Martin McCauley
By: Martin McCauley – Bayshore Solutions Business Development Director
Content; it seems like it’s all you hear about nowadays when it comes to an effective digital marketing strategy. Content, and more of it, is an easy enough request to make, but for anybody who is responsible for producing that content, you know that it’s a lot easier requested than done! Well here’s the good news; there’s a way to almost magically multiply some of your best quality content giving you more pages on your website, more blog posts, and more tweets.
Let’s say you interview your CEO. You’ve been trying to get time on his calendar for weeks. It’s already been rescheduled three times, but the time comes and you finally get your half hour with him. You use your time wisely and tap deeply into his reservoir of knowledge to get some great info regarding the state of the industry, the most important trends on the horizon, and a key insight on new customer acquisition. You clearly get enough content to put together an awesome blog post that garners a more than respectable spike in traffic. You’re happy, your manager is happy and your CEO is happy, a success by most any measure.
In fact, it’s a huge missed opportunity! Why? Because you have squandered a valuable core resource (the interview) by leveraging it for only a single piece of content, and although that content produced the desired result (increased traffic), it could have been leveraged to produce a much higher return on that half hour interview.
Let me explain.
Let’s say that instead of that single blog post, you put a little more time and energy into the project and use your CEO interview to create a new white paper that summarizes your CEO’s key points. Then let’s say that white paper is important enough to garner its own spot on the home page, and you are happy to provide a PDF copy at no cost to whoever would like it so long as they supply their email address, giving you a valuable Call to Action on your homepage as well as new emails to add to your database for future marketing opportunities.
You then also use that white paper to create not just one, but many social media posts. The first several posts will also be announce over several days or even over a couple of weeks that the new white paper is “Coming Soon”. Once the white paper is released, there will be several more posts announcing that it is “Available Now”. You’ll also be sure to get creative with these announcements, so it doesn’t just look like the same post over and over again. For example, “What’s on the Immediate Horizon for the Industry,” or “State of the Industry: What You Need to Know,” and so on; each one focusing on a unique aspect of the white paper.
But wait! We’re not done yet! Now let’s take that white paper, and create not just one blog post, but no fewer than five blog posts! We start with a blog post on the State of the Industry, but we “squeeze” the content out enough to where we release it as a Part I followed by a Part II. Next, we take each of the industry trends which your CEO let you know are on the horizon, and there is a separate blog post for each trend, Industry Trend I, Industry Trend II (maybe even Industry Trend III).
Finally, there is a blog post entirely dedicated to Customer Acquisition. These blog posts are released over a series of weeks, and, just like the white paper, each post is accompanied by several social media posts. Pro tip: never make the mistake of thinking that each blog post only deserves a single social media post; the nature of social media feeds is such that it is very likely your social media audience will not see the post unless you post it several times at various times over several days.
So there you have it, a single half hour interview has populated your content calendar for up to two months! You could even get crazy and put together an info-graphic or two, and if you’re feeling really adventurous you could record the interview, and release it as a podcast, or, even better, several podcasts. You get the idea. This is a content marketing strategy that you can apply to almost any piece of quality content. Instead of desperately scrounging for more and more content, be sure to make the very best use of the content you already have.
For some professional assistance with creating and implementing your content strategy, Bayshore Solutions experts are here to help. Contact us to get started producing and promoting quality content for your business.
Martin McCauley is a Business Development executive at Bayshore Solutions—a Web Design, Web Development, and Digital Marketing Company.