Creating fresh content is an essential part of any marketing strategy.
It gets people to pay attention, helps you build trust, and even gives you the chance to reach new customers when people share.
But while generating content is essential to your marketing success, finding the time to create fresh content on a regular basis isn’t always easy. This is especially true when you have to run a business, manage your staff, and make sure everything else in your life is running smoothly.
Luckily, you don’t always need to create new content to satisfy your audience.
By re-purposing the great content you already have and delivering it in new ways, you can get more out of the content you are already creating.
Not only will you save time, but can help create brand consistency, build authority, and raise awareness in a whole new way.
Here are six things you can do to get more from your marketing content:
1. Share it.
Every piece of content you create can be shared on your various social media channels. This is a great way for your content to maximize its reach.
Each social network comes with its own context. By understanding the context of the different networks, and presenting the content in a way that’s unique to each individual channel, you are able to get more from our content and present it to a wider audience.
Here are a few tips for each of the top social networks:
- Twitter: Twitter is a high volume, low value network; posting multiple links to the same content is encouraged! Switch up the text each time you tweet the same piece of content to avoid looking spammy and repetitive.
- Facebook: Try combining images and text to make your update more visually appealing in the crowded news feed. Once you catch your audience’s attention, encourage conversation by asking a question relevant to the content.
- Google+: Many businesses use Google+ to benefit from its SEO value, and because of that, it’s important to include keywords and topics that are significant to your business throughout your posts. Google+ is also one network where longer posts are encouraged because of their SEO value.
- Pinterest: Pinterest is the most visual of the social network, so be sure to pin all of your content’s visual elements.
- LinkedIn: For LinkedIn’s professional audience, highlight the more formal or technical aspect of your content within your post.
2. Redesign it.
Every piece of written content you create can be redesigned and presented in a way that’s visually appealing to your online audience.
Content with lists, tips, facts, or quotes are great for creating word images.
You can use one of these images as your next graphic post on Facebook, or use a series of images within tweets spread over a long period of time. Get creative and organize your images according to themes or events that you’ve recently had, and showcase them on a Pinterest board or Facebook album.
Tip: Consider a free tool like PicMonkey when creating word images.
3. Break it up.
When you first share a piece of content, you’ll probably be focused on the big idea. While this is important, it’s also good to keep in mind all the different components, and how you can share them with your audience.
For example, if you own a gardening store and share an article that’s “10 Tips to Get Your Yard Ready for Spring,” chances are your first tweet will look something like this:
Are you ready for Spring? Check out our 10 tips for getting your yard ready!
But within that post, there are also a ton of great tips you can focus on as well.
Let’s say the first tip is, #1 Buy the right grass seed.
Well, then the next tweet might be:
10 Tips to Get Your Yard Ready for Spring: #1 Buy the right grass seed.
By focusing on different aspects of your content and highlighting new information, it will appear fresh rather than repurposed.
4. Discuss it.
One of the ways that we give our content new life is by talking about it in our weekly Speakeasy Marketing Roundtable podcast or in a video on our YouTube Channel.
While this may seem complicated, creating professional-looking videos or quality audio recording is a lot easier than you might think.
For most business owners, a smartphone will be the only piece of equipment you need to create content your audience will love. You may also want to consider a tool like Google+ Hangout to host a live video chat that you can then share later.
Remember that the quality of the content is what’s most important to your audience. Don’t worry if your video isn’t a big budget production.
5. Present it.
If you’re ever invited to do a speaking engagement or to share your ideas at an event, you can use the wealth of content you’ve created to build a presentation.
A tool like Microsoft PowerPoint is fairly easy to learn, but may take some time before you’re ready to present your information to an audience. If you don’t have any experience with designing presentations, you may want to elicit the help of a staff member or a colleague.
When the presentation is done, you can use a tool like SlideShare to share it on social media. In the future, you may even want to host your own live events or share your knowledge in a webinar.
6. Package it.
You can gather content you’ve created on your website, blog, or even helpful content from other resources that you think your readers will like, and put it all under one place.
Packaging your content not only allows you to get more from the great work you’re already doing, but also allows you to create an incredibly valuable resource that your audience will thank you for.
One of the most effective ways to package your content is to create an email newsletter.
Another way, you can package your content is to create an eBook. This may sound intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be when you are combining existing content.