It’s tough out there for content marketers, what with keeping a steady stream of content flowing through all the channels—company website, email, blogs, social media, etc. It can be overwhelming at times, which is why it is important for marketers to create content that can be reused elsewhere. Here’s a how-to guide on leveraging premium content for marketers.
First, why is it so important to leverage premium content across channels?
Because it’s good for SEO, you can reach different customers through different channels, and it saves you time and energy in creating content.
To begin leveraging your content, take a look at your existing content—everything on your website, your direct marketing emails, your blog posts, social media posts, etc. Take an inventory of this content with an eye towards recycling it and reusing it again somewhere else.
Is there long form content on your website that could be broken up and republished as blog posts? Do you have data sets that could be presented visually with infographics? How about the presentation you recently did for that industry group—could your slides serve as the basis of a blog post or ebook?
Going forward, keep the COPE maxim in mind—Create Once, Publish Everywhere—as you develop your editorial calendar. This will help you think strategically about how to create content that can be leveraged across platforms.
When you create new content, start with one core idea—this could be a service you want more clients for or a specific problem you can solve for customers.
Next, identify 5-10 topic areas around this issue that you can write on knowledgeably. Think about these topics in detail and try to anticipate questions that customers would have about the topics.
Take these 5-10 topic areas and write a blog post or two about each, making sure to preemptively answer your customers’ likely questions. Once you have all these blog posts ready, string them together with a table of contents and write an introduction and voila, instant ebook.
Now you have quite a few blog posts and an ebook ready to go. That equals easy social media content—just post links to each post and the ebook on your social media channels.
Now, do you have to give any presentations soon? Take one of your blog posts, make a few adjustments, throw in some more graphics, spread it all out over a dozen slides, and boom! Presentation is done! Upload your presentation to Slideshare, and you have more content to post on social media.
Creating content for only one use on one platform is a waste of time and effort. Instead, maximize your resources by leveraging your content across as many platforms as possible.
