If you are deploying a content marketing strategy for lead generation and nurturing, congratulations! You’ve come over to the bright side where owned content is recognized for the power and influence is has over the marketing funnel. But when it comes to creating your marketing content, are you working smarter, not harder?
It is incredibly inefficient to spend hours researching, writing, editing, and publishing one interesting and engaging blog post to your website and then just leave it there for readers to find on their own. That content is gold. Why not use it in other marketing channels? This is especially true for resource-strapped start-ups and small businesses who may be paying freelancers like myself to create their content. If you are willing, I can offer additional suggestions as to where the content I’m writing for you could attract, nurture, and convert customers. The same content can often be used to build brand awareness and position you or your management team as thought leaders .
Ask yourself these questions:
- “Am I thinking through my content marketing strategy from the top of the funnel to the bottom?”
- “Am I using my content to its fullest potential?”
- “Am I using this content in all marketing and advertising channels?”
If the answer to any of these questions is no, it’s time to rethink your content strategy. Repurposing content is an easy way to optimize your resources, enhance your marketing strategy, stretch your marketing budget dollars and reinforce your brand message. It just takes a little planning and coordination. Here are some tips to start.
Schedule Your Content
Planning ahead when you can is critical. It’s difficult to successfully repurpose most content on the fly or in pieces. You may miss critical steps or duplicate work, eliminating any efficiencies you were trying to find. The best thing you could do is to establish a content calendar with your marketing partners. This calendar should outline all of your known marketing and advertising campaigns for the year, including seasonal or holiday promotions, product launches, events, store openings, etc. Layer in your evergreen funnel content as an ongoing campaign. I understand that it may not be possible to know every single campaign you’ll do during a year but try to capture as many as you can. Once you’ve got your calendar in place, you’ll see where you need to build content. It’s important to plan consistent messaging and tactics that are timely, integrated and brand right. That’s where repurposing content is useful.
Start With the Big Projects
The next step is to look for the long form projects that will take the most resources to develop. Strategize with your team how you could use parts of the piece in other channels. Make a plan for the writer and designer to keep those other pieces of content in mind as create the original. If you have the time to wait, have the creators build the entire campaign all at once. This usually takes longer to do so you’ll need to plan launch and publishing dates accordingly.
For example, consider a nonprofit’s annual report. This project comes around every year and for many, it’s a project that we accomplish on autopilot. But stop and think for a minute. What is actually in your annual report? Can you use the impact stats as infographics for social media posts? Can you use the client stories in direct mail appeals? Would you link the financials page of the annual report on your About Us webpage? Make a list of the content in your annual report and the tactics you could use to deploy it elsewhere. Then, create a plan to break up the finished annual report into these chunks of content. Lastly, store the content in an easily accessible place for future use.
Here’s an example of how my team repurposed a 6-page annual report:
- Impact stats broken up into nineteen individual infographics and shared throughout the year on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
- Impact stats used on program webpages
- Four client stories and photos used in print and e-newsletters throughout the year
- Four client stories and quotes used in press releases throughout the year
- Four client quotes and photos shared throughout the year on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
- Our Services and Our Mission pages used in a PowerPoint presentation for the CEO to present to prospective board members and in community partnership meetings
- Photos used on program webpages
- Finance page graphics used in printed program case statements
Here’s another example. A client asked me to write an e-book about event marketing targeting event planners. It was to be used as gated content for their event ticketing SaaS solution. The e-book was 22 pages and included several checklists and worksheets for planners to use as they work on their marketing strategy.
This one piece of content could have also been used in the following ways:
- Four to six email drip campaign linking several of the checklists as an event planning timeline
- Social media quiz highlighting the importance of promoting your events
- Blog post highlighting a typical event marketing strategy
- Blog posts highlighting the event promotion techniques tied to the SaaS ticketing platform and linking to the checklist
- The content becomes a webinar or a podcast hosted by the CEO or CMO
- Infographic on the event marketing budget statistics in the e-book used in social media and email
- Customer stories in the e-book printed added to testimonials and “contact us” pages
The possibilities are really endless. Your decisions on how to repurpose your content depends on your content needs. Look for holes in your funnel marketing strategy and create content that would be impactful for your target audience at those stages.
Other Ways to Repurpose Content
It’s important to always think about how you can integrate your message in every campaign. You should never post an article or e-book without also planning to send an email, deploy a SEM campaign and post on social media. Design a campaign that is impactful on all marketing platforms, both traditional and digital. Use the same messaging and images so that your message is consistent and clear but tailored to the platform.
Repurposing on the Fly
Of course, there is always that content opportunity or need that comes up unexpectedly. Sometimes it makes sense to stop what you are doing and make it happen. If you need last minute content for an ad or a promotion, it’s best to have evergreen content on hand that you could repurpose quickly into something new. If you have the budget, you could even build a library of “just in case” evergreen content to pull from when you need it.
Your content marketing strategy is only as effective as the quality of content you produce and how you use it. Establishing a consistent content publishing loop is critical to your success. Repurposing content helps you optimize resources. Don’t think of it as old content. With a little love, it can be timeless.
I would love to help you strategize an impactful content marketing strategy for your business. Contact me today and let’s get started!
