Congratulations, you did it!

After months of intense effort, you and your team finally hit your content publishing goal. A seemingly endless string of highly targeted articles, podcast episodes, ebooks, webinars, slide decks, and LinkedIn posts.

Best of all, you’re seeing a clear impact from all of that work.

But there’s a problem.

As successful as your content strategy seems to be on the surface, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. The question is where to even begin.

One place to start is by looking for the bright spots. Identifying the specific assets, campaigns, topics, and other attributes that stood out and performed better than others.

“By studying bright spots, we can identify the circumstances that allow us to succeed. And if we understand those circumstances, we can replicate them, allowing our success to spread.” (Dan Heath, Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working)

Let’s walk through a hypothetical example of how to apply this “bright spots” approach to your content marketing strategy.

Step 1: Make it Visual
Use a white board like Miro to create a visual map of your entire content ecosystem. Every asset, every process, every audience, every moving part. This will make it easier to zoom out to focus on the big picture, zoom in on the most important details, and see the connections between every piece of the puzzle.

Step 2: Look for Bright Spots
Which parts of your content ecosystem are having the greatest impact? It could be specific assets (ebooks, podcast episodes), processes, target audiences, CTAs, etc.

Step 3: Look for Patterns
Are there certain topic themes, content formats, offers, audiences, or other attributes that seem to be working better than others?

Step 4: Test a Hypothesis
Let’s say you discover a bright spot pattern that points to a particular cluster of topics, formats, and target audiences that seem to be outperforming everything else. Combine those attributes into a new micro-campaign that you can test to validate.

Step 5: Update Your Approach
If your hypothesis and test reveal that a certain topic, format, and audience mix performs well, adapt your overall strategy and focus your resources on those bright spots.

Of course, this isn’t a one-and-done exercise. Finding and leveraging bright spots is an ongoing process of discovery, testing, and iteration.

The key is to pay close attention to what’s actually working, not what you think should be working.

Reality, not theory.