So, you have a blog. And social media. And an email newsletter. They all demonstrate your expertise, authority and trustworthiness to your audience (and to the Googles). They are part of your overall marketing strategy, and they’re helping you turn tire-kickers into cash-spenders.
And creating all that content is killing you.
Sound familiar?
You’re not alone. Many small businesses are on the same content-creation treadmill; feeding the social media beast alone can seem like a Herculean task. It regularly pulls you and your team away from supporting your existing customers, back-office administration, and the million other things that you’d rather be filling your day with.
What if there was a better way?
There is!
Get off the content creation treadmill
The biggest mistake most small businesses make when they go all-in on a content marketing strategy is constantly developing new material.
But… don’t you need new stuff all the time?
Not really.
Rather than developing 100 unique pieces of content, wouldn’t it make more sense to create 25 pieces that you can reuse and repurpose?
Recycling makes sense
Let’s start with social media. Yes, it may seem like we’re on social all the time, but… we’re not actually consuming content 24/7 365. Your audience sleeps, works, goes to school, binges Netflix, whatever, and during those moments, they are missing whatever you’re posting. Most are not going back through your feed regularly to see what they’ve missed.
And if they do… what’s the risk of them seeing slight duplication in content?
There is none (unless your business is selling in-the-moment services and information: you can’t recycle last week’s weather, news or stock prices!), so you can safely reuse each piece of content a few times without your social followers abandoning you!
How does that work?
Okay, let’s say you’ve got an awesome video tour of your business. There are a lot of ways you can use it to support content:
- Simple: Hey, tour our office and see where the magic happens!
- Informational: What happens when you submit a work request? We get to work!
- Silly: The boss is on vacation and we’re running amok!
- Serious: Our office doesn’t have many bells and whistles – we put our time and energy into solving your problems rather than decorating our workspace.
Thus, the same video can be used (or slightly repurposed – sliced down, turned into a gif, used as a teaser) multiple times. Check out additional approaches to social content here.
It can also appear on your website (helping your site stay fresh), as part of a blog on the way your team works, in your next newsletter or sales email, or any other way you can think of!
That’s a LOT of uses for one 45-90 second video! And it can show up on social now AND again in 3-6 months. Even if a small fraction of your audience remembers seeing it multiple times, they aren’t going to abandon you!
More examples, please!
Let’s say you sell an amazing eye-candy product. You arrange for professional photography to really make it look sexy. Now what?
Now, you maximize the mileage you get from that photography:
- Put it on your product pages
- Use it in case studies demonstrating your expertise and experience and how it made a client’s life easier/better
- Post it multiple times in your social feed, with different messages and filters over weeks and months
- Work it into a blog, supporting a story about how awesome your business is (that blog could even share language from your case study)
- Make it part of your sales emails, and use it in newsletters (now and in the future)
The point is, that every single piece of long-form content you write, photo you take, and video you shoot can be reused in many different ways. It’s a heck of a lot easier (and faster!) to reuse something that already exists than it is to continually create something new.
But... what about in-the-moment stuff?!
This repurposing approach doesn’t stop you from occasionally using one-time, in-the-moment content. Take a picture of the team stuffing their faces on doughnut day without fear! Grab video of the team volunteering together. Write emergency content that will never be reused. Those things are valuable and useful and add a lot of value as storytelling content.
But don’t be afraid to lean a little more heavily on existing content, finding ways to bring it back to life, and reintroducing your audience to it over time.
You’ll make your content marketing life a lot easier, and your audience won’t hold it against you!
Bonus: your new followers won’t know that it’s recycled – they’re seeing it for the first time, and learning all the reasons why you’re a great business!
Obligatory self-promotion
We can help you craft that amazing, reusable content in a variety of formats. Interested in getting that content monkey off your back? Give us a call at 1-888-322-6250.
