When you develop your own content, one important thing to consider is how many ways you can present that content. You worked hard and spent a lot of time developing that content. Why not capitalize on it and get it in front of as many people, in as many different content formats as possible?
Over the past few articles, I’ve been talking a lot about creating personas to define your perfect customers, when planning your content marketing strategy. One part I’ve touched on a few times is the fact that when you develop your content, you want to develop your content on channels and platforms that fit with your client personas. In other words, you do not want to create content, say on a blog, if your ideal clients don’t read blogs but instead listen to hours of podcasts each week.
While it is important that you initially develop all your content to be as findable and absorbable as possible for your ideal customers, once you’ve achieved that goal, you definitely want to look beyond that one delivery method and try to find unique ways to repurpose your content, spreading it across multiple platforms. For instance, when I used to work for another marketing agency, I would frequently record “how to” marketing videos that discussed theories about things like print marketing, and how to revive that legacy form of marketing and breathe new life into it. While the videos were the main way I wanted to get my message out to our client base, I found that if I also converted those video clips into podcasts, I ended up getting a bunch of traffic from people that were outside the initial persona group I was targeting, but nevertheless very interested and engaged with what I was sharing.
With that in mind, I want to give you a real life scenario, describing how you can take a single piece of content, and repurpose it across multiple channels, getting the maximum amount of traffic and engagement possible out of that piece of content.
Pro Tip: No Matter What Kind Of Content You Have Created, There Is A Way To Repurpose It
It’s true. I know sometimes it may seem hard to figure out how, but trust me when I tell you that there is not a piece of content on the planet that can’t successfully be repurposed into other marketing channels. For today’s practical tutorial, let’s stick with the example I gave above, of a video “how to” on revitalizing a legacy form of marketing, direct mail postcards.
As I mentioned, the very first thing I did was turn the video into a podcast that was uploaded and distributed via multiple podcasting platforms. While this didn’t originally occur to me as a great idea, it turned out to really pay off. The podcast was widely downloaded and eventually even spun off into it’s own podcast series where we discussed common problems with people that wanted to use legacy marketing methods in a tech oriented world.
The next thing I immediately considered was the video itself. While at the time I posted the video on our corporate YouTube channel, it occurred to me that there are more avenues for video consumption besides YouTube alone. So the next thing I did was take that same video and upload it to our Facebook business page. Not only that, I made a quick 10 second teaser video of the content and created a Facebook ad that promoted the video, in the hopes to get even more people to click to watch the video. Not surprisingly, in as little as 24 hours time, I had received thousands of video views, specifically through the Facebook channel.
Next, I had to consider our blog. This was another great place I could embed the video. Embedded videos without text description though weren’t going to give the SEO pump that I wanted. With that in mind, I did create a blog post that had the video embedded, front and center on the top of the post, but I went one step further by adding text description. I basically just typed out the transcript of everything I said in the video and put it in my post, under the video. I then went one step further, adding hyperlinks to the text, and in some places, giving a little extra description to keep the reader on track and not confused by any nuances that were missing in the conversion from video to the written word.
So before you knew it, I took one single piece of content and was able to repurpose it to three other very solid platforms that ended up getting the content way more eyes and engagement than simply leaving a video on our corporate YouTube channel would have ever gotten.
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