Reusing Content for Marketing

How to Reclaim “Premium” Content for Inbound Marketing

The concept of Inbound Marketing hinges on providing something so valuable that someone will trade their contact information for it. So enticing that they know they are going to have to hear from you again. Sound easy?

Needless to say we spend a lot of time perfecting the work we do for our clients. In most cases we opt for writing an eBook (typically a downloadable PDF) and/or a companion checklist.

To understand why you would want to reuse your original Premium Content, you need to understand the amount of effort that goes into producing the original piece. The process usually goes something like this:

• Create your “Buyer Persona’s
  Before we create content, we need to agree on who we are creating it for and what might motivate them to download our client’s premium content offer.
  
  
• Brainstorm the concept or “theme”
  Once we agree on who our primary and secondary target personas are, we create a list of what we believe would be of actual benefit to them.
  
  
• Come up with an effective title
  Sometimes that means clever…but it always means descriptive. Once we start distributing this content, the title caries the burden of being the main hook.
  
  
• Create a detailed outline
  Certainly we create the outline for our copywriters to use a guide, but we also consider what each section might look like as its own blog post.
  
  
• Create the copy
  The copy has to be top-notch, clean and flow smoothly. It’s will go through multiple edits so that our staff and our clients are all onboard.
  
  
• Layout the Book
  This part is so much more time consuming than you would expect. If your premium content is image intensive, expect to spend a lot of time on image selection alone.

So after spending this much effort creating a pristine piece of quality content for your marketing strategy, you don’t want this to be a one-hit wonder, no matter how effective it is in its original format.

So how do you reuse all this work with minimal effort?

Step #1: If it is the type of step-by-step information that the consumer can use in a printable checklist form (remember our Buyer Personas?), you already have the makings of a separate piece of premium content. Once you have all the content for an entire eBook organized, it’s not a huge leap to create an abridged edition in checklist format. This can be used as either a separate offer with its own marketing campaign, or as a companion piece to add value to your original book.

Step #2: If you did a good job with your outline, the book should be naturally broken down into convenient “blog-ready” posts. Each of the blogs can be used to promote the original content (or a different offer).

Step #3: Each of the blog posts is probably tweetable, and ripe for syndication across multiple social platforms. You can get a lot of mileage out of each section.

Step #4: There is probably plenty of material in the book to create a series of emails promoting the original book, or even an alternative offer.  

Start all over again with a similar market

To really leverage all the work you put into the original content, take a look at your other personas. Can some minor but strategic changes give your content new life in different markets?

Example #1: One of our clients sells POS (Point Of Sale) systems. Their target market are small retailers. More to the point, they had already segregated their target market into specific industries such as “Surf Shops”, “Equestrian shops”, “Fashion Boutiques”, etc.

The original content was intentionally generic in the sense that the information was applicable to virtually every retailer. However, would it be a far cry to change some of the wording to insert mentions of surfing, or horses or fashion?

Instead of featuring generic images of shopkeepers and customers, how much effort would it be to swap out those images for pictures of surfboards or saddles?  

Each of your micro-markets can now have its own customized premium content ready for market. All that work that you did (or paid for) can be leveraged multiple times with minimal effort.

Example #2: We created various eBooks and checklists for our own company based on general Inbound Marketing principles. Like most Inbound Agencies we have our own vertical markets that we’re fond of. How difficult do you think it would be to customize this eBook: 25 Website ‘Must Haves’ For Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales for the Glass & Mirror industry, or the Charter School industry, or the manufacturing industry?

Don’t Just Create One-Hit-Wonders

If you are planning on investing time and money on an Inbound Marketing strategy, invest the extra thought into how you can leverage all that effort across multiple markets. You’d be surprised at how much more vested your target markets are when they see content that is written just for “them”.

You might also like:

How to Give Good Headline:
Books, blogs and landing pages all rely heavily on the titles just to get someone to take a glance. As David Ogilvy famously said “You HAVE to crap out 25 headlines for every piece of content”

Trying to Appeal to Everyone is Appealing to No One:
Creating Buyer Personas are a key to creating the right premium content for your target market. Here is an example of a persona that we created for one of the examples in this article.