4 Ways to Maximize the Reach of Your Published Content Content creation and dissemination is essential for any successful content strategy, but it's a major undertaking for small businesses. Here are a few tips to make it easier.
Edited by Dan Bova
Content creation and dissemination is essential for any successful content strategy, but it's a major undertaking for small businesses. Having a strategic marketing plan that maximizes the impact of each piece of content you create reduces the amount of original items you need to create, increases your ROI on your content marketing initiative, reduces your time spent and ensures efficiency in regards to marketing spend and employee time.
Yet, many entrepreneurs haven't trained themselves to find opportunities in their content-marketing plans to strategically deploy content in multiple ways.
Here are four steps that you can take with any piece of content you create to get more value from it over time.
1. Take an asset approach to content creation. Consider this: If you create content in a modular way that can be broken down and assembled in different formats, it'll be much easier to create the right final presentation for a particular channel. The more variations of content, the more opportunities.
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For example, an expert interview could be recorded and transcribed. The interview could be used as source material for a white paper, released on its own as an industry interview, the audio files produced into a podcast or video interview and key themes and quotes used in articles and social media updates. The more nuggets you have, the more your core content can evolve into multiple forms.
2. Build a cross-channel strategy that puts content into different formats. Each piece of content created should be used for more than one channel.
For example, a newsletter article could serve as advanced content for your email subscribers. A week later, it could be published on your blog or shared as a guest post. Interesting excerpts could be used as social media status updates. The facts could be woven into a visual format, such as an infographic. An audio version could be integrated into your podcast. While not every piece of content will work with every channel, you should evaluate each piece of content that you create with one question in mind: How many different ways can I format all or part of this content to connect with my audience and expand my reach?
3. Find purposes for content across the buying funnel. When a piece of content is created, it often is crafted with a distinct purpose in mind.
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For instance, you might create a white paper that assesses your industry's problems and deploy it as a lead generation piece. However, there's likely to be a wide range of other contexts and purposes that the materials could also be used for. For example, could some of the facts be used in pitches to the media to help generate interest and awareness of your brand? Could a series of videos or graphics be created to educate or inform your existing customers? Identifying different uses across business functions and throughout the funnel is another great way to position your content.
4. Look for bundling and packaging opportunities. Always be on the lookout for new ways to bundle, package and present your existing content. Is your full body of content easily accessible? If a fan goes looking for the materials that you've found, are they left following a disparate content footprint around the web? Could you create a repository with all your best materials to help position you as an expert? This approach has worked extremely well for me, particularly, with the Resources section I published, containing downloadable copies of my best work. Do you have a series of articles or blog posts on a related theme that could be curated into an ebook?
Repurposing your content has numerous benefits --from reducing the stress on your staff to create new materials to enabling you to publish high-quality content at a faster rate. For many companies, developing the perspective needed to strategically repurpose content gives you the leverage needed to scale up your content marketing initiative.
