How To Plan Recession-Proof Content
The Office for Budget Responsibility has confirmed that the UK is in recession. For many, this raises questions about how to approach their content marketing strategy. In particular, there is a need to make recession-proof content that will remain useful for both the target audience and the publisher, even in times of economic turmoil.
Why You Should Budget for Content, Even in a Recession
In the UK Government’s Autumn Statement 2022, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) confirmed that the country fell into a recession in Q3 2022. The OBR also forecasts that the recession will continue throughout 2023, with the United Kingdom’s economy not seeing growth again until 2024. For businesses and others operating a content marketing strategy, this throws up questions about how to best approach this period of economic turmoil.
A previous article published on the Textbroker platform covered the fact that recessions can actually offer significant opportunities for content marketers who are bold and avoid cutting content costs. While other companies make cuts, those who hold their nerve are able to gain a greater share of voice, and research shows they bounce back more strongly from periods of economic crisis. However, steps still need to be taken to optimise a content marketing strategy.
In this article, we will explore some of the key ways you can go about planning recession-proof content so that your marketing efforts are robust enough to withstand the turbulent economic times we are facing.
How Do I Make My Content Recession-Proof?
Recession-proof content is content that remains useful to its target audience during harsh economic times while still delivering value for money for the marketer or business that publishes it. Below, you will find four tips that can assist you in planning and creating high-quality, recession-proof content.
1. Focus on return on investment
A great way to ensure your content is as recession-proof as possible is to place a strong emphasis on content that delivers a good return on investment. To achieve this, you will need to establish some key performance indicators based on your specific objectives. For instance, if you are looking to boost traffic to your website, you can measure the number of hits different types of content attract. In addition, you can track the number of those hits that actually turn into conversions.
Alternatively, if your content marketing strategy is focused on maximising visibility and reach, you can measure performance across social media channels. This can be done by looking at metrics, like the number of times that content is shared or interacted with. Regardless of the precise outcomes that you are looking for, the key is to explore your previously published content and look for trends. What types of content are performing well? Which ones are falling short? What do they have in common?
During a recession, every penny counts, so it is important to make evidence-based decisions rather than relying on your gut instincts. Once you have clear insights into the types of content that perform well, based on your own key performance indicators, you can focus your efforts on producing more of this high-performing content.
2. Make your strategy adaptable
Another way to plan recession-proof content is to commit to being adaptable. As you publish content, you may find that a type of content performs far better than you expect, or you might receive feedback from your audience that makes you feel compelled to switch gears and move away from your established plan.
The important thing when dealing with a content marketing strategy during a recession is to let your audience guide your content. Look at the interactions your readers are having with your brand and try to learn lessons. If you are constantly hearing that a particular type of content is unappealing or off-putting, do not keep persevering just because that was your initial plan. Be willing to adapt the plan based on what the audience demands.
It is also worth highlighting the fact that the recession will not only impact your marketing budget — it will also impact your customer base’s budget, too. As the recession progresses, it may be sensible to address the topic in an upfront way and provide useful insights that can help your target audience cope with financial uncertainty. Directly addressing people’s worries and concerns in your marketing content is often a great strategy for building credibility and trust.
Ultimately, focusing on your target audience’s needs will help your content to become resistant to economic pressures.
3. Make specific, evergreen content
During a recession, marketing professionals and others involved with content marketing may find it increasingly difficult to convince decision-makers to maintain or even increase the budget available. A potential way to make your case more convincing is to ensure that everything you are creating and publishing has a clear and defined purpose.
For each and every piece of content you publish, you should be able to specify who the content is for and what you want the content to actually achieve. You may wish to segment a wide audience into different groups, or you may wish to target content towards existing buyer personas. You should have a clear objective behind each piece of content, and you should be able to justify this objective in order to make a clear case for funding it.
Some of the most common objectives for marketing content include:
- Generating sales
- Attracting sign-ups
- Building brand awareness
- Sharing research
- Providing advice
Ideally, you should also make your content ‘evergreen’, which means it will remain relevant and useful forever, as this will maximise your long-term results. As an article for the Digital Marketing Institute explains, evergreen content can take many forms, including ‘how-to’ guides, tips, list-based articles and product reviews. Evergreen content is more likely to perform well in search engines, too, assuming you use search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques.
4. Publish high-quality content
Finally, a robust content marketing strategy that can withstand the various effects of a recession will be centred around the creation and publication of high-quality content. There is no shortcut here and no way to create a viable, long-term content marketing strategy without also creating content that benefits people.
Your content should be useful to your audience, even if its primary use is as a form of entertainment. Try not to be too overtly promotional, although you can certainly use content marketing to promote products and services or encourage sign-ups for mailing lists, memberships, or online accounts. It may be difficult to create high-quality in-house content and maintain a consistent publishing schedule, so you could consider outsourcing to a great writer.
The very best marketing content will also attract backlinks from other sources, and it can be extremely beneficial for SEO efforts if these backlinks come from high-authority domains. These are usually highly professional websites with a large audience, so it is unrealistic to expect backlinks unless you publish excellent content.
How Textbroker Can Help You
Textbroker is an online content platform that is trusted by more than 80,000 customers around the world. Using the platform, you will have the ability to outsource your content marketing needs and forge working relationships with excellent writers who specialise in a wide variety of topics. Whether you need regular blog posts, a single article about your latest research, or even a professional ebook or white paper, we can assist you.
At Textbroker, our customers have the option of placing open orders or direct orders. Open orders can be taken on by any of the skilled authors in our talent pool. Direct orders can be sent to a specific writer who possesses the necessary skills or expertise. For those with large projects, there is also the option of establishing a team of individually selected writers to ensure you maintain a steady publishing schedule.
The writers using our platform are required to continually meet our quality standards, and you can place orders at different quality levels in order to suit your budget. There are also no monthly subscription fees to pay, so you can use our services as much or as little as you need to create recession-proof content based on the specifics of your content marketing strategy.
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