Resuscitate Your Underperforming Content Using These Proven Digital Defibrillators

Published by Jacqueline Lee on Tuesday, February 13, 2024 in Content Marketing.

Just because your content bombed doesn't mean it's worthless. Here's how to extract greatness from your poorly performing posts.

It happens to everyone: You funnel promising content through every available social network and you get crickets. This eerie silence from your digital audience might tempt you to declare your content dead on arrival, but that wouldn't be wise. There are a myriad of ways to repurpose stale content. Give your work the chance to live another day by administering some content CPR.

See also: Writers, Here's 7 Ways to Beef Up Your Blog Posts

Make It Evergreen

Readers love to read about the day's news in your industry, but if everyone's publishing about a hot topic, your content will be suffocated. Review your content for evergreen ideas that could generate long-lasting value.

For example, if your blog post about LeBron James returning to Cleveland barely registered a blip on the social scene, repurpose it into an evergreen post about pro-athletes like LeBron who left their native teams, played in a faraway location and came home again.

Present It Using Another Medium

Content built on great ideas can stumble when it's presented in the wrong format. A 1,500-word blog post might falter, but a five-minute video interview with your CEO could bring the topic back to life.

Brainstorm some ways to repackage your content and deliver it using another medium. You could convert your content into a SlideShare deck or use it to create a podcast.

Add Length

A lot of digital noise competes for your customers' limited attention spans. However, it's a mistake to assume that customers only want short-form content. According to data from Medium, a growing social-blogging platform, the most commonly read posts contain about 1,600 words and take about seven minutes to read.

Conduct more research for your blog post. Interview some experts. The more you discover about the subject of your blog, the greater chance you'll come across information that will attract and delight your readers.

See also: How to Convey Depth in a Tiny Tweet, Facebook Post & More

Change Your Target Audience

The right content presented to the wrong people can result in a marketing fatality. However, by reviving your content for the right audience, you just might extend its life. Choose a piece of underperforming content and brainstorm ways to reframe it for different audiences.

For example, if you marketed the content to consumers when a B2B audience would be better, then polish it up for your B2B connections and share it with your LinkedIn network.

See also: Millennials to Baby Boomers: Create Content for Your Audience's Generation

Optimize for Search

If you create content for inbound marketing while failing to optimize it for search, then your work will breathe its last before your customers ever find it.

Take some time to optimize your copy for your customers' search queries. Use tools like data markup to make content easy for search engines to index. If your business has a local presence, incorporate geographic information into your copy.

Add a Call-to-Action

Many companies design content to build goodwill and provide value for their customers. However, they fail to guide customers toward completing the content's objective.

If you want customers to visit your e-commerce site, then provide a link to your site and ask for the click. Sometimes, the easiest way to revive flagging content is to tell your audience what to do with it.

Remember: Time spent on ill-performing content is not time wasted. There are likely good ideas hidden in underperforming content -- the key is to recognize which pieces of your content stand best on their own.

Do you have content CPR success stories? Please share them with us below.