5 Ways to prepare your content strategy for the year ahead

Updated February 13th, 2024

Best ways to prepare your content strategy in 2024

As another year draws to a close, you may be wondering how best to analyse your marketing efforts and prepare for the year ahead. One area that you should certainly focus on as we head into 2018 is content marketing, and below, we’ve rounded up five ways to prepare your strategy.

#1 Use analytics to find your most popular posts

When building your website, you should have included a code to tracking software such as Google Analytics, as this will provide you with powerful data on your users and what they get up to when they visit your website. Use this data to find your most popular blog posts, and cross-reference with social media to find out which content was shared the most.

From this, you’ll be able to determine which types of content proved most popular, and prepare other content around these ideas of templates. For example, if your Halloween gift guide was especially popular this year, then you could roll out other gift guides next year for seasonal events and occasions such as Spring, Easter, Summer and Christmas.

#2 Refresh your older content 

Now that you have a list of your most popular content, you should review your blog posts and make a list of changes you’d like to make. Unless you post exclusively evergreen content, there is a chance that your material is out of date.

Perhaps a resource no longer exists, or there’s more up-to-date and accurate research to back up the points you wanted to make? Going back over your old content and refreshing it will keep your material relevant and current, which will ensure your bounce rate remains low when people click through to your site from Google.

#3 Write content in advance

Depending on the nature of your industry or the type of blog you’re maintaining, you should try to get ahead of the curve and write content in advance. If you aim to have January’s content prepared, proofed and scheduled in December, then you’ll be able to get ahead and keep your blog updated with relevant content. Plus, if you know that you’re always a month ahead, you can afford to take a week off from your content marketing efforts – news to the ears of anyone who is running their own business and trying to maintain a business as well as a marketing strategy.

If you don’t know where to start with preparing content in advance, suggest some blog posts and topic suggestions, and then download a content marketing calendar. From there, you will be able to prepare your content and schedule it around upcoming events and occasions, and schedule this new content on social media so that your brand is “always on”.

#4 Leverage user generated content 

User generated content is one of the most powerful forms of content marketing – it’s little wonder that brand engagement increases by up to 28% when users are exposed to UGC. You can take content from social media (for example, when a customer shares an image of themselves using your product) and create a blog post or social media campaign around it. Another idea to get people to create content for your brand is to run a competition (like a photography or blogging competition). Just remember to ask permission before you use someone else’s content.

#5 Start guest blogging 

If your content isn’t opening your brand to more potential customers, then you could try guest blogging. If you haven’t blogged on someone else’s website before, it’s simple: email them to ask if they’re accepting contributors, create a piece of valuable and relevant content for their website, add a link back to your website and voilà! There are a wide range of benefits of guest blogging for small business owners, including increased brand awareness, backlinks which will boost your website’s domain authority and SEO, and more referral traffic.

The more you prepare your content marketing efforts for the year ahead, the more success you will have with your campaign. So what are you waiting for? It’s time to get started with 1500+ Quality Blogs That Accept Guest Posts