I recently delivered a presentation on marketing at the annual CASRO Management Conference in New Orleans.
It was called, “12 reasons why your marketing & sales might not be working and what you can do about it.” Other than creating the PowerPoint presentation itself, it took me no time to develop… no time flushing out ideas, no time refining concepts, no time finalizing the content.
How was I so lucky? Easy… the presentation already existed. It was based on an eBook I had published a few months earlier. I simply took the content that had been developed for the eBook and ‘re-purposed’ it for the presentation.
So, as you look at your content strategy (you are developing content, aren’t you?), are you taking advantage of re-purposing?
Take a look at all of the different kinds of content available to you:
- Articles
- White papers
- Case studies
- EBooks
- Webinars
- Blog posts
- Tweets
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Online discussions
- And more
Some might think that re-purposing is a little cheesy… maybe even a little lazy. I strongly disagree… and for several reasons:
TIMING: Potential clients (and that’s really who you want consuming your content) don’t always connect with you at the exact time you publish a piece of content. Re-purposing your content gives them the chance to access that same content (albeit in different form) at a later date. That is, they might not see your blog post in February, but they downloaded it as part of an eBook in May.
LEARNING: People learn differently. Some people learn by reading a document – sometimes over and over again. Make sure some of your content is in the written word (blog posts, articles, etc.) for them.
Others need to see and hear the information presented to them… for those folks, webinars, videos or podcasts work best.
Re-purposing your content into various formats ensures that people gravitate to the format best suited to their learning style.
ACCESS: Lastly, re-purposing content gives people access to it in ways they like best. For example, I know people who will not give up an hour of their day to sit in a webinar… they’d rather clip an article and read it in the evening. I know others who don’t spend a lot of time online… so if all my content was on my blog, they’d never see it.
As you work on your editorial calendar (you do have one, don’t you?) for the next month , next quarter or next year… don’t be shy about spreading the wealth around by re-purposing your various pieces of content into different formats and spreading them out over time.
Do that, and your content marketing will give your market research firm a competitive advantage over other firms whose content is singularly focused.