Don’t you sometimes wish you could redo all that content created years ago?
I go back to things I wrote half a dozen years ago and think, “Sheesh, that didn’t age well.”
But that’s learning on the record , right?
For brands, this problem is relatively new. Before the web and search, a cringy marketing campaign or problematic CEO-penned article could quickly fade away. Most people just evaluated what the brand said at a given moment. Our collective memory was short — and finding older content took much more effort than typing a few characters.
However, you can create a content strategy that applies not only to what the brand says today and tomorrow but also reshapes what we’ve said in the past.
“How’s that possible?” you ask.
Here’s what I mean.
Use new capabilities to reframe the past
In The 4 C’s Formula: Your Building Blocks of Growth, entrepreneur coach Dan Sullivan talks about acquiring new capabilities (one of the titular 4 C’s). He writes that “a new capability creates confidence ahead of it, but it also rearranges everything behind it,” and any jump in capability “automatically transforms both the past and the future.”
Said more simply: When you acquire some new capability — like the ability to do content marketing well — you feel more confident about developing new content marketing projects. But that new ability also lets you reinterpret your past because it shows how your capabilities developed.
Your new perspectives let you — and other people — see your past in a better light. The great content you create tomorrow increases the value of the old content you put out yesterday.
When I read my cringy post from 2013, I can see how forward-thinking some of the ideas were. I can see the links I was trying to make — however poorly they’ve aged in a decade.
Applying these new perspectives to the past may be easier than projecting them to the future. Research shows that people feel disassociated from who they believe they’ll become.
They even discount their existing capabilities when considering their future selves. It’s as if we see our future selves as someone else.
The right content strategy lets you continually reboot (or retcon, as sci-fi geeks might say) your origin story and gives you more confidence about the future stories you’ll tell.
Reshape content for the future and the past
One of the most productive things you can do is to review the content your brand leaves in its wake. As you acquire new content capabilities, advance your story, and change your points of view, you’ll naturally evolve what your brand will say.
Take the opportunity to evolve what it’s already said, too.
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 to take it on. “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 ROTted (redundant, outdated, or trivial) content.
Someone (or some team) must decide which assets to keep, which to change, and which to delete. Concerns over duplication, SEO, and old branding or outdated designs drive the decisions.
Inspiring? Not particularly.
However, reviewing past content through the lens of your new capabilities can make this tedious task much more enjoyable.
That outdated white paper? How might you reimagine it knowing what you know now? You might find a great metaphor you haven’t used in years. And it may be applicable today if you give it a more modern context.
What about those amazing articles someone created years ago that were never promoted, so they never got traction? Why not reproduce them in your new template and promote them?
That series of webinars you did with a partner that later became a competitor? Feel free to delete them all.
In other words, what insight do you have now that changes how you see the content you created?
Don’t only reshape your future. Change the context of the past.
One of the often-forgotten tenets of the whole magical thing called the World Wide Web is, “We can change it.” Yes, the Internet never forgets, but it stops caring quickly. So, when you have ideas worth caring about, change them to suit the current context.
You can change all of it.
How to decide what to reboot
I once had the privilege of talking with an extraordinary woman who handles 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 seen the Spiderman origin story told in slightly different ways?)
Marvel sees new origin stories as critical to keeping a story “alive” and relevant to new and different audiences. Audiences sometimes interpret these new stories as playing to the cultural zeitgeist (Black Panther and Ms. Marvel come to mind).
But the Marvel team doesn’t think of them or design them that way, she said.
Instead, Marvel considers rebooting origin stories as a form of co-creation with fans. They look at (and solicit, when possible) 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 attempt that content audit, look to your fans to help you understand how to reshape your brand story.
Think about who will co-create with you. Who are your passionate fans? Who knows your mythology and journey so well that they’d know when, how, and where a reboot would be appropriate and will care if you retcon a particular origin story or thought?
Does anyone remember and care about what you wrote five years ago? Find the people who know the equivalent of that detail from your brand stories.
Find those people. Gather with them. Listen to them. You don’t have to act on everything you hear. They’re still your brand’s stories, after all.
But fans can help you reboot your stories at the right time.
Old content rarely survived in the past. The physical space needed to store it and the time and effort required to reprint, reshoot, or recreate it meant that most old content was destroyed or became inaccessible.
Digital content changed all that. Now, it’s possible to keep everything. And it’s sometimes more expensive to address old content at all. That’s why websites are bloated, blogs go back decades, and document repositories remain unorganized.
But that doesn’t mean they should stay that way.
As content practitioners, you’re creating the artifacts of your future every day. Treat them with the respect future treasures deserve.
But don’t forget to seize the opportunity to use them to reshape past stories, too.
Updated from a July 2022 article.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute