With marketing budgets slashed, some brands have been trying to reuse their old content at the risk of sacrificing the overarching story and creating unlinked campaigns. To discuss how to scale content the right way, we had an event on Wednesday January 27th focusing on How to Make Most of Your Marketing Materials. One of our speakers. Mary-Anne Baldwin, summarized this topic in her own words in this article.
1. Dig through your content back catalogue
An easy way to boost your content output without extra resource is to dig through what you’ve already got because it’s often much more efficient to adapt what you have than to start from scratch. There’s likely to be great content in the vault that pre-dates you joining a company and certainly some of your own you’ve forgotten all about.
While you’re sifting through content for assets you can repurpose now, it’s also a great time to audit your content for the longer-term. Tag any content that may be reused at a later date so it’s searchable by campaign names, customer personas or key account.
This isn’t about regurgitating whole marketing campaigns from a couple of years back. It’s important to stay fresh – but you can certainly do that while reworking single content assets for a new objective.
Your content back catalogue can also be a great source for new ideas and easy wins. Look first at your top performing content and consider why it’s done so well – have you hit the right tone, used an interesting medium or imagery? Use this insight to spin out new content ideas so you can continue the conversation.
Most people ignore their poor performing content thinking it’s not worth investing more time. Yet often under engaged content can be transformed with just a few tweaks. Perhaps you need to improve its SEO, links, headline or readability. Take what you’ve learned from your top performing content and apply what you can to your lower hitters.
2. Create marketing campaigns from a single content source
Stop thinking about each content asset in isolation. By identifying in advance how your content ties up, you can deliver a small marketing campaign with multiple assets repurposed from a single piece of ‘pillar’ content.
For example, imagine you’re about to create a lead generating whitepaper and you need to entice people to download the report. Here’s how you can create a series of marketing assets for more bang for your buck.
How to repurpose your whitepaper pillar content
- Write the whitepaper in three sections – each one repurposed as an article
- Include at least 10 pull quotes and pull out stats – each one becomes a social post
- Chose the top 5 pull quotes and stats – together they become an infographic
- Section the whitepaper into the key points – use subheads as questions/ discussion points for an event, such as a panel discussion or webinar.
Or perhaps you’ve already delivered a webinar and you want to leverage its success.
How to repurpose webinar pillar content
- Edited webinar becomes a series of 3-minute videos
- Use screenshots/ stills as photos
- Repurpose audio as a podcast
- Transcribe audio for blogs/ articles/ how-to guides
- Use quotes as social posts
All content can be repurposed, though some is harder than others. While written copy is the easiest to rework, crossing mediums – such as video to copy – can be harder. However, it’s important not to focus too much on how long or hard it is to repurpose an item, but the pay off it delivers.
3. Segment your customers for personalised content at scale
By segmenting your customers – whether it’s by persona, the customer journey or by key accounts (in the case of Account Based Marketing) you can create highly targeted and effective content that can be used at scale.
A great delivery method is to create an indexed content library that is searchable by the desired marker, such as by vertical, company size, customer persona, or customer challenge. By making this content customisable, sales and marketing can personalise this off-the-shelf content with details such as the client’s brand logo and colours.
Creating a content library from scratch may seem too much to sign up for, in which case tie this into your content audit and populate it with existing – possibly reworked – content. And remember, content might work for a number of different customer segments, especially if adapted for its specific audience.
Although 2021 may have started off with budget cuts, using these 3 ways our event speaker and content expert Mary-Anne provided, and looking into the tips that were given during our event about globalization, localization and content repurposing automation, brands can create successful campaigns using old content. To learn more about our experts’ suggestions and how to integrate content repurposing into your marketing strategy, you can read our recap of our event here!
