Don’t you sometimes wish you could re-edit all that content you created years ago?
I remember things I wrote half a dozen years ago and think, “Gosh, that hasn’t aged well.”
But that’s real learning, right?
This problem is relatively new for brands. Before the web and search, a pessimistic marketing campaign or a problematic article written by the CEO could quickly disappear. Most people simply evaluated what the brand said at a given time. Our collective memory was short – and finding older content required much more effort than typing a few characters.
However, you can develop a content strategy that not only relates to what the brand says today and tomorrow, but also reframes what we have said in the past.
“How is that possible?” you ask.
Here’s what I mean.
Use new opportunities to reshape the past
In The 4-C Formula: Your Building Blocks for GrowthEntrepreneur trainer Dan Sullivan talks about acquiring new skills (one of the eponymous 4 Cs). He writes that “a new skill creates confidence but also reorders everything behind it,” and that every leap in performance “automatically changes both the past and the future.”
Put more simply, as you acquire new skills – such as the ability to do good content marketing – you will feel more confident when developing new content marketing projects. But this new skill also allows you to reinterpret your past because it shows how your skills have developed.
Your new perspectives allow you – and other people – to see your past in a better light. The great content you create tomorrow will add value to the old content you published yesterday.
Reading my cringey post from 2013, I can see how forward-thinking some of the ideas were. I can see the connections I wanted to make – no matter how poorly they have aged in a decade.
It might be easier to apply these new perspectives to the past than to project them onto the future. Research shows that people feel distanced from who they believe they will become.
They even neglect their existing skills when thinking about their future selves. It’s as if we see our future selves as someone else.
With the right content strategy, you can continually reboot (or remake, as sci-fi geeks would say) your origin story and gain more confidence in the future stories you’ll tell.
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Redesign content for the future and the past
One of the most productive things you can do is review the content your brand leaves behind. As you explore new content opportunities, evolve your story, and change your perspectives, you’ll naturally evolve what your brand will say.
Take the opportunity to develop what has already been said.
Does it sound like I’m suggesting you need a content audit? Well, you probably do.
Whenever I suggest an audit to a content or marketing team, exactly zero people volunteer for it. “Yay, let’s do another content audit!” said no one ever.
That’s understandable. A content audit requires a manual review of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of assets to find rotten (redundant, obsolete, or trivial) content.
Someone (or a team) has to decide which assets to keep, which to change, and which to delete. Concerns about duplication, SEO and old branding or outdated designs drive decisions.
Inspiring? Not particularly.
However, viewing past content through the lens of your new skills can make this tedious task much more enjoyable.
That outdated white paper? How might you reimagine it, knowing what you know now? Maybe you’ll find a great metaphor that you haven’t used in years. And it could still be applicable today if you put it in a more modern context.
What about those great articles someone created years ago that were never promoted and therefore never gained traction? Why don’t you reproduce them in your new template and promote them?
The series of webinars you ran with a partner who later became a competitor? Feel free to delete them all.
In other words, what insights do you have now that changes the way you view the content you create?
Don’t just redesign your future. Change the context of the past.
One of the oft-forgotten tenets of the whole magical thing called the World Wide Web is: “We can change it.” Yes, the Internet never forgets, but it quickly stops caring. So if you have ideas that are important to you, adapt them to the current context.
You can change everything.
How to decide what to restart
I once had the privilege of speaking with an extraordinary woman who oversees investment strategy for consumer and entertainment media brands. She shared something the head of Marvel Studios told her about how they balance origin stories with the need to reboot popular hero arcs. (How many times have we told Spiderman’s origin story in slightly different ways?)
For Marvel, new origin stories are critical to keeping a story “alive” and relevant to new and different audiences. Audiences sometimes interpret these new stories as a nod to the cultural zeitgeist (Black Panther and Ms. Marvel come to mind).
But the Marvel team doesn’t think about it that way or design it that way, she said.
Instead, Marvel sees rebooting origin stories as a form of co-creation with fans. They look at (and, where possible, solicit) feedback from their most passionate audiences to understand when and how a reboot might be necessary or timely.
This is a great lesson.
Before you conduct a content audit, reach out to your fans to understand how you can reframe your brand story.
Think about who will create something with you. Who are your passionate fans? Who knows your mythology and journey well enough to know when, how, and where a reboot would be appropriate, and care if you reinterpret a particular origin story or idea?
Does anyone remember and care about what you wrote five years ago? Find the people who know the equivalent of this detail from your brand stories.
Find these people. Meet with them. Listen to them. You don’t have to react to everything you hear. After all, it’s still your brand’s stories.
But fans can help you restart your stories at the right time.
In the past, old content was rarely retained. The physical space required for storage and the time and effort required to reprint, re-record, or recreate resulted in most old content being destroyed or no longer accessible.
Digital content has changed all that. Now it’s possible to keep everything. And that’s how it is sometimes more It’s expensive to even deal with old content. This is why websites are crowded, blogs are decades old, and document repositories remain disorganized.
But that doesn’t mean they should stay that way.
As a content practitioner, you create the artifacts of your future every day. Treat them with the respect that future treasures deserve.
But don’t forget to take the opportunity to use it to reshape past stories too.
Unironically updated from a July 2022 article.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute