How often do you review your content strategy?
We like to look at ours at the beginning of each year. It’s a habit that we’ve got into at Content 10x and it’s proven to be hugely beneficial.
In fact, after reviewing our plan for 2023 we decided on some big changes.
In this blog post, we give three steps for efficiently and effectively reviewing your content strategy as well as explaining the changes we’re making… and why it’s so important that we do!
Press play to listen to the podcast episode.
Three steps for reviewing your content strategy:
1. Analyze the Data
If you have a podcast, look at all the analytics and data around downloads and listeners. If you publish YouTube videos, there's lots of YouTube data for people viewing and subscribing, which is helpful.
If you are focused more on email marketing, then look at your email data – open rates, click through rates, it should all be there.
If you are focused on social media then each platform has different analytics available and there’s lots of third party tools that provide detailed analytics too.
If you focus on search then look at Google Analytics.
The point is, know what data is important to you and work out how to get hold of it, and how you will measure it.
There’s so much available and it can give you enormous insight and direction for your content strategy.
2. Ask your Audience
Data only tells you half of the truth. You need to speak to people too. There are lots of ways to engage with your audience:
Run polls or a survey on your social media channels
Send an email to your subscribers asking for feedback
Directly contact some individuals who you know consume your content and ask them if they have time to discuss and provide feedback.
You can engage a third party if you want to gather feedback from your audience and customers, if you have the budget.
3. Read the research
There's lots of useful, informative research that looks into what's happening in the world of content, delving deep into podcast marketing, video marketing, social media marketing, and more.
If there's a certain area where you want to make changes, see if you can find some reputable research into what is working.
For example, we’ve been looking closely at a report recently called the Fourth Annual LinkedIn Algorithm Research 2022 by Richard Van Der Blom, who’s the founder of Just Connecting. It’s interesting for anyone creating content and building an audience and network on LinkedIn.
We found this report so useful and it helped inform some of the changes and updates that we are making to our content strategy for 2023.
… which quite nicely provides a segway into our announcement!
Changes to our content for 2023
The Content 10x podcast is going to move from a weekly to bi-weekly schedule!
After five years and 271 episodes of creating and hosting a weekly podcast – this isn’t a decision that we’ve come to lightly.
When the show launched Amy decided on a weekly schedule because she wanted to share a unique point of view on content repurposing each week and become known as an authority. In fact, she wanted us to become known as THE authority on content repurposing.
Weekly made total sense then because it was about making an impact, being consistent, and building up a useful content library.
It was also practicing what we preached and being empathetic when it came to our clients, by having a similar content marketing approach to those that we support.
We found it has been good for experimenting with repurposing as well.
We have loads of content each week that we can repurpose in various different ways… and we have been able to take what we learned and share that with our clients to improve their services.
But...what got you here doesn’t get you there, as they say! The time has come to try something new.
We’re going to follow our own advice when it comes to doing more with less.
At the end of 2022 Amy gave her main content marketing predication to Content Marketing Institute for the year ahead and it was this:
Amy had a great conversation with Robert Rose on The Content 10x Podcast as well, talking about knowing when enough is enough with regards to your content.
So, as 2022 drew to a close, and we reviewed our 2023 content plan so much was pointing in this direction it was hard to ignore!
Each of our podcast episodes takes a lot of time - it requires planning, researching, scripting, writing, recording, editing, post production and repurposing and so on – it’s at least 20 hours an episode across the team….
So by making it bi-weekly we are saving time….and this is time that we want to invest in the followings ways.
1. Improving quality of episode topics
First, we want to invest in improving the quality of the episode topics, more research, more understanding our audience and more focus on quality outputs of the content itself.
It's not just the topics, but better quality outputs overall – there’s always the chance to raise the bar.
2. Spending more time on other content
We want to spend more time on other content that we want to create. For example, we have thought leadership content, our case studies, as well as the new season of the B2B Content Strategist podcast, which is in the planning stages.
We are also going to have more time to put into repurposing the content we’ve already created – we’re sitting on 271 podcast episodes and blog posts and all the relevant, valuable content that comes with those.
We're going to see how we can bring that great content to the forefront again when we move to this bi-weekly schedule.
3. More video podcasts
Time to turn the camera back on! We're going to start videoing some of our podcast episodes, moving away from solo episodes being audio-only and guest interviews being on video – to having some solo episodes as video podcasts too. This will result in more video content to repurpose for our social media and YouTube channel.
Then our podcasts will have more of a ‘how to’ focus, and we plan on more how-to tutorial videos for YouTube.
4. More of a focus on LinkedIn
Then finally, we’re going to be focusing more on LinkedIn and getting the balance between Amy’s personal profile and the Content 10x page right. Plus we want to start creating more multimedia posts for LinkedIn for Amy’s thought leadership content.
So many changes and we can’t wait! What do you think of our new direction? We’d love to hear. Plus tell us any changes you’ve made to your content strategy for 2023.