Heat Up Your Content Marketing Game During the Summer Lull: 5 Things To Do
People should take vacations. It’s a healthy thing to do. Of course, doing so often disrupts the regular work of the content marketers left behind. When you face a forced lull, do these five things.
1. Dig into your analytics manually
Sure, you can pull a lot of automated analytics reports about your content. But I bet you don’t get every number you want in the package or format you want.
For example, I have a client who distributes an email newsletter through a marketing hub provider. The platform’s analytics list open and click-through rates alongside each issue title. But there’s no option to create a report with the results from every issue in a single spreadsheet.
To compare results or identify trends, I’d have to manually enter the data into a spreadsheet. It’s a time-sucking task that I never get around to doing.
I hired some help this summer and put that task on his to-do list. When he finishes, I’ll have a big-picture view I can use to update the editorial strategy.
2. Listen to and watch your content
Ensuring content accessibility is a smart marketing strategy – and the right thing to do.
You probably write alt text for your images, use Pascal case for your hashtags (#SummerLull, not #summerlull), and provide captions for your videos. (If not, start there.)
But have you ever experienced your content as people who have a vision or hearing impairment might? Take the time to do it now.
3. Create almost-finished evergreen or predictable content
Get a head start now on creating some content pieces you know you’ll need in the next six months or so.
Identify planned content that doesn’t involve many other people (scheduling time with them can be hard in peak vacation times). Content pieces that are updates or refreshes of things you wrote last year are good candidates, whether they’re articles, infographics, videos, e-books, or other types.
Then get to work. Note what might need to be reviewed or updated closer to the publishing date.
4. Transform top-performing content into other formats
Convert some of the highest-performing content on your primary channel into new formats or try publishing on lesser-used channels:
- Turn a how-to blog into a step-by-step infographic.
- Turn a video into a handful of images and publish a carousel on Instagram.
- Turn a webinar into an article.
Yes, these are content repurposing opportunities, but they’re also ways to discover new audience preferences for formats or distribution channels.
5. Add content accouterments
Maybe you’ve met your publishing deadlines by skipping small but important aspects of the content – timestamps, episode descriptions, captions, customized excerpts, meta descriptions, etc. Wait, you’d never do that, right?
OK, let’s say you’ve inherited a program where those elements weren’t understood or valued. Maybe your predecessor felt their absence wouldn’t affect content performance or even be noticed. After all, if someone fails to write a caption, the public-facing page doesn’t say “caption needed here” (unless something’s gone very wrong).
Even with the best intentions, you typically don’t have time to go back and finish adding those content accouterments. And if no one tracked which assets need these little content updates, the task takes even longer.
Try this approach to tackle the updates during your slow time:
- Create a checklist of must-have items for each content asset type.
- Decide on the period you want to address (last six months, a year, a set of years, etc.)
- Create an inventory of assets that need review.
- Review each item for all the necessary elements and check them off as completed. Continue reading →
