You spent a lot of time and effort to create your messaging, which you dutifully employed in your marketing. It’s all over your website and social media. You used it in email distribution to your network and perhaps even in a blog or white paper. That’s great, but do you realize fresh content doesn’t age well? Within weeks, the search bots have moved on, your customers have seen it, perhaps read it and moved on, and a prospect probably had no reason to read it to begin with. Why? Because a customer or prospect views content from a singular perspective: what’s in it for me?
Content marketing is one of the most important ways to attract a prospect to engage with your brand. Sadly, unless you have a dedicated team who understands the true purpose of content, and with a mandate to continually churn out fresh content and gain followers, simply distributing your elevator speech will not suffice. It’s expensive and time-consuming to build new creative. So, the odds are that at some point you’ll find yourself trying to figure out how to create marketing content on a budget.
Any marketing department with a content campaign running typically follows these steps:
Then you quickly move on to the next piece of content or campaign for the rinse and repeat cycle.
It costs a whole lot to create new content, and it’s far more economical to pull historic content off the shelf to give it a new lease on life. An easy way to think about how to accomplish this is with the “3 R’s” of content creation – Repurpose, Reposition and Reuse.
Let’s say the content piece is from last year. It’s a topic that’s worked and still has legs. However, your audience has seen this particular piece. It might be time to re-purpose the content. With this strategy, you take one piece of content and turn it into a bunch of other pieces using the same core content. Turn a single white paper into one or more blog posts, a slide deck, and a podcast. The expanded variety of media will engage with a new set of prospects, who may not have been interested in reading long-form content. To capture potential leads, direct visitors to the original white paper as a call to action in the introduction of the repurposed content.
Sometimes just changing up how the white paper is positioned with a few small edits to the body copy and a new headline will create something that looks and feels new. What has happened within your industry since the original white paper was published? Is there a new, fresh twist that can be included? This is probably the simplest way to breathe some life into an older piece.
You’ve already shared this content. The whole world has already seen it, so why do they want it again? While I’d love to think that everybody reads each email, dives into every blog post, and absorbs all the points of the original content, it just doesn’t work that way. Your customers and prospects only care about your content if it is meaningful when they need it, and their needs don’t always align with your marketing calendar. What wasn’t of interest six months ago, could be the answer to their current problem. Hit re-send to the people that didn’t open the email or click on the original link. In addition, think of all the contacts you’ve added to your database since you first published the piece. They don’t know it’s repurposed. Remember, there is a lot of content out there. Your visitors are pummeled with messages every day. Use these strategies and engage people that have shown some level of interest and that will find it useful and relevant.
Reach out to us! We can help you develop a strategy and create compelling content that targets your audience.
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