Christmas is a distant memory, the New Year festivities are over and working life rumbles relentlessly on: 2017 is here
The beginning of any New Year can be a dispiriting time. Improbable new dietary restrictions, the bloated aftermath of yuletide overindulgence and the unbearable weight of unattainable resolutions are just some of the ingredients in the bitter cocktail of New Year gloom. Who could find opportunity amid such misery? Content marketers, of course.
The same New Year customs evoking dread for many can represent beacons of optimism in the world of content marketing. Give a content marketing twist to your New Year goals and banish any early January blues.
Detox
Cleansing your body of accumulated Christmas calories can be a thankless way to start the year. But, for content marketers, the prospect of cleansing key websites, print outlets and social media of low quality content is enough to get pulses racing.
The return to work in January brings with it a wealth of analytics data to get stuck into, illuminating notable successes and failures from the past 12 months. Now is the time to expose the previous year’s ailing content and zoom in on what went well.
Unlike the monotony of replacing beer and chocolate with smoothies and kale, starting a New Year diet rich in insight and analytics gives content marketers the strength they need to take an axe to last year’s more feeble content offerings.
Resolutions
The sudden flurry of unrealistic goals that people set themselves on 1 January tends to compound rather than combat New Year woe. Content marketers, however, have a more pleasing range of options available.
On the one hand, pursuing new clients and greater content reach throughout 2017 can provide objectives for content marketing teams to rally behind. Other goals, such as increasing content output and experimenting with new formats, can be initiated immediately.
Producing more content for a greater number of clients is no common or garden resolution. Turn your resolutions into a New Year revolution by setting out an ambitious stall for your content marketing efforts in 2017.
Invest
Gym memberships crying out to be used, language textbooks longing to be opened and musical instruments begging to be tooted are all examples of well intentioned New Year investments that quickly become relics of delusional buyers’ short-lived enthusiasms.
However, the world of content marketing is full of unmined resources waiting to be exploited. Developing trends like virtual reality, automation and influencer advertising promise to revolutionise content marketing in years to come.
So, it is important that content marketers seize the moment and invest to ensure they are riding the tide of these trends. If not, they could be the ones who find themselves gathering dust as the market moves forward without them.
Persevere
Whether you’re on a detox drive, desperately clinging on to your resolutions or beginning to wonder why you bothered buying that trumpet, there is a clearly established pattern for all New Year ambitions: blundering commitment in the first week of January, struggling by the second, regret in the third and humiliating capitulation by the fourth.
But persevering with your content aspirations can quickly pay off. Dispatch with lagging content, resolve to reach more consumers in more creative ways and plan out investment in your company’s future. Following through with these aims can all help overwhelm the New Year blues by paving the way for a great 2017.
