There is a growing sense that the key is firmly in the ignition of the UK and global economy and we’re just waiting for someone to give it a turn. Whether or not the economy will roar back into life remains to be seen – economists and business leaders seem divided on the issue.

What is clear is that businesses need to be as ready as they can be for the economic restart. From a content perspective, that means ticking everything off the following list:

Review & revise your content journeys – by having content journeys in place, you will be able to use your content to progress your customers from engagement to sale.

Sensecheck your personas – your target audiences may have changed due to the crisis or may very well change in a recession. Now is the time to assess who you are targeting and therefore who you are creating your content for.

Consider your customer needs – it’s almost unimaginable that your customers’ needs won’t have changed. These need to be urgently reassessed as creating content against the wrong list of customer needs is wasteful.

Audit your content – having done the three steps above, you’ll be in a great place to audit your content and see what you have or what can be repurposed for the months ahead. It’s probably time to consider retiring some of that content too.

Update your content plan – with your content audit complete, you can update your content plan, ensuring you also take a look at how your activation approach might need to change, especially if budgets have dropped. Also consider whether the types of content you should be creating are right. For example, video is still important in a working from home world, but how to achieve that in a lockdown (hint: it’s possible, just ask).

Fill your content bank – while it’s tempting to only create content on a needs basis, the business shutdown that many marketers are experiencing is the perfect time for building up a bank of great content.

Connect your content – one of our biggest bugbears is the lack of connectivity between content items. At the very least, there should be recommended and related content, but ideally all content should be connected together to form a content journey for the customer.

Re-engage the right way – if, like us, you went into stealth mode during the immediate lockdown crisis, then now is the time to start re-engaging your customer and prospect base. While it may be too early for the hard sell, re-establishing the engagement is still needed.