Late one night, the inspiration hits. Eagerly, you whip out your laptop and spill the contents of your overactive brain into a Word document. Completing each sentence brings undeniable gratification. By the end of the final paragraph, you’re practically giddy. A few tweaks here, a few edits there, and voila! Your 1,000-word masterpiece is complete. You’ve just written the greatest blog post of your career, and you can’t wait to publish it to your company’s blog.
Now, one of two things will happen:
If your content experiences sound more like the second outcome, you’re not alone. Even the most brilliant content seems to have a fleeting shelf life. However, at Kuno Creative, we’ve found a few methods of extending our content’s time in the limelight. Read on to learn how you can get the most mileage out of your content.
Creating fresh content can be expensive and time-consuming. While the ROI of a well-crafted content strategy can be astronomical, small to mid-size businesses often struggle to find the resources to continually create high-converting, engaging new content.
If the thought of publishing a new blog post daily or a new video each week gives you indigestion, it’s time to take a step back and reassess. While frequency of publishing affects SEO, quality still reigns king. Instead of pumping out several pieces per week, spend your time and energy on fewer, more in-depth efforts.
Often, we talk about repurposing content. But, what does that really mean? Isn’t it bad practice to publish the same content over and over again?
Instead of plagiarizing yourself and bombarding your audience with identical messages over and over, find new ways to address old topics. Dig into your data and seek out past high-performing pieces. If they're still applicable, brush them off, re-optimize and re-share across multiple channels. For example, if you published a high-converting ebook two years ago, consider making updates and re-releasing as a new edition.
In other cases, you may choose to leverage your best-performing content in new ways. Blog posts can become infographics or SlideShares. A great ebook can become a video series or a podcast.
We live in an era of flash-in-the-pan trends. What constitutes a breaking story in the morning could be old news by Happy Hour (cough, “the dress,” cough). While it's important to stay relevant, if your resources are limited you don't want to focus too much on trending topics that readers may tired of hearing about before you’ve managed to gain any traction.
Unless you have an entire newsroom full of dedicated, trend-spotting, social-focused journalists (à la BuzzFeed), don’t hitch your content to these fleeting moments. Instead, invest your resources in subjects with greater staying power, such as content that educates and instructs. For example, if you sell project management software, “5 Tips for Better Managing Remote Employees” would carry weight longer than “Time Management Lessons from the 2015 Oscars.”
You can share your content via your company’s social media accounts and your own personal accounts, but if you really want to ramp up the exposure you have to build an army of sharers.
The best place to start is with your own team. From C-level executives to entry-level administrative staff, marketing professionals to product developers—get all employees involved in sharing. Ensure your team is regularly publishing company content via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and any other channels they frequent. The more people who share, the broader your network and the wider your reach.
Even when you have a team of brand storytellers and a well-crafted strategy, it’s still difficult to publish enough powerful content to meet demand. Often it feels like you’re only yielding a fraction of a return on your investment of time and effort. Unfortunately, it’s this challenge that leads many businesses to throw in the towel on content.
To solve this issue, Pawan Deshpande, CEO of Curata, developed the content pyramid—a methodology that helps you get the biggest bang for your content buck.
The base of the pyramid, or the largest chunk of the strategy, is composed of low effort, high frequency curated content such as Tweets and blog comments. Next comes short form content, then infographics and webinars, followed by ebooks and white papers and—at the very top—print books. Although the content grows in effort as you move up the pyramid, the frequency decreases. So, while you may send out 25 Tweets over the course of a campaign, you’ll only write one ebook.
Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a content marketing “easy button.” But by using repetition, varying content formats and distributing via a mix of owned, earned and paid media, it’s possible to increase the reach and lifespan of your content without putting in much more effort than you already are.
Practice these methods to erase your content expiration date, earn greater acknowledgment of your hard work and ensure a healthy content marketing ROI.
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