Update Your Marketing Content: Strategies to Increase Your Reach

Crafting marketing content costs time, effort, and resources. You also have to create content on a consistent basis across multiple platforms if you want to have any hope of reaching your goals such as to increase your reach, improve your SEO, create a positive brand image, and, ultimately, improve revenue. If the content you create isn’t good enough, you waste valuable resources and opportunities. That’s why ensuring your content not only reaches your target market but motivates them to share your content and buy your products is crucial for your success. You want to create content to increase your reach by updating old content and creating fresh, valuable content.

In this article, we focus on how you can update old marketing content and create fresh content that meets your needs, as well as how you can best utilize your resources and increase your reach.

14 ways to use content marketing to increase your reach

In marketing, two communication goals stand out: reach and frequency.

Reach refers to the number of people in your target market who see your marketing content. In general, when you increase your reach, your performance across other metrics, such as sales, improves. Of course, performance improvements require two things:

1. The folks you reach are part of your target market. It does no good to send communication to folks who don’t have the need, money, authority, and desire for your products, which means they aren’t part of your target market. Nothing you say to someone outside your target market will impact performance.
2. The content you create motivates them to take desired actions, such as sharing, buying, or reviewing their purchases.

Frequency refers to the number of times an individual who is part of your target market is exposed to your content. While there’s a lot of debate regarding how much frequency is necessary to motivate your target market, most experts agree the minimum is around five times within a relatively short time frame since awareness of the content fades over time. Alternatively, too much exposure to the same content can result in burnout, which has negative consequences.

Let’s move on to ways you can increase your reach and, thereby, reach your goals.

1. Analyze your old content’s performance

Start by analyzing the performance of your old content when working on refreshing it. You need to have a bird’s-eye view of your previous content.

• How well-written and engaging is each post?
• Does the content have grammatical errors?
• How many resources did it consume?
• How well did it perform?
• Is the content still accurate and valuable to readers?

On a broader level, you might also want to analyze the content from an SEO perspective, writing perspective, and design perspective. Do a deep analysis, collect data, and create a report. This report will give you a clear view of what you were doing and what you may have missed.

2. Conduct SERP analysis

SERP analysis is invaluable when updating old content. SERP stands for search engine results page and refers to where your content appears on the page when users search for content related to your products. The higher up your content appears on the page, the more clicks you get.

Conducting a SERP analysis for individual pieces of content will give you insights into what is ranking at the top. You can understand what top-ranking content is offering the audience that your content isn’t.

This can include:

• The missing insights
• The missing headings
• A better structure
• missing keywords
• and other factors

Analyzing SERP will help you understand what the audience is looking for and how it is, allowing you to find ideas and gaps in your competitors’ work and ensure that your content covers them.

3. Keep your audience in mind

Content is written for an audience, not for oneself. Who is the audience anyway and how can you meet their needs? When crafting content, it is essential to acknowledge your audience’s preferences, behavior, concerns, and various aspects.

That’s why you should research your audience before fixing your old (and creating new) content. Use your research to build market personas that include not only demographics but also lifestyle and information on what platforms can help improve your reach to each persona.

4. Focus on introductions

Quality introductions and meta descriptions are indispensable for content. When creating or updating content, ensure your intro paragraph clearly lays out your topic and what your readers will find valuable when they read the entire content. Meta descriptions are designed to highlight the value you bring to the topic and guide search engines in categorizing your content. These show up in search results below the link to provide some context surrounding the content.

Ensure your keywords show prominently in both the introduction and meta description so it’s clear upfront what your topic is and how you provide value to readers. Catchy introductions can be used for any content (e.g., blog posts, YouTube videos, and social media posts) to captivate readers from the start.

Introductions set the tone for your content. They welcome your audience and are your first opportunity to make an impression and engage them.

A compelling introduction is:

1. brief
2. concise
3. addresses the issue or question
4. provides a clear idea about the content
5. encourages readers to read further

A lousy introduction is long, vague, disinteresting, lacks value, and can cause readers to bounce off your page.

Avoid the following mistakes when writing introductions:

1. Long and wordy introductions
2. Never-ending background stories and reasonings (i.e., why someone should buy a product)
3. Irrelevancy and off-topic discussion
4. Promises: (i.e., in this article, I will show you the trick.). It works. I will show you. (You will be able to use it.)
5. Providing no value

Additionally, here’s how you should write your introductions:

1. Keep it short
2. Keep background stories concise and give only two to three lines of reason
3. Keep it relevant to the topic
4. Use at most one line for the promise
5. Provide value: Use bullet points to sum up the key points of the content, write a summary, or give away the “recipe,” etc.
6. Write a concise introduction for a listicle article: Listicle articles are unique in that readers know what to expect from the content. Introductions can be unnecessary. You can shorten any long-form content by extracting the key points from your list. This makes it easier to write a brief, engaging introduction that draws readers in without stating the obvious.

5. Treat titles as hooks

Titles have the power to hook people even before they start reading the actual content. They are your hooks. A title is the first thing your audience sees. So, if it is compelling enough, it can steal the clicks even if it ranks third on a SERP. On the other hand, a bland title can make people not want to click, even if it ranks number one. From an SEO standpoint, you need a title that includes the keywords you want to rank for and contains no more than 60 characters.

Hence, writing captivating titles is essential for improving content.

