7 content marketing tasks you'll forget to do (most likely)

When you run your own business and do your own marketing — you can get lost easily.

 

Both are essential for the growth of your brand or products and — in the end — for earning you more money. But both require a lot of attention to details, creativity and efficiency.

 

And you only have 24h per day. You can’t spend them all wondering what could be improved in your marketing — that’s a straight way to burnout.

 

And while I’m in no way a business expert — I can show you some ways to help you manage your content marketing in a way that is:

 

• creative
• efficient
• growth-focused

 

This year, I worked with 20+ businesses worldwide and helped them build efficient content marketing systems. Most of them overlooked the same tasks that stopped their growth.

 

I’ve gathered 7 of the most overlooked content marketing tasks in a checklist, so you can come back to it anytime. I hope this will help you avoid marketing problems a lot of small businesses struggle with. Make sure to save this checklist in your bookmarks!

 

Let’s dive in:

 

Optimize headlines

Good headlines can make or break your content.

 

You don’t have much time to catch people’s attention with your content. Headlines help you spark interest and make people click on them to see more.

And sometimes — that’s the beginning of the customer’s journey through your sales funnel.

 

My friend Andrew (@AndrewWriteCopy) created a fantastic guide for writing killer headlines:

 

Headline Writing 101

The ultimate beginner’s guide to writing effective headlines...

— Andrew | Copy & Conversions (@AndrewWriteCopy) May 10, 2022

 

Optimize readability

Once you get your audience hooked with a great headline, you can’t mess this up with unreadable body content.

 

There are many tools to check the readability of your blog posts and other long-form content (my favorite one is definitely Hemingway App.)

 

 

Repurpose old content

This blog post wouldn’t come to life if I didn’t use repurposing. Here's a LinkedIn post I created a couple of weeks ago:

 

 

 

 

There’s no need to come up with new content ideas every time. If you feel your content is worth sharing once again — you should absolutely do it.

 

Some people repost old content regularly with just a few tweaks. And there’s nothing wrong with it. Your new followers most likely didn’t know that thread you posted 3 months ago.

 

By repurposing, you can strengthen your message and showcase your expertise even more.

 

Focus on business goals

Why are you creating content?

 

Is the answer: “because everyone is doing it”?

 

If so — please stop and let me tell you something:

 

Unless each content piece you publish has a clear goal — there’s no point in creating it at all.

 

Without a strategy, you’ll only waste time on pointless content creation. And you’ll most likely be disappointed by your results.

 

Here’s a great guide on how to set goals for your content.

 

Create evergreen content (or find the already existing one)

Evergreen content is the most valuable content for any small brand that doesn’t have time for a steady, big stream of new content every week. Aiming for the “always on” long-form content, you ensure a good source of repurposing ideas that can be used at any time.

 

It’s another part of a killer content marketing strategy. To prevent breaks in your consistency, you need to ensure you have a great backlog of evergreen content ideas you can use in multiple channels at different times.

 

The most interesting part is: most brands already have some form of evergreen content created without even realizing it.

 

So, next time you scroll through your website, try to identify topics that can be considered “evergreen” for your business.

 

Delete outdated, useless content

While analyzing your website, it’s also good to pay attention to some outdated content pieces. Maybe some trends or news aren’t the “hot topics” anymore. Maybe the data inside your blog posts need some updating.

 

Keeping all your content fresh will showcase you actually care about the value you provide. Too many times, we see a blog done by a brand full of outdated, low-quality articles, forgotten somewhere on the last pages.

 

The thing is: Google doesn’t care about where the blog post is placed on your website. And it can show the content to a potential customer. You wouldn’t like the customer to get to know you from THIS angle, right? 😉

 

I personally use the R.O.T. score to determine if the content I’m auditing needs some pruning:

 

 

Use customer feedback for case studies

First of all: make sure to gather your customer feedback in 1 place.

 

This will help you get an overview of what your customers are saying about your brand, and help you determine positive and negative trends.

 

If you notice any feedback that stands out and want to know more about the customer’s story — that’s a perfect case study opportunity.

Just recently, I’ve compiled a thread about how to write a good case study, based on my experience with writing 15+ case studies this year:

 

Case studies are the no. 1 tool to boost sales at your startup.

But most people don't know how to write them.

Here are 7 steps to help you write case studies that will close the sales for you: pic.twitter.com/mfhazU6iUs

— Kuba 👨‍🏭 (@contentkuba) November 3, 2022

 

Where do you start improving your content?

As you may have noticed — all tips I’ve used here should be used on your website.

 

That wasn’t an accident.

 

Your website or blog is your business's most important OWNED media channel. Yet, most businesses seem to be focused more on earned (social media) and paid channels (ads).

 

That’s a big mistake that can hurt your business once your customers move through the sales funnel.

 

If you promise your audience something on social media or position yourself as a brand expert — you need to maintain the same quality of the message on your website.

It can feel amateurish if a brand boasts about its experience but has only poor-quality listicles.

Invest time and effort into your website and treat it as a content hub you can build upon with other formats and channels later.