It’s Time to Recession-Proof Your Content Strategy

What will the impending recession mean for marketing? Invest or cut? History tells us that 60% of brands who increased media spend in the last recession saw a greater ROI.

Yet global advertising spend is only forecast to grow by 3.5% to 5.9% in 2023. Why? The marketing environment is different from recessions of yesteryear. The pandemic has made us all comfortable with buying online and using streaming and social media for our entertainment. The continued rise of social media to drive engagement and direct sales opportunities has led marketers to build quicker, more cost-efficient and highly targeted content strategies.

It explains why one of the biggest marketing investments in 2023 will be in content. The challenge is to make it work harder in a recession, 85% of marketers see ROI as more important when budgets tighten, and 65% plan to be more creative.

Tag has a simple perspective; an overwhelming number of businesses will use digital content marketing this year, so, let’s ‘Reimagine’ the use of existing content that’s already been invested in – to squeeze out every ounce of value. Recycling content is of course not a new idea, (a third of our clients are actively looking at their DAMs to reuse content), yet many businesses have yet to realise the true potential from ‘mining their content gold’.

How do you mine it? Here are some tips based on how we at Tag approach the reusing and reapplying of content.

1. Focus on evergreen content

Some content will have a ‘sell by date’, but not all. A quick and targeted audit will identify the content that will have perennial appeal. Once identified, collate the content master files so you can extract and adapt for use in other formats and channels. For example, can you turn white papers into infographics, static key visuals into video using motion techniques?

2. Build on success

Filter the content that has most engaged your audiences and will still deliver results against your 2023 objectives. Analysing the KPIs and metrics will make the case for which content to invest time in reusing.

3. Don’t boil oceans

Chances are you have a lot of content and the prospect of looking at this is daunting. Start small and prove the potential to drive value at scale. Look at content from one product or service, one market or region. Make this a case study for wider business buy in and support.

4. Optimise

Don’t go straight to content dissemination. The chances are it can be refreshed to resonate even more. Run the content by your personas one more time. Identify any new personas (post the pandemic), formats (e.g. TikTok), channels or environments that content could be applied to. And look to existing or new martech to make it work harder as you scale.

5. Measure

All content will have a shelf-life but ‘atomising’ master content to reuse across as many relevant formats and channels will drive greater impact and value. Measure the impact and effectiveness of your ‘new-found gold’ to gain insight and proof to scale. Remember over 80% of us will use content marketing this year so an effective reuse strategy could turbo charge your content ecosystem while optimising previous and future investments.

6. Think sustainability

Reuse and reapply has a role to play in any business sustainability strategy. Accelerating the use and effective measurement of existing content will go a long way to meeting your sustainability objectives.

It might seem counter-instinctive, looking at past content and not looking forward. But here’s another way of seeing it: we are spending upwards of $450 billion a year on content marketing, 70% of it lies unused, 70% of us don’t feel our content is successful, and three-quarters of us think our content is wasted. We have found our customers who use our asset storage software, Di DAM, see a 30% rise in the reuse of assets so there’s a lot to be said for storing content correctly for ease of retrieval and repurpose. In a recession every marketing dollar must work doubly hard. There is bound to still be huge value in the content you’ve already invested in, Tag’s re-imagination team would love to share more thoughts and experience to help you find that content gold.