Companies which are focused on keeping their website current and are busy engaging regularly with potential clients on social media know that they can only do that by producing content. Content, as Bill Gates told us more than two decades ago now, is indeed ‘king’.
Content comes in many different guises - it isn’t all about writing blogs. Increasingly today, it can be video clips, memes, infographics, photography… the list goes on.
The one thing which is true of all these pieces of content is that there’s a cost to producing them. Even writing a blog means a member of your own team giving up their time for a couple of hours or paying for the resources of a freelance writer. Good photography, eye-catching infographics and video can also be expensive to create.
It's important to consider then both the life-time of a piece of content and ways in which it can be used again – or repurposed. A good place to start then is with a marketing plan and we’ll be talking about creating an effective plan in a future blog. Once you’ve got a plan, you can see what campaigns (such as new launches) you’ll be focusing on over the next year and also which festivals etc, such as Christmas, you can build content around.
Once you’ve got a plan, then you’ll be focused on what pieces of content need producing and, in theory, be more efficient with your marketing spend from the outset.
Once you’ve got a piece of content, then it’s worth considering how it can be used effectively in different ways. For instance, if you’ve had a short video created for a new launch, then there could be ways of breaking it up into shorter clips for social media or taking screenshots of some scenes to share.
The same could be achieved with a piece of written content. If somebody on the team is asked to write a white paper on a particular subject, then this will start off as a long form piece of writing, which won’t sit well as a blog or social media post. It could though be sectioned up into a series of blogs.
If the white paper covers something new or ground-breaking, there could even be potential to repurpose the content into a press release to share with your particular media.
Alternatively, you could reimagine the white paper as a Q&A type interview with that member of staff, asking them how they drew the conclusions they did. This could be created as words but, of course, there’s potential to create a video interview based on the white paper and this, again, can be chopped up into smaller pieces – sometimes called ‘snackable’ content.
A longer article could also potentially be broken up into a top tips type of article. This content is ideal for social media, as each tip could sent out as a series of tweets or, with an image or infographic, shared on Instagram. If these include links back to your website, then this will also help with your SEO.
Of course, a piece of content might have begun its life as an address given at a conference or perhaps a webinar or ‘live’ social media event. If you have permission to do so, then this could be repurposed as words and then shared in various ways.
While you’d want to avoid simply using the same piece of content in the same way over and over again, repurposing it in different ways avoids it looking as if you’re doing that. Also, you could repurpose the content to appeal to different groups of consumers.
You could also legitimately reshare copy when it’s linked back to a particular time of the year or an awareness day, perhaps. Again, if you’ve prepared a marketing plan, which covers social media, then these could be scheduled in. Equally, you could keep other pieces of copy ready to reshare if they relate to something which can’t be scheduled in – such as particularly hot (or cold) spell of weather.
Good content is worth investing in. If you repurpose it to suit a different channel or potential customer, than you will reach and influence a variety of audiences.
If you’d like to know more about repurposing content, then do get in touch with our team at Lake Solutions on tel: 020 3397 3222.