The Gist: Bruno Mars took an old, low-performing, under-appreciated song, added Cardi B and a 90’s-themed music video, and turned it into a #1 hit. You can do the same with your content through strategic content updates.
Bruno Mars took an old, low-performing, under-appreciated song, added Cardi B and a 90’s-themed music video, and turned it into a #1 hit.
The best part?
He did YEARS after he wrote the original content.
You can do the same with your content. 🙌
table of contents
You need to fix up and finesse your old content
2. Delete the content that’s beyond repair
3. Update the content that’s almost there
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Which is more embarrassing: the oldest tagged photo of you on Facebook, or the oldest blog post of yours on the company blog?
If I had to guess, you had to think about that for a second. And that’s a maaajor sign you need to “finesse” your content!
See…
There’s this thing that starts to happen as you get further into your content marketing journey, especially once you’ve FINALLY figured out what you’re doing…
Your old content starts to embarrass your current strategy. 
Ever happened to you?
Here’s how it usually goes:
- Your business decides to jump on the content marketing bandwagon before building a strategy out first.
- Over time, your marketing team figures things out (yeah, smartypants!) and improves its strategy and content quality.
- Then, you’re so caught up in the endless cycle of creating new content that you don’t have time to think about all the old, unstrategic posts still sitting on your blog.
And in the words of Bruno in Finesse, I like to “shut that sh*t down on sight, that’s right.”
You need to fix up and finesse your old content
Like Bruno (sorta) says, you need to shut down your outdated, unstrategic content.
Right now, it’s still out there for people to find and use to form an impression of your brand. So even if your new content is fantastic, your old stuff is still alive and working against it.
But here’s the good news: it’s SO easy to fix!
Fixing unstrategic content is wayyy easier than figuring out how to create good content in the first place.
Here are a few simple steps to get started:
1. Complete a content audit
You can’t improve your past content if you don’t know how well it performed in the first place.
So the first step to finessing your old content is to complete a content audit.
Look at all your old assets – blog content, social media posts, emails, and more – and how well they’re meeting your marketing goals.
(Which metrics to look at will depend on your own key performance indicators, so make sure your team has agreed on those before moving on!)
Once you’ve revisited your old content and its success metrics, make improvements and optimization easier by placing each piece into one of four buckets:
- Outdated strategy and low content quality
- Outdated strategy but high content quality
- Current strategy and high content quality
- Current strategy and low content quality
(Consider a piece of content’s strategy outdated if its audience, topic, or call-to-action isn’t aligned with your current marketing strategy.)
2. Delete the content that’s beyond repair
If an old blog post or video is both poorly produced and no longer relevant to your content strategy, just delete it!
I know this terrifies tons of content marketers (and I used to be one of ‘em), but it’s worth it in the long run.
Bad and unstrategic content can do more harm than good, more harm than no content at all.
Simply delete anything that would take a huge amount of effort to “fix.” To save any SEO power it had, redirect it to the most relevant and strategic alternative on your site.
And if it becomes relevant to your business strategy again, you can simply reproduce and republish it. 
3. Update the content that’s almost there
Once your more embarrassing and unstrategic content is taken care of, look at the pieces that are *almost* doing what they should be.
This is the content that’s either lower quality but still aligned with your strategy, or really great and just needs a strategy update.
Give it a good Clueless-style makeover (we’re mixing 90’s analogies here, but go with me).
Here are some ways to make old content more strategic:
- Improve the flow and readability of the content itself
- Tweak the title and topic to better target your ideal audience
- Target a different primary keyword for SEO traffic
- Add a call-to-action that reflects your current customer journey
- Work in objective/non-promotional mentions of your products or services
Again, it all depends on your own success metrics!
But I’ll bet you’ve got a ton of old content that’s almost there, and could easily be finessed.
What are you waiting for?
Plan your perfect repurposing strategy
Download my free content repurposing planning worksheet to figure out the most strategic and intentional way to reuse and recycle your content.