TopRank Marketing‘s Lee Odden shares essential tips to help you get the most from content investments
Did you know, that on a daily basis, 16 to 20 percent of search queries on Google have never been seen before? With over 100 billion monthly queries, there are an incredible number of ways that people express their interests, wants and needs.
At the same time, half of marketers say producing content consistently is a top challenge.
With the diversity of expressions buyers search for and the demands of producing a variety of engaging content on a consistent basis, one has to wonder why so many B2B marketers insist on publishing content once and with a singular theme.
To get more value from content investments while providing a greater variety of information to prospective customers, many B2B marketers are repurposing. Common tactics include things like creating five versions of an ebook using different keywords in the titles or deconstructing a large white paper into fifteen blog posts covering uber-niche topics. The thing is, content repurposing doesn’t always create a very good user experience.
Efficiency at the cost of engagement is not how successful B2B marketers attract, engage and win new clients. The challenge is to balance content that can be efficiently and effectively repurposed with the kinds of content topics and formats that buyers actually want.
So how can you reconcile the need to achieve maximum value for content investments while maintaining a great customer experience?
1. Start by going modular
Plan, create and repurpose component pieces of information and media organized by topic, keyword, customer need and type of media. Content planning that uses a modular approach will make the repurposing process easier, more keyword relevant and more meaningful for the audience, because topics are driven by an understanding of customer interests.
For many content calendars, a modular approach means thinking ahead about how the content you’re planning can be remixed, repurposed and deconstructed into other forms that retain utility for your customers.
For example, some content may be interchangeable with templates that allow you to use a core of content and then customize it for a certain industry audience. Or you can personalize for a very specific customer segment without having to completely recreate all new content every time.
2. Be the best answer with hub and spoke
Create a substantial content asset that provides comprehensive coverage of a topic that your buyers care about. For many B2B marketers, this will be in the form of a white paper, ebook or research report.
On its own, this large asset is valuable to your audience. But what about potential customers that prefer content in a more visual format? Or audio? What about prospective buyers that see a large report as a big TLDR but would respond better to short form content?
This is where the spokes come into play. Along with the large asset, identify the information that is most amenable to complementary formats and tangential topics. Repurpose content from the big asset, creating specific pieces intended to be consumed according to the preferences of your audience. That way, people who want an infographic or a narrated video or motion graphic can get it. And those that want mid-length content in the form of a blog post or article on an industry website can get that, too.
3. Cook microcontent into a meal
Snackable content can often be managed and repurposed like ingredients to create a main course. On their own, short form content like quotes, tips and statistics are useful for social network shares and as added credibility to blog posts, ebooks and articles.
When collected together according to a theme, microcontent can become the often abused, but frequently impactful listicle blog post, infographic or motion graphic. Better yet, track how well your community responds to microcontent that is shared on social networks and combine the best performing content into your culinary content masterpiece, optimized with keywords of course.
4. Explore thematic interviews
Connecting with industry influencers is a great way to bring expertise and credibility to your content. Interviews with well-known executives and brandividuals on their own provide an interesting perspective for your readers.
From a repurposing standpoint, it’s important to think through the themes of your interviews and the individual questions to ensure your content will topically align with your customers’ interests.
An approach to interviews might be, for example, to identify a series of 12 industry influencers who are each asked 10 questions. Let’s say four of those questions are essentially the same for each interview. Publish the individual interviews as episodic content in a series. Then once the series is over, take all of the answers to each of the duplicated questions and assemble those into four new posts, SlideShares, infographics or visual ebooks. Just be sure to ask questions that will evoke practical or provocative answers in order to get the best result with repurposing.
5. Flavorize your best performers
If you’ve been in the content creation game for a while, you’ve undoubtedly hit a few home runs with some of your evergreen content. As that content ages, it may be able to live another life. This may seem pretty straightforward, but the flavor is in the favors you can get from internal and industry influencers.
First identify your best-performing content according to topics during a given timeframe. Pick out those content assets that might do best with an update. Don’t just change the setup and the examples — although, that’s not a bad idea. Reach out to internal subject matter experts for their perspective on the topic. At the same time, either go to your inventory of saved quotes from industry influencers, or reach out to new influencers for their take on the topic as well. Adding updates to historic performers can help make lasting evergreen content perform even better than it did in the first place.
The magic of realizing maximum value from your content investment isn’t only about repurposing a single piece of content into 25 different individual parts. Evolved content repurposing is really about empathy, smart planning and a modular approach that delivers efficiency as well as a personalized experience for your audience.
