to see what worked, what didn’t and what was missing from your inbound marketing arsenal. It’s about making improvements and building upon what you’ve accomplished this year.
So how do you spot the areas that need improvement to make next year even better? Here are 3 things every inbound marketer needs to do for New Years.
What Every Inbound Marketer Needs To Do For The New Year?
Audit
You can’t make an honest assessment of the past year, unless you’ve taken inventory of all the content you have online. Create a spreadsheet of all your content (links included) and analyze how they performed against your business objectives.
For instance you can find out what content was the most popular and delivered the most leads by checking your website and social media analytics. A good tool for tracking how your content does on social media is by installing AddThis to your site.
Want to know what it takes to make remarkable content? Read our previous blog post: The Anatomy Of Remarkable Content
Plan
Throughout the year you’ve probably learnt a lot about your audience and what they like. But in some cases, your initial assumptions about them may have proven to be wrong and probably noticed certain types of content work better than others.
In either case, the start of the year is a period where you can make adjustments to your content strategy. Use the information from the audit to make better decisions about what to include in your New Year’s plan.
From a business perspective, you may want to establish more credibility, in which case you can decide to write more white papers and deliver more keynotes at industry events.
Some key questions you might want to ask yourself include:
- Who’s your audience?
- What do they want?
- How can you deliver more value?
- What was missing from last year?
- Have the needs of audience changed?
For more information about content strategy, check out: How To Develop A Content Strategy That Rocks!
Repurpose Content
From the audit you did, you’ll have a complete list of all your content. It gives an overview of what you can work with, and instead of constantly pushing out new content – take a look at what can be repurposed into other forms of content.
For example, instead of writing a blog post and leaving it alone after it’s done – why not make a SlideShare presentation out of it.
Alternatively, if you’re also podcasting, you can transcribe it and turn into a blog post. Another way to repurpose content is to slice a lengthy piece of content into smaller chunks and share them via social media.
There are loads of ways you can go about it, here are a few other ideas for you to check out: What To Publish When You’re Short On Ideas?
So there you have it, a short to-do list for all inbound marketers. What are your inbound marketing resolutions for next year? Let us know by commenting, and also don’t forget to like us on Facebook.
We’ll be back in January with more blog posts for you, and remember to rest up and relax. Happy Holidays everybody!
Photo by jonrawlinson via Flickr
