Convert company speeches into ebooks, blog posts, SlideShares, and other content marketing collateral by following this simple strategy.
Content marketing is not always easy, even for the most seasoned marketers. While we have the technology to publish at the tap of a finger, it can be challenging to build up the wealth of high-quality material you need to fill your marketing funnel.
Your internal subject-matter experts don’t have the time to write content, or even be interviewed. You don’t have enough current research to draw from. Or maybe you simply hit a drought of inspiration—you dry up. After building up heightened expectations about what content marketing can deliver for your team, you may fall into what Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi has called “the trough of disillusionment.”
But there is a cunning way to get out of this hole—and move into a far more sustainable path. The key is to mine existing content in its raw form in your business—identifying it, extracting it, massaging it, curating it, and then releasing it out into the world in a myriad of forms. This is known as content repurposing and here’s how to do it:
Start by asking yourself a few questions. Does your company hold webinars? Do your brand evangelists or your C-Suite speak on panels, or give presentations to fellow industry leaders? Do you host roadshows or annual conferences where key team members expound their thought-leadership and panels of experts discuss the greatest challenges in the industry?
These events are your content goldmines. They’re drenched in value and are sitting like undiscovered content warehouses all around you. Rather than having to hunt down a subject matter expert, set up an interview and coax the content out of them, you’ve got raw content that has already been delivered in a clear and engaging way. Be sure to invest in high-quality recordings of these events, as they can pay dividends for years to come.
While you already may be producing marketing videos from these events, you could be missing out on dozens of potential uses for this content in the written form. To unlock it, get the content transcribed, provide it to your team of writers or your content marketing agency, and collaborate on a content plan stemming from the transcripts.
As you do this, think big.
Start by analyzing whether the content has the potential to develop into an eBook or whitepaper, which is typically at least 2,000 words, but could be much longer if needed. This should be a comprehensive guide that provides actionable insights that your prospects won’t want to miss out on.
This is your gated asset, your lead-gen tool and the North Star in your content constellation. Find the most valuable elements from the transcribed talk or webinar and build a compelling eBook outline. You’ll want to only extract content that is genuinely useful here, ditch all the self-promotional talk but keep the relevant and helpful industry tips. The wonderful thing is that your road shows or annual conferences have all manner of panels and keynote presentations that contain these nuggets of wisdom. Dig them out, build an outline, unleash your writers on the copy, and get that draft designed into a slick and readable eBook. As you’re doing this, start to also think about the other assets that will emanate from this North Star.
A SlideShare is the eBook’s partner-in-crime. They go together beautifully. As you build the SlideShare outline, take elements from the eBook and represent them in a visual form with concise copy pulling the reader through—but not enough to give away the entire game.
KissMetrics calls SlideShare “the Quiet Giant of Content Marketing” and with more than 60 million unique viewers per month, the site certainly has a lot of potential eyeballs. You can upload an entire eBook to SlideShare, but we’re fans of creating a separate SlideShare that entices folks to download the gated eBook for more.
(Plan the SlideShare as you’re planning the eBook, so that the designs can be cleverly duplicated, rather than doing it later as an afterthought. Your designer will thank you for it.)
As you develop the outline for the eBook, simultaneously create a series of pitches for related blog posts. You have two main routes here: take one element from the eBook and hone in on that particular thread in detail, or take a point from the eBook as your jumping off point and go off creatively from there. Your call-to-action at the end of both is to download the eBook that expands on the topic. Stagger these blogs to be published after the eBook is released, to keep luring fresh eyes back to the asset.
Does the content you’re utilizing convey information that is complex? Do you have access to an abundance of stats that perhaps don’t mean a lot when you look at them in writing, but when shown visually will be revelatory to your industry? Perhaps you can see a persona or journey emerging from your raw data that would help others understand an industry challenge in a fresh way. Infographics are beloved for the way they attract attention, educate, inspire, entertain and engage new prospects—and they work dazzlingly well in our uber-distracted, modern age.
Finally, as you do all of the above, be ruthlessly strategic. Always keep the big picture and your business goals in mind. By creating multiple spinoffs for multiple target audiences, you can build each piece in way that will lead prospects further down the funnel. Think of the various personas you’re targeting and how each piece of content speaks to their buyer journey and hone your messaging accordingly. And as you design all of the assets, keep the branding and design aligned and be sure to create a distribution plan.
What you’ll find, if you follow these simple steps, is that you’ll be creating compelling, targeted content in an orderly and systematic way. You’ll have discovered an endless well of inspiration from the very inside of your company. The webinars will keep flowing, the evangelists will keep evangelizing, and your transcripts will keep bringing you insights and valuable, original content. You’ll be taking what already exists and spinning it out into multiple new forms that drive leads at every stage of the funnel. You’ll be acting like a marketer, in the greatest sense of the word.
Clare Tyrrell-Morin brings 15 years of international marketing and editing experience to Eucalypt Media. Born in the UK, she spent a decade in the Asian media industry as arts writer for the South China Morning Post newspaper, founding art editor of Time Out Hong Kong, and marketing and events manager for Asia City Media. She moved to Maine in 2009 with her husband and has been enjoying the pristine air ever since.
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