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It's spooky season again, which means all things creepy and terrifying—vampires, werewolves, zombies, and low-performing blog posts.
If that last one made you want to hide under a blanket, you're in the right place. Just like zombies can rise from the dead, your old marketing content can come back to life. It's called a content refresh, and there's nothing supernatural about it.
A refresh updates your old material and infuses it with new life. It's like a vampire bite, only without the bloodshed.
Sound better than a fun-sized Snickers and a horror movie marathon? Keep reading for some spooktacular ways to bring content back to life.
Why Refresh Your Content?
If Halloween movies have taught us anything, it's that the graveyard is just the beginning. Your old content doesn't have to stay six feet under, lingering in obscurity. All it takes is a content refresh to bring old content back into the light and get it working for you again!
Don't be scared: A content refresh is just an update to something you've written before. Content updates make old material more effective and help you achieve your goals, such as:
- Higher search rankings
- Increased audience engagement
- Improved reader value
- Better shareability
Your content already has this power — you just need to dig it up and give it new life.
Ghoulishly Effective Strategies To Resurrect Your Content
If you've never done a content refresh before, or it's been a while, have no fear. You don't need special powers to update your old material — just these scarily good tips and a can-do attitude.
Dust Off the Cobwebs
As a marketer, you know facts and statistics offer readers value and demonstrate your knowledge of a topic. Authoritative and helpful content is like a secret passageway to great Google rankings. But when was the last time you peeked into that passage?
Statistics age faster than a zombie in the summer sun. That mind-blowing stat about consumer shopping trends in 2019? It's not so impressive five years later.
A content refresh lets you clear away those dusty old facts and replace them with shiny new ones. Don't have an updated stat? You can always rework the paragraph to make it relevant in a different way.
Then, when audiences first peek at your content, the door won't squeak, and cobwebs made of dated stats won't hit them in the face. Current facts and statistics will lure them forward to conversion.
Frankenstein Your Content With Images and Video
Frankenstein was a disturbed man, but he knew one thing: With the right pieces, you can create something new and exciting.
Fortunately for you, the "right pieces" in digital marketing aren't pre-owned arms and legs. They're visuals.
Pictures, videos, and infographics can transform dated content into something that engages today's audiences. Visual elements catch people's attention faster, engage their emotions better, and spark emotional connections with your message.
It's not magic. It's science. The brain processes pictures and videos more quickly and with more neurological complexity than it processes text. That's why you can recall a video better than an article — and why that horror movie you saw in fifth grade still haunts you.
As you refresh your content, look for ways to stitch in pictures, videos, and infographics. Just make sure they're relevant. A gratuitous image can stick out in an article like a monkey arm on a Frankenstein monster.
Spellbinding Keywords That Work
Have you ever seen one of those movies where the main character opens a centuries-old book of spells, reads the magic words, and the spell works as if someone wrote it yesterday?
Keywords can work magic, but they don't quite work like that.
Keywords drive traffic when they match your audience's intent. Sometimes, that intent stays the same over months or years. Buffy's Vampire Stake Shop can probably still target the search phrase, "Where do I stab a bloodthirsty stalker?"
For most human businesses, though, ranking on Google requires updating your keywords every so often. Fortunately, you don't need to be a mind reader to make that happen. Keyword research will show you the way.
Keyword research points to the words and phrases people use to search for your topic. You want to use keywords that get plenty of action but only have a few other sites competing for them.
Plan each refreshed piece to have one main keyword or key phrase, with a few secondary keywords for good measure. Finding the right combination of keywords works like a magic spell, making your content more visible to the people who want to see it.
Summon Your Audience WIth New Calls to Action
Casting magic spells can be fun, but you're not here to play around. Your refreshed content needs to get results, meaning your audience needs to take action.
The Magic of a Great CTA
They're not mind-readers either, so you need to tell them what to do — in the form of a call to action (CTA). Your CTA is the summoning charm that draws your audience out of the shadows and encourages them to do something. Think of it as the final ingredient in a potion that calls forth the supernatural being or makes two people fall in love.
Except here, you're asking your readers to engage with your business. You may want them to sign up for your email list, book a product demo, or even make a purchase.
Customers are notoriously tricky to summon, but an engaging CTA does the trick. It has to be active, engaging, and positive, with just enough encouragement to convince them they must act now.
Finding the Right Ingredients
It's tempting to keep your old, tried-and-true CTA where it is, but a CTA can always be better — fresher, more effective, and more interesting. You wouldn't finish off your most important magic potion with the same old eye of newt, would you?
Pay special attention to that CTA as you refresh your content. Polish it up and make it attractive to your target audience. If you need inspiration, check out some proven-effective CTAs from the real world. Even the best potion-makers learn from each other!
Don't Ghost Your Readers With Spectral Content
Your refreshed content can spellbind audiences and summon them to action — but only if they know that content exists. Your spells and potions can't dazzle if you only conjure in the cellar.
Posting your refreshed content on social media gives it another chance for success. Remember, even Frankenstein needed electricity to bring his monster to life!
Your "electricity" is social media exposure. The more people see your refreshed content, the better your chances of conversions.
Here's the magic formula for promoting content on social media:
- Add social share buttons to content. Social icons make it easy for readers to share your content with their followers. Stick to three or four buttons for the platforms where you get the most traffic. You don't want readers to overthink where to post!
- Schedule shares to your pages. Try to get your refreshed content on every page where you have a presence. You don't have to make every post go live simultaneously — nor should you! Different platforms have different peak times, and you'll get more attention by planning accordingly. Host your seance in the evening. Post your Instagram in the late morning.
- Include relevant hashtags. A hashtag lets even more people find your content on social. It's like a magic word people can search for. If their search matches the hashtag you added, they have a good chance of seeing your content.
Don't let your newly refreshed content become a ghost. You've worked too hard! Promote it on social media and get it the attention it deserves.
No Tricks, Just Metrics
Speaking of working hard, you'll want to know whether your content refresh did the trick. That's where performance metrics come in.
Like monster footprints in the back garden, content metrics tell you who's been around and what they've been up to. Specifically, they tell you how much attention your material received and what that attention looked like.
Some metrics you might want to track include:
- Organic search traffic: How many visitors came to your content through Google?
- Total visits: How many people came to your blog from all sources — organic links, paid ads, social media, and ghostly beckoning in the night?
- Average engagement time: How long did people spend reading or otherwise interacting with your content?
- Click-through rate: What percentage of all content viewers clicked to take further action?
Put away your crystal ball — you won't need it to get this information. You can find the numbers you want with standard, non-supernatural search engine optimization (SEO) tools. Google Analytics is free and has a user-friendly interface. There are also plenty of paid tools, including Ahrefs, Semrush, and Hotjar.
Dig around to find what best meets your needs. We recommend bypassing the local fortune-teller — for starters, their prices are much too high.
Ready, Set, Haunt!
Frankenstein and Merlin the Magician would be proud. You've gathered the right "spare" parts, spoken the magic words, and infused your content with some life-giving electricity through social media buzz.
And now... it's alive!
You've revived your formerly decaying content, and it's ready for the big haunted hayride, AKA the top of the search results page. Make sure you've polished up that call to action and chosen the best possible keywords. Your audience is ready, but not for a jump scare — for your stellar value proposition. Happy haunting!