6. Add visuals

Other than improving titles and introductions, go out of your way to add helpful visuals to your content. Visuals can speak clearly and loudly than text. The vivid details a video presents to users can help them understand content much better than standalone text can. Don’t worry if you don’t have enough visual resources; you can create basic videos using images and text with little effort using free tools like Adobe Express and Canva or more expensive ones like Premier Pro. The following YouTube video explains how:

Other than videos, utilize the power of diverse visual formats, such as images, graphs, infographics, and gifs, to improve your content and make it more relevant and comprehensive. Google also loves visuals and tends to rank content with visuals higher. Visual social media uploads are also much more engaging than text posts, attracting more people and converting more leads.

7. Add examples & proofs

It’s worth mentioning that adding examples and case studies to your content can strengthen its narrative. Sometimes, information can feel incomplete without examples. For instance, if I am talking about how mixing two colors makes a third one, a suitable example would be blue and yellow, making green. However, some examples are better given in a visual format. Explainer videos can demonstrate the proper use of your product. Hence, buyers get the most from their purchases, and prospective buyers feel more comfortable purchasing because they can see how easy it is to get results.

Often, examples serve as proof of your narrative. So, don’t just give examples; use suitable formats according to what you are trying to demonstrate.

Utilize different formats to give examples, such as:

• Graphs
• Case studies
• Stats
• Client testimonials
• Product images, videos, etc.

Clear and helpful examples make the content more understandable and user-friendly.

8. Work with subject-matter experts

Working with subject matter experts (SME’s) is the best way to cover a subject online, especially if you are trying to rank on a search engine. This is because subject matter experts understand a subject inside out. They have “first-hand” experience in a matter, which is also required by Google’s E-E-A-T standards.

Subject matter experts can address a matter way better than others, allowing you to build topical authority and become the thought leader in your niche.

9. Optimize for SEO

One primary practice for increasing your reach is optimizing it for SEO. If you don’t know, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the practice of making a piece of content search engine-friendly so that it ranks well on SERPs. Clicks from these SERPs are what’s called organic reach, which, for most brands, represents about 53% of all traffic to the website, which means this is a high priority when creating content. Here are some elements that go into calculating your rank:

• keywords match user intent
• quality signals such as time on site, backlinks, and others
• authority, which comes from including links to quality websites and your domain authority
• experience, including the age of the website and the frequency of adding fresh content

10. Refresh outdated content

After understanding previously missed opportunities, mistakes, and your audience, it is time to update the old content affected by these factors. At a glance, here’s what refreshing old content can include:

• Fixing grammar
• Updating outdated information & covering recent trends
• Adding relevant & removing irrelevant information
• Covering missed headings & subheadings
• Covering missed topics & subtopics
• Improving keyword density & adding missed keywords
• Adding statistics & quotations to support your statements
• Linking to sources
• Adding examples & testimonies if you missed them previously
• Adding visuals and removing the ones that add no value
• Fixing the tone and voice of the content
• Incorporating ideas your competitors are using

Generally, you add the things that make your content people-first and remove the things that trouble people.

Pro tip: Utilize AI tools to cut down on the effort of updating old content. For example, a generative AI tool can quickly generate heading ideas, a sentence rephraser can quickly rephrase poorly worded text, and a grammar checker can help you fix the grammatical errors in your content.

11. Recreate what deserves to be

Revitalizing some of the old content can take a significant amount of effort. It might be better to recreate a piece of old content and delete the original if:

• Refreshing is less effort- and resource-friendly than recreating it
• It requires significant changes
• It is entirely dead regarding its quality and performance
• Its URL is no longer relevant

However, if the content is already ranking on SERPs, even if not high, it is better to revitalize it.

12. Remove or redirect dead content

You might want to remove a piece of content or redirect it to your latest post on the same topic if it is doing more harm than good. Here are some scenarios in which redirecting or removing a post might be a better solution than updating it:

• Your target audience has changed
• The user personas have changed significantly
• The content cannot be updated and is damaging the business’s reputation
• A better post on the same topic already exists on your website
• The overall structure of the content is no longer relevant to your needs and should be changed

13. Develop a content strategy

Develop a content strategy that addresses each group of consumers that make up your target market and create content that addresses each stage in the buyer journey.

A content strategy is a roadmap that helps you understand what kind of content you want to create, what keywords you want to target, and which topics you want to cover. A simple blog content strategy can help set goals, clarify your perspective, and allocate resources effectively.

Create a content calendar using this template to ensure you meet the goals of your content strategy. A calendar ensures you never face a blank screen without knowing what to write about and that you consistently hit all your targeted groups and buying stages.

Monitor and adjust the content

Lastly, monitor and update the quality of your content. Adjusting your content is crucial for maintaining its relevance and performance and ensuring it meets your audience’s needs. Here are some essential tips to help you monitor and adjust your content:

1. Set clear goals: Setting clear goals can help you achieve your objectives, such as increasing website traffic or generating leads. Monitoring relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) can also help.
2. Use analytics tools: Tools like Google Analytics can track your website’s traffic, user behavior, and conversions to help you understand the content’s performance. SEO tools like Google Search Console, SEMrush, and Ahrefs help track keyword rankings, backlinks, and search traffic. All of this data can be used to pinpoint which pieces of content might not be performing well. Social media analytics tools can help you understand what users like and engage with the most.
3. Use audience feedback: audience feedback from surveys and polls allows you to perceive your content through the audience’s eyes. Furthermore, monitor user comments on your content and pay attention to recurring suggestions.
4. Conduct content audits: audit your content to assess its performance and relevance regarding changing trends. Remove or update outdated content.

By following these tips, you can ensure your content remains updated and fresh throughout the seasons.

Conclusion

This article highlights how updating your marketing content is vital for it to perform well on marketing channels. We discussed 14 proven strategies you can utilize to improve your poorly performing content and re-utilize it to increase your audience reach. Follow these strategies to make the most of your resources and achieve marketing success.

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