How do you know what content to make? How do you know that the effort and expense will be worth it? Gather the smartest minds in your company to guess at what your audience wants to hear from you? Brainstorm a list of things that you want to tell them and hope they like it? Use third-party data to back-up the guesses you made in the conference room?
What if instead of guessing you ask your audience what they want to hear from you?
One often neglected part of the content marketing conversation is the process we call Optimize. This is the process of looking at the best performing content, the content that your audience has implicitly voted for with their engagement, and looking for creative ways to revisit, remix, and repackage. In this way, we are focusing resources on creating content that our audience says they want rather than what we believe they want or think they should want.
If original content and amplified content are experiments, Optimize is doubling down on the results of those experiments. The first two processes create content for your audience to vote on, the third gives them more of what they want.
