Consulting Firms: Here’s Your COVID-19 Content Strategy
In early March, you were humming along with your content strategy: publishing articles, writing white papers, posting to LinkedIn, maybe even rewriting the marketing pages on your website. Then it all came to a screeching halt with the onset of the COVID-19 crisis.
Suddenly, all of your priorities are different. But the work continues. You still need to serve your clients, and that means putting out thought leadership that meets their needs during this time.
Here are some ideas for how to pivot your content strategy without starting from scratch:
Repurpose your long-form content.
Most consulting firms I’ve worked with have reports, white papers, and even books they’ve published that they promoted once for the launch but haven’t tapped back into for a long time.
These pieces are invaluable mines of research and expertise that you possess and that your customers could benefit from.
Just a few ideas for what you can do with one piece of long-form content:
Publish each chapter as a separate article.
Post 200-300 word sections to LinkedIn.
Turn a chapter into a PowerPoint deck to send to your clients and prospects.
Record yourself reading a chapter (or talking through the PowerPoint deck) and publish it as a webinar.
There are so many more ways you can get mileage out of content you’ve already created, for less time and investment than creating content from nothing.
Rework your advice to be relevant to COVID-19.
It’s likely that much of the advice you’d give to your clients still applies right now. You’ll just need to make some slight tweaks to make it relevant to the crisis at hand.
Comb through your previously published content and pull 5-10 articles or report chapters that you can most easily revise. Then make the changes and republish the articles under a COVID-19-related title.
Some of the most relevant topics right now:
Working from home
Change management
Communication in uncertainty
Supply chain
Health and safety
The new work/life balance
Agility
Employee engagement
Workforce costs
Preparing for recovery
Looking for help reworking your existing content to be relevant to COVID-19? Contact me.
Revisit your overall content plan.
This is a great time to decide what’s actually necessary, versus what you could afford to do during an economic boom.
Do you really need to publish one white paper per month, or could you publish one per quarter, make it really targeted, and promote the heck out of it?
Is your content calendar overcomplicated, causing you to fall behind and feel guilty about it? Perhaps it’s time to create something simpler that you can realistically follow.
Do you need to improve your SEO but never take the time to do keyword research and properly optimize web pages? Create an SEO checklist now, so it’s in place when you’re ready to start working on your website again.