If you spend a lot of time and energy putting together content for your audience, then you know you need it to work hard for you to gain the maximum ROI. Now we’ll assume you have put together your marketing and social plans, so you know the platforms that you want to work for you. What we need to do is show you how you can think about using a piece of content a couple of times over so that it fits the platforms you are posting to.
What content should you create?
When users are searching the web, they are doing so for a number of reasons, these are
- To find a solution to a problem
- To update themselves on the latest news in their industry
- To be entertained
- To learn more about their industry
So the content you create needs to address one of these areas for it to be useful.
Where to put that content?
The original piece of content should always be put on a platform that you own, which is why we favour a blog or news area within a website. This is the core to your online marketing and, of course, will drive traffic overall to your website which is normally one of the marketing goals that companies want to achieve.
So once you have written a blog post what else can you do with it?
Repurpose your content
Once your article is written, can it be used on its own, or coupled with other articles you have written in another format. For example
- Can you pull any facts and figures from it to create an infographic?
- Could you turn it into a presentation?
- What about an e-book?
- Even a podcast – probably the easiest to achieve
If you’re clever about your content marketing plan, and you put together a series of blogs over the course of a few weeks, all these suggestions would be possible.
Where to put your repurposed content?
If you’ve created an infographic, there are dozens of infographic directories that you can place your artwork for free… of course you’ll want to place it on your blog as its ‘home’, but you can easily promote it elsewhere too. Presentations are the same; we love Slideshare for Powerpoints, but why not think about using Prezzi as an alternative?
Of course, once you have published your content, its makes it easy to share through different platforms, you might choose LinkedIn and Google+ to highlight the presentation, but perhaps Twitter and Pinterest for the infographic. After a few weeks swap over, yes it’s the same ‘content’ but it will attract different people.
That way one piece of content can be used 5-6 times over in a number of different ways.
Artwork and images
It will come as no surprise that on the social platforms, images and videos are the most shared content, and drive the most engagement. Typically because they hit the ‘I want to be entertained’ element of being online. I can’t stress enough that you need to invest in some quality artwork that represents your brand or at very least get some good photos together that you can re-use with your content creation.
They say a picture paints a thousand words, and online not a truer word is said.
Your takeaway
- Think about a series of 4-5 blogs that you can put together in a theme.
- Purchase or get created the images that will surround the series
- Write the articles and get them scheduled to publish over the next month (or whatever timeframe suits your content plan)
- Use those same articles to create either a presentation or an e-book. Even just a pdf download that you can give away to people would be useful.
Need help coming up with a theme, or ideas? give us a call we might be able to help you!