Check your content marketing before September hits

We’re in the dog days of summer right now. Time to analyze your content marketing strategy and improve for the rest of 2016.

A common content marketing trap is focusing on quantity over quality. Content that provides value to your target market should always be your number one goal. Use this summertime downtime to ask yourself these questions:

What were the most popular pieces of content you created in the past six months?

You’ll want to judge your content’s popularity by the number of clicks, visitors, shares, and/or downloads it gets.

Try to take into account differences in distribution strategy, budget, or even time-of-year. You should judge what’s working relative to these factors.

Why were these content pieces popular?

There are a few common reasons a content piece could perform well.

Timely: Your content addresses a topic that is hot on everyone’s lips. For example, when Pokémon Go was first released we wrote about it with a marketing spin.

Valuable: Your content provides a lot of insightful, actionable tips for your target market. The pieces you put more effort into will often be more popular.

Unique: Your content offers up a fresh perspective based on your expertise. When there’s nothing else like it on the web, it will be more popular.

Entertaining: Your content makes readers laugh. Comedy done right has huge appeal and adds character to your content.

Your content should always try to hit these points, but some pieces will excel more than others for these reasons.

What can you do next with your content marketing?

Take what you’ve learned and then take a risk with your content. If you see that certain themes or styles are working, experiment further and see how they fare.

When we looked at our content two pieces stood out: Chronic Lateness Syndrome is Costing Your Business and Stryve’s “Get Shit Done Wednesdays” Time Blocking Policy Changed How We Work. We proved that general business tips have a wider appeal than granular digital marketing blogs. We also learned that highlighting our company culture and personality made for more enjoyable reading. So now we’re looking for more ways to include company culture in our content strategy.

Use any downtime you can get to stop and think critically about your content strategy. Hope these tips help!