Despite the alleged economic recovery, marketing budgets remain tight. Yet, as industry publications shrink and become less critical gateways for distributing your messages, you must publish more of your own content to get your messages out to buyers.
How can you create more content for less dollars?
Like the thrifty and creative domestic god/goddess who can squeeze six meals out of a single chicken, you can make your content budget go a lot farther if you repurpose your existing content assets.
Here are some of the many ways I’ve worked with clients to breathe new life into existing content:
1 - 8. Customer Stories
Interviews with customers can give you a jackpot of content. From a single customer interview you can obtain:
· A press release announcing that the customer has adopted your product. This shows that your product has momentum. It might also show that you’re gaining ground on competitors.
· A customer success story that you can use early in the sales cycle to demonstrate that customers achieve measurable value from your products.
· An implementation story that helps customers evaluating different vendors see how well you partner with customers to meet their specific requirements.
· An article for your company magazine, online newsletter, or even a blog post.
· A video or pod cast of the customer endorsing your product.
· Quotes for use in datasheets.
· Abstracts of essential points for use in sales presentations.
· Abridged case studies that can be used to illustrate trends in white papers.
9. White Papers
Turn white papers into thought-leadership articles for placement in a trade magazine, company newsletter, ezine or even a short blog post with a link to the original. In some cases, you may have to cut the paper down slightly for length—white papers are typically 2,500-3,000 words, articles are usually 800-2,000 words. Often, you don’t even have to do that much.
10. Product Solution Guides
Repurpose product solution guides into industry solution guides or white papers. Many B2B companies understand that they need to talk about the customer challenges as they relate to the customer’s specific industry. Many solution sheets or vertical white papers combine new content that discusses problems of a specific industry and wrap it around existing product information to create industry-specific solution guides or white papers.
11. Datasheets
Once you’ve written a datasheet that describes your key differentiators, how your product works, most important features, and three to five key benefits, it takes just a few minutes to crank out a page for your website describing your product.
12. Presentations
Many companies translate presentations into white papers and vice versa. I worked with one company that explicitly did this because the CTO didn’t want to have to travel so much in person and wanted to send a white paper in his place. In other cases, the white paper could be used as an offer for a lead generation or nurturing campaign.
13. Repurpose Print into Rich Media
And of course, since people absorb information in different ways and have different preferences as to how they wish to receive information, you present the same information in different formats. For example, excerpt a white paper into a podcast or video. Translate a video into an article, and so on.
How have you repurposed your content?
Recent Comments