How To Rectify A Stale Content Strategy

Content, content, content. It’s all we see these days, and has become a major force in marketing. Even the piece you’re reading right now is content. For this reason, it’s very easy to fall into bad habits as you develop your own campaign and strategy. Worse, if it’s not cared for and personalised, it’s so easy for your approach to become a tiresome effort that people only ignore.

If you’ve noticed those bad habits have developed over time, it’s cause for change. You might think your content is poorly written, your videos aren’t so informative, or perhaps no one is visiting your infographic pages. That’s not to say all content should be earning you five sales per hour per piece, but the portfolio should be having some kind of effect.

How do you make that change? In this post, we’ll discuss that and more:

Take An Impartial Look At What’s Being Published

We’d recommend going back through what’s been published over the last six months or a year and really looking at it with fresh eyes. Ask yourself some questions – are the topics still relevant to what the audience cares about now, or have things moved on while the content stayed in the same place? Does it read well or is the content stuffed with keywords?

It’s easy for strategy to get stuck in a rut where the same types of posts are being created over and over because they worked once, but audiences get tired of seeing the same angles repeatedly.

For insight, it’s worth checking which pieces are still getting traffic and which ones have completely dropped off. Older content that’s still pulling in visitors might just need updating with new information or a refreshed perspective. Though posts that never gained traction might reveal topics that weren’t as interesting as they seemed at the time, and it’s totally fine if you remove that.

Consider The Questions You Receive Most

You may have been creating content based on what seems important internally, without checking if that’s what the audience is curious about. Marketing firms know that people are asking questions in search engines, in social media comments, in forums, and those questions are giving away exactly what they want to know more about. A stale strategy is generally founded on a disconnect between what’s being published and what people are actively looking for.

Tools that show search trends and keyword data can be helpful here, but so can just paying attention to the comments section or customer support inquiries. If the same questions keep coming up, that’s content waiting to be create, so pass it on to your marketing team and talk about it!

Refresh The Formats Being Used

Written blog posts are great (hi!) but if that’s the only format being used, it can start feeling a bit samey after a while. Audiences consume content in different ways depending on where they are and what they’re doing, so mixing up the formats can breathe new life into your braned approach. If you’ve relied on constant reel posting, more polished video content might reach people who don’t want to read long articles. If you’ve never developed infographics, they can make complex information more digestible and shareable.

Of course, some other examples of content you could focus on include podcasts, case studies, interactive tools, or simple featured articles on your website. They can all be ways to present information that feels fresh. The same core message or topic can be repurposed into multiple formats too, which extends its reach if you’re smart about it. If everything has been text-based for a long time, experimenting with other formats might not be bad place to start.

Look At Where Content Is Being Sent

Creating good content is only half the job, despite all your efforts, because it also needs to be put in front of people who’ll see it. A strategy can go stale if content is being published in the same places with the same promotion tactics but your audiences have moved to different platforms. What worked on one social platform a few years ago might not be as effective now. Think of how many advertisers pulled out of X, formerly Twitter, when it became clear it would be quite a toxic political environment (even more so than before). Maybe your customers went with that.

If you want to try again to get out there and reach people, perhaps you could try again with email newsletters, social media platforms, online communities, and partnerships with other sites. They can all be good ways to get content seen by more people. Sometimes content is being created but not promoted enough and not correctly formatted in the proper way (which we’ll go into later), so it just sits on a website hoping people will stumble across it. 

Revisit The Publishing Schedule

You have to be reliable with content but not overburden the audience or burn out the team creating it. We hope we’re not being too rude by saying that most people have lives outside your firm and have little time to be promoted to. That means a stale strategy sometimes happens because the publishing schedule doesn’t match up with how much quality content can realistically be produced or viewed. Pushing out three posts a week that are just okay isn’t as valuable as publishing one really solid piece that people will want to read and share.

Though alternatively to that, publishing too infrequently can make it hard to stay on people’s radar, and they might forget about the content altogether between posts. Finding the right balance does take a little time for your own firm, but it’s worth looking at whether the current schedule is working or if adjustments would help. Prioritize quality above all if you can, though.

Consider Collaboration

You don’t have to do it all alone, believe it or not. If you have room for it, working with other creators, businesses, or experts can be great for new perspectives to help a content strategy that’s been running in circles. To use an example, if you open a blog up to guest posts, interviews, collaborative projects, or just featuring other team insights, it can make content feel more dynamic and less like it’s coming from just one voice all the time. You never know, others might even bring their audience to the content as well.

Of course, such partnerships can take different forms depending on what makes sense. Some might involve co-creating content together. In terms of outreach, link building strategies, working with services such as fatjoe’s link building suite, can also help content reach new audiences through a sustained approach towards SEO strategy and authority. It helps if you know all the promotion is being taken care of, so you can worry about the content itself.

Update Old Content That’s Still Relevant

We mentioned removing old content before, but not every piece of content needs to be brand new to be valuable. It’s still perfectly find to begin going back through older posts that are still getting some traffic and updating them with current information, any new and relevant examples, or improved formatting if you notice the past effort is a bit off.

Obviously, that’s more efficient than constantly creating everything from scratch, because the foundation is already there and just needs refreshing appropriately.  That’s not to say you won’t remove some posts that have outlived their purpose. You might have a long history of posts on Covid advice, which is hopefully redundant now (touch wood!). Either way, it’s a good use of resources and can improve the overall quality of what’s available and reduce the backlog a bit.

Pay Attention To Technical Performance

Remember that SEO is often defined by how well your web pages work as well, so if they load slowly, are hard to navigate on mobile devices, or have broken links scattered throughout old posts, it hurts your ranking. It also frustrates any organic visitors, and that’s best to avoid, as all this can easily and quietly undermine a strategy without being immediately obvious.

Put together checks on site speed, mobile responsiveness, and internal linking, and you’ll no doubt see a few problems that are easy to fix. Moreover, making sure everything is accessible and easy to use helps content reach its best potential, because people aren’t getting frustrated and clicking away before they’ve had a chance to engage with it.

Experiment & Be Willing To Try New Things

Ultimately, a stale content strategy often stays stale because there’s a reluctance to try things that feel unfamiliar or risky. Sticking with what’s been done before feels safer, but it doesn’t usually lead to different results, which is generally the definition of staleness. Maybe you have to run your own blog and write your own posts as the head of the firm once in a while, or celebrate events you’ve run with debriefing posts and a photo gallery.

Not every experiment is going to work, and that’s fine, the point is learning what connects and what doesn’t, then adjusting based on what the data and audience feedback are showing. Do that and you’ll have a good idea for where to go next.

With this advice, we believe you’ll rectify any stale content strategy!