Blog posts. Whitepapers. E-books. Bylined articles. E-newsletters. Videos. You get the idea. Companies and causes invest significant resources in creating high quality educational content to share with their target audiences. But, are they maximizing the value of this content? Great marketing isn’t about “one and done” – it’s about finding multiple ways to package and share content to ensure exposure and engagement with the widest segment of your target audience.
Your oldest content may be some of your best content
Perhaps you developed a “how to” video 5 years ago that provides a succinct and easy to follow snapshot of onboarding with your company’s technology. You may have posted it to your website, included a link in your client onboarding materials and shared it on social media when it was first released. But, what have you done with it since?
While some content has a longer shelf-life than others, tapping into older content that remains relevant today for everything from newsletter links to social media material is a great way to maximize the value of your marketing content.
Share often
In a world where content is created and shared at staggering rates, it’s safe to say one tweet isn’t enough to ensure your content achieved optimal reach. You can…
- Pull different sound bites from a television interview to tee it up on social media each time you share it to avoid redundancy
- Extract a wide range of tips from your blogs and bylined articles to help lure new readers
- Revisit older content when timely opportunities arise – think the tips you prepared for small business tax filings, etc.
Consistency is key to marketing success as is frequency of exposure. People need to hear a message seven times before they remember it so following the “rule of seven” can help ensure not only exposure but penetration of messaging with your target audiences.
The sales team is your marketing ally
Gone are the days of siloed operations where marketing and sales, or even advertising and public relations, operated independently. Today, integration is critical to achieving strategic, business and marketing goals.
Since the sales team has the benefit of being on the front lines with clients and prospects, they can be a valuable distribution channel for your marketing content, particularly educational and thought leadership assets. When you embrace the sales team as a distribution channel, you not only extend the reach of your content but provide valuable resources for building trust with prospective clients.
Embrace the encore
Is it time for a sequel? Should you advance from 100-level content to 200-level? Reviewing your marketing analytics – open rates, click thrus, content downloads and leads generated, to name a few – makes it is easy to identify the content that is resonating with target audiences. With this intel in-hand, organizations can hone their marketing strategy to generate repeat successes.
Whether you cull through content from presentations made by the c-suite at conferences and events or used bylined articles as fodder for the next generation of content, remain mindful of how you can build upon popular existing assets to maximize engagement and ROI.
Reuse and recycle
While adaptive reuse may be the term du jour in the commercial real estate sector, as vacant office buildings prepare for their next chapter and new uses, a similar approach can help to maximize the value of your marketing content. For example…
- Your blog posts could become a multi-chapter e-book
- Quotes can be extracted from bylined/expert articles for social sharing
- Presentations can become content for SlideShare
- The company profile video can be sliced and diced to create short videos for social sharing
And, the list goes on…and on…and on.
Whether intended to be a teaser or in-depth educational content, each marketing asset in your brand’s arsenal is prime for multiple uses. When you develop your content strategy, focus on developing assets that can be repurposed for use across multiple channels without diluting their value. A brand’s audiences vary across platforms so finding ways to share and engage multiple channels allows organizations to reach a larger share of their audience which ultimately creates a broader pool of potential leads, prospective partners and other important stakeholders.
