You must consistently and intentionally refresh your web content.
Because, over time, content starts to decay, becomes outdated, and loses traffic.
And that means you stop generating revenue from your content.
But where do you start?
How do you decide what needs to be updated?
Here are 3 lessons my content marketing team learned when we started refreshing and repurposing content at Global Call Forwarding.
Content refreshing at Global Call Forwarding
About Global Call Forwarding:
Global Call Forwarding is a cloud telephony provider that offers phone and cloud communication services to SMBs and enterprises.
There are tons of companies in this space so we often compete with larger organizations that have large marketing teams and funding.
Our best bet at getting in front of the right customers?
Appear high on Google.
Most of these companies create large volumes of content faster, grow their domain authority, and advertise more – giving them an edge at the top of Google.
As a result, high-value keywords are much harder to rank for and we must be strategic in our content marketing.
Quantity does not equal quantity.
To boost our online visibility, we spent the better half of 2021 evaluating how we approach our content.
This meant being more intentional with every piece of content, whether we were repurposing and refreshing old content or writing new articles.
So, what did we focus on and what did we learn?
1 – Take time to understand your audience
To improve our messaging, we wanted to delve deeper into who uses our products.
We got together and assessed our target audience and ideal customer profiles.
Guess what?
There were a few gaps.
For instance, we had a whole content cluster for a certain target audience. But we didn’t have many clients from that industry.
Did we need to improve outreach efforts or redirect our content focus to a different audience segment?
We also spoke with customers to understand how and why they use our services.
What problems were they solving?
What features helped them the most?
These conversations helped us find new keywords and language that customers use when describing our products and services.
We started leveraging this language into our existing content and writing new content for these keywords, even if they didn’t have high volume.
Why target low-volume keywords?
Three reasons:
- They align with our content strategy.
- The right people are searching for it.
- It’s not too competitive we won’t rank.
2 – Adopt a product-led content approach
We had to make our products more visible to prospects and customers.
Earlier in our strategy, we didn’t include screenshots of our control panel in any of our content.
This meant users didn’t know what they would be working with or how to achieve what they wanted with us.
Our sales and support teams highlighted the need for such content since customers asked for a demo or onboarding support.
They’d never seen our product.
We updated our content with screenshots of the control panel in articles highlighting our core features and giving them visual support.
Content refreshing leads to content repurposing
After refreshing content, we saw obvious opportunities to repurpose that content.
We made new knowledge base articles.
We created videos and started a YouTube channel.
We focussed on product-led content resources to help:
- Prospects see what they can implement with our product.
- Customers use features and customize their phone system.
The benefits?
These product tutorials started ranking on Google, gaining views from non-customers.
This way, we refreshed old blog posts with new content features (images and videos) while establishing a new distribution channel.
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3 – Repurpose content to extract more value
As we refreshed our content, we considered how to reach more customers: repurpose content and improve distribution.
For some, it meant expanding the content or including images.
For others, it meant repurposing content into a different medium. This included both long-form and short-form content.
For instance, we discovered that our blog, knowledge base, and YouTube channel could work to support each other.
In fact, we were able to refresh some of our blog content and how-to guides into short explainer videos.
We did the same with our knowledge base articles demonstrating how to set up, update, or customize features.
We then used these videos as visual aids in our blog content residing on the second page on Google.
When we added videos to our blog posts, we started ranking higher.
In some cases, even if our article took time to arrive on the first page, the video was almost immediately included in the videos section of Google.
We then converted these videos to sales enablement content.
In fact, our onboarding page was a combination of knowledge base articles and how-to blog posts.
We’ve even used our product pages and case studies to create shareable brochures.
TLDR: We used one piece of content to create others and support customers in different stages of the buying process and with different search intents.
In doing so, we ranked higher on Google and reached more customers.
Is content refreshing and repurposing worth it?
Yes!
Updating your content help you find more customers and generate more revenue.
When you refresh your content with clear intent, you improve its search engine rankings as well as build useful content for customers making their way down the funnel.
The key is understanding what each piece of content can potentially do.
This is where content metrics, keyword analysis, and industry knowledge work together.
Don’t refresh for the sake of updating.
Be intentional with what needs to be refreshed or repurposed, and consider the best way to do this.
- Pay attention to your audience.
- Identify gaps in your content.
- Compare with competitors.
Then create a plan to use existing content to bridge these gaps.
The result?
Compelling, comprehensive content that educates and converts prospects into lifelong customers.
Sounds worth it, right?
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