Crystal Clear Communications Blog

Spring is here! And gardening offers 9 lessons to help your content marketing flourish. Learn how to cultivate content.

9 Ways To Cultivate Content For Bigger Yields in Content Marketing

The view from the curb. When someone looks at a house, the landscape creates the first impression. Does your content marketing look great from the curb? Is it organized? Alive? Fresh?

Plant evergreens first. Evergreen content provides customers information with enduring value. Content marketers provide buyer’s guides, business tools, glossaries, and how-to videos to consistently draw customers to a website year after year.

Be patient with perennials. This week I’m harvesting asparagus that I planted years ago.

Ever planted asparagus? As gets it established, the first year you get no crop. The second year, you get no crop. Starting in the third year, you get 2 harvests a year, continuing for 15 to 20 years.

You get the same kind of reward when you create perennial content, especially early in the lifecycle of a trend, technology, or solution. It takes time to catch on – then it produces for years and years.

When a content topic attracts a good following, subdivide the topic to create more content … just as you’d divide perennials in your garden.

See what takes root in your soil. Experiment with different topics to learn what resonates with buyers and fits their needs. Content marketers need to analyze readership and interactions for fruitful patterns.

Diversify media. Cultivate many varieties, and you’ll find varieties with a good yield, even in a tough year. Vary the forms of content marketing on each topic – blogs, new releases, white papers, videos, infographics, magazines, podcasts, and more.

Find the right spot. Good content can get lost in the wrong spot. Move it into the sun, on its own page, or onto the home page. Seek symbiosis: what are natural sidebar topics for your content?

Weed out what you don’t need. Not everything works out. Weed out content that doesn’t draw readers. Or take a new angle to make content spring back to life. 

Hire master gardeners who sign their work. Some of the best content marketing is written by journalists who covered a specific industry for many years. Their bylines are widely recognized and trusted. When you hire them, be sure to put their bylines on your content.

Focus on the harvest. In the end, the best content marketing yields the most qualified leads, customers, and revenue. Analyze results, add more of what works, and weed out the rest. With the gardener’s approach to content, you can achieve a bountiful harvest!

Here’s my 2-minute video on content marketing for the Business Marketing Association of Chicago.