Evaluating Your Content Marketing Goals with the Season Changes
There are many reasons why you shouldn’t wait to update and evaluate your content marketing goals until a new year. One of the biggest reasons that you don’t want to wait that long is if you are steering off course, it will be difficult to catch the problem and rein it in. Instead, you ought to revisit goals with every change of seasons – that is to say, quarterly.
Why Use Seasons to Cue Review Sessions?
The change in seasons presents us with natural markers for reviewing goals and checking our strategy. They also (very roughly) divide the year up into four segments. This means that, at the very least, you are checking progress on your company’s content goals every three months. If something isn’t working, you can scrap it. If something is working, you can keep doing more of it.
Seasonal Goal Check-Ins Present Good Times for Planning Seasonal Content and Marketing Strategies
When you’re checking in seasonally rather than annually, you can also put plans in place for seasonal content and marketing efforts. If you know that for your business industry fall tends to be slow, you can create season-specific goals to try to ramp business up and prepare for the busy winter season. If spring is a time you are generally slammed with work, checking in on your goals as the season starts can help you to better plan for these fluctuations to avoid a lull in your content marketing efforts.
The Perfect Opportunity for Regular Reviews
As I’d already mentioned, the seasons make a perfect time for you to conduct regular reviews. What progress have you made toward your goals? Are there any goals that were neglected? Why were they neglected? How is the goal phrased – is it in language that is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound)? Is it a goal that is no longer relevant? Can you dream bigger? This check-in ensures that you don’t go a full year without paying attention to goals you set.
Season-Specific Goal Setting Helps Build Relationships
When you set seasonal content marketing goals, you can help ensure that you’re communicating with your team members on a regular basis when it comes to articulating readership and conversion goals. It also helps you to maintain your readership and gain new readers. This is because you can tailor your content to your existing audience that will help convert readers to customers and you can tailor content to your target market.
Seasonal Reviews Ensure a Good Balance of Seasonal-to-Evergreen Content
It’s important to have content that’s applicable to your readers no matter what season it is, but it’s also a good thing when your content addresses concerns that your readers are apt to have during the various seasons. When you review content goals on a seasonal basis, it helps you to remember to plan and schedule seasonal posts. This can help with things like Q4 marketing goals. If you plan these posts at the beginning of the year, you may miss the mark. If, instead, you plan your Q4 marketing in the fall, you can be sure that any content you plan will be relevant to the audience you have developed through the rest of the year, and that it will be responsive to current trends.
Preventing Stale Content
While performing your content review and your review of marketing goals, the change of seasons also makes for a good time to revisit previous content. Check links and keywords, make sure the images you used are relevant (or add images if the content is old enough to merit that). Make sure everything is optimized and easy to read. Make notes for new content you can create based on comments or new developments.
Seasonal Reviews Help Ensure Success
By setting content marketing goals with the seasons instead of with the change of the year, you can help ensure that your efforts will be successful. It’s important to keep content fresh, be responsive to your readers’ interests and action triggers, and prepare for upcoming events.
Ronda Bowen – Content Creator
