Feeding the Content Marketing Beast? Don't forget to heat up the leftovers!
Now more than ever, the Beast is hungry. To keep our brand, company, product or service top of mind, we need to feed the Beast—more, more, more!
More content. In more channels. For more audiences.
Our content demands are growing exponentially while our time, teams and budgets seem increasingly constrained. For the many organizations I’ve worked with, there is one consistent theme I’ve noticed: we serve the Beast finely-prepared meals while leftovers sit in the pantry past expiration.
Now that you’re both confused and hungry…let me put it more simply. As marketers, we work so hard to produce new content, we forget to revisit good (used) content and give it new flavor. Here are a few tips I’ve learned that can help you slice, dice and otherwise heat up content you have on the shelf.
Tip #1: Variety is the spice of content
When I joined a nonprofit organization, content was our bread and butter. It was how we attracted and engaged two of our primary constituents. As part of my onboarding to the organization, I audited the content and learned was that while it excelled in topic and substance, it wasn’t varied in type. The team served up long-format articles over and over.
Long-format articles are like the beef wellington of the content world. Absolutely delicious, but It takes a lot of work to produce and at times, it’s too heavy to consume.
Today, your content plan needs to include both traditional and visual content types. Newsletters and white papers might be your organization’s bread and butter, but don’t overlook infographics, videos, podcasts/audio, animation, slideshares, and gifs or memes.
One tech firm used a meme as a quick way to announce a round of funding. It’s a good visual way to share news in social channels and I’m willing to bet the ROI on this content piece was better than an email or a newsletter announcement. Memes can be a great way to quickly post something relevant or timely; and can be strong brand-builders. They are a quick wink and a nod to your constituents that you share a common bond. Just beware your meme – know its original intent and stay within your brand and tone guidelines, while you have a little fun.
Tip #2: Perfection is the enemy of a decent meal
No one is a perfect chef all the time. What every successful chef knows is WHEN perfection matters. Serving a meal for a famous food critic? Perfection. Need to eat to keep a busy kitchen going all night? That burnt grilled toast will do.
In marketing, you need to know when perfection matters…and when it doesn’t. My rule of thumb is that usually 80% is good enough; the last 20% is often an exercise in vanity. It's a measure of the value of your work versus the return it will get. Will rounds of edits impact your audience's desired behavior? In my experience, the answer is almost always no.
Last year, my team built a multi-pronged digital campaign to promote a new program. We included the Program Owner throughout the entire process from kickoff through a final review of all deliverables.
On the day of campaign launch, she asked the team to accommodate minor design changes. She wasn’t a marketer, so she didn’t realize her 'minor changes' involved the writer, front-end designer, developer, and a proof/quality assurance check. All for subjective changes that wouldn’t move the needle. I'm no economist, but I use the term "diminished returns" to help quantify the value of subjective copy and design changes. Frequently, as in the case cited above, the ROI is simply not there. We launched the campaign on time without the requested changes, and it achieved the desired results.
I can be a perfectionist but after years of learning, experience, and constant self-reminding, I’ve adopted wise advice from a famous Snow Queen that I will share with you now.
Tip #3: Upcycle your content to recreate favorite meals…or create new ones
Content development is expensive. That’s why content should be upcycled, reused and otherwise reheated into something new. Trust me, you’ve got the leftovers just waiting to be used.
The most effective upcycling we did in our online community was to reuse strong performers. I know it sounds elementary, but our team was so busy creating new content, they needed someone to gently nudge them and say, “what about content we already published, does it still have shelf life?”
Indeed, it did. Using a mix of analytics and identifying article topics that would stay relevant, we built an “evergreen” library. We’d use something from this library when there was a gap in our publishing schedule or a timely or relevant opportunity. Perhaps an image, headline or intro paragraph was tweaked, but the guts of the article stayed the same. We re-promoted the article and voila, the evergreen article continued to solidly perform.
One example was our “emergency preparedness” article. It had run once in our community and then sat on the shelf. We put it back into rotation for hurricanes, fires, landslides, etc., and turned it into an email that we would proactively send to our community members who were in the path of a storm. We even re-skinned the article for Halloween 'Zombie preparedness' (a hit!) and turned the article tips into a visual infographic. This one article that had initially had one run generated many new opportunities to engage our community–at very little cost.
Extra tip: Seeking a recipe for success? Sometimes you just need a sous chef!
Emergency Preparedness is great example of upcycling. Unfortunately, I can point to a garbage heap of great content that never got reused. Why? Because my teams were always so busy with new deliverables and new programs, we rarely had enough time to look back. Upcycling or recycling content is smart, but it takes work. Especially if you have content silos where content is being managed by different teams or groups. There are likely opportunities to use and re-use content, but no one has time to take a comprehensive view.
It’s one reason I’m here. I know how hard it is to take time to audit existing content or find the time to slice and dice it for something tasty and new.
One way to make use of the piles of content sitting unused in your proverbial pantry?
Find an experienced set of hands. They can audit your existing content to look for missed opportunities and help create a forward-looking plan to make sure your content investment has more utility and a longer life across more channels.
I’d love the chance to help you mix it up. Contact me at Jill@midfield-marketing.com for new content ideas.
Bon Appetit!
