How long have you been working from the same content marketing strategy? Because of the effort it can take to create one, many businesses end up leaving their strategy for years without revamping it. This is contrary to the recommendation from the Content Marketing Institute to revisit your strategy often and give it a periodic tune-up.

As business returns to normal after the Christmas period, your brand is probably looking to the year ahead and defining their strategic direction. Why not use the new year as a time to review your content marketing strategy and ensure it’s up to date? To begin the realignment of your content marketing strategy, make sure you consider the following factors:

1) Have your business objectives changed?

If it’s been a whole year since you created your content marketing strategy, it’s likely your business objectives might have shifted from what was previously documented.

This will be highly influential to the reshaping of your strategy, as business objectives are the backbone of any successful content marketing strategy. If your business objectives have shifted drastically, you’ll need to shift the audiences you target and tactics you use. In some cases, it may even be necessary to write a whole new strategy.

2) Could you use new measurement tools?

Have you encountered any tools in the past year that could improve the quality of your measurement? Your measurement will be the proof of whether your content marketing strategy was effective; if you’ve acquired new skills or capabilities you need to add these to your processes and documented strategies.

If you’ve moved from one stage of your strategy to another, it may be time to start measuring a whole new goal. Revisit tools you planned to use in this stage and consider whether these are still the best available.

3) What content worked last year, what didn’t, and why?

An important part of reviewing and realigning your content marketing strategy is identifying what in your initial plan was a success and what was a failure. With this information in mind, see if you can identify why these successes and failures happened, and apply this knowledge to your strategy.

Do your results uncover things you didn’t know about your audience? Do your successes indicate patterns of their behaviour you weren’t aware of? If so, it may be time to go back and substantiate your findings with extra research.

4) What has changed in social media?

Almost all content marketing strategies rely on social media channels to distribute content. For this reason it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse and update your strategies according to new social media changes. Each year we see changes across all kinds of platforms in social media, and the major from 2015 include:

New trends may unlock new opportunities for targeting, distribution and amplification of your content. If your business could benefit from the use of any new social media features, include them in your strategy so your team involved in execution can follow suit.

If you’d like help re-vamping your content marketing strategy, contact Lush Digital Media. We’re constantly new ways to improve upon content marketing.