Content Marketing Simplified

Content marketing can definitely be overwhelming and often feel like a grind. 

As a general rule of thumb, I always recommend that you create the foundations of social media strategy by initially focusing on building out one platform.

That’s the simplest way to gather really important data about how your message is landing with your community, what they’re interested in, what they need from you etc.

Then, once you’ve nailed that – you have a system you’re using regularly to produce content each month, you’re happy with the amount of time you’re spending on content marketing, and you’re happy with the results you’re getting – then it’s time to consider expanding your reach.

If this is you, the simplest way to expand your reach organically is to abandon the idea of multiple pieces of content on a variety of different topics each month and choose instead to focus on creating one new piece of content per month and repurposing it across multiple platforms.

Here’s how that might work; let’s say your overall topic is ‘The benefits of yin yoga’.

• You could start with a blog post that you publish on your website which talks about four specific benefits of yin yoga.
• Then each week on your social media accounts you might focus on one of the four benefits with a quote post (taking a quote from the blog), an image post (with a link back to the blog), and a text post (which captures a significant amount of the blog post). That’s the bulk of your social media done for the month.

Then there are many different ways you could take things to the next level. They include:

• You might produce a series of four short yin yoga videos which address one benefit each week and demonstrate some of the postures. (Remembering to put a link in the notes for each video linking back to your blog post.)
• You could then include a link to your YouTube videos on your blog post (given that it’s always good to drive traffic between your platforms), embed the videos on that post, or create four separate blog posts each with a video embedded and just a couple of sentences introducing the video.
• You could also run a weekly FB live which covers the exact same content as the YouTube videos. (You could consider this option as an alternative to building out a YouTube channel or in addition to, if you have a strong FB community and want to answer their questions as you’re talking through each benefit.)
• You could cut down the videos into 1 minute snippets and schedule them to be published on IG and FB with links in the posts back to your blog of YouTube channel (depending on where you want to drive traffic).
• You could also turn the original video files into audio files and voila you have four podcast episodes. Or just create a video podcast which means the only extra work is uploading your YouTube videos to your podcast host.
• You could produce an infographic which lists those same four benefits and publish that to Pinterest and Facebook with a link back to your blog post.
• You could create a slideshow of your blog post and upload it to LinkedIn if your potential audience lives there.
• And finally, you could (and for this bullet point, I strongly recommend you do) schedule a series of weekly emails to your community, focusing on the different benefits each week and linking back to your blog posts, YouTube channel or podcast show (again, depending on where you want to direct your traffic).

NOTE: you’re obviously not going to do all of these things at once. These are simply options for what you COULD DO, exemplifying how to make the most of that first piece of work you did in creating the original blog post.

The benefits of this approach are multifarious;

1. it is easy to batch time when you’re just focused on one topic. You could set aside 2-3 days at the beginning or end of the month, pull all of this together and schedule it in the appropriate places. Then there it is; your content for the month organised, supporting one another, and going out across the month. Which means all you need to do is show up and chat to people, answer questions, and focus on engagement.
2. the content you create on one platform supports the content you create on another platform which = consistency in your messaging and a stronger brand overall.
3. if you choose your topics wisely, this approach makes it easy to promote your free opt-in. Using the example above, let’s say your opt-in is a 30-minute yin yoga class. Including a banner or a link at the bottom of each blog post, social media post, YouTube video, the show notes of your podcast etc suddenly puts your opt-in in front of so many more people than it otherwise would be.
4. you don’t have to do all the repurposing yourself which means you can increase your visibility by at least 3x with no extra effort from you. With this approach, you would produce the first piece of content and then pay someone else to produce many of the other pieces. Start with the piece you have to produce – that no one else can produce. Perhaps that’s the videos or the blog post. If it’s videos, get them transcribed and ask your assistant to turn that into a blog post and social media posts. If it’s the video, he or she can then create a slide show, an infographic and social media posts from the original blog.
5. by adopting this approach, by the end of the year, you have covered 12 topics that you can easily turn into a book. Continuing with the yin yoga example, let’s say you covered off on 12 different topics relating to yin yoga from the benefits of yin, to yin yoga for pregnancy, to yin yoga for burned-out corporates, to yin postures for each season, to the best yin postures to take before sleep etc. At the end of the year, you have all the content you need to either produce an e-book to sell to your community or you’ll have the foundations of a paper book which you can take to a publisher (or work with an editor to publish yourself).
6. This approach works for both people who like to cover a topic thoroughly and for those who get bored easily. For the former group of people, you get to dive a little deeper with each platform you choose to share your content on. For the latter, yes you’ll be focused on one topic for a whole month, but you’ll also be able to re-create it in different ways across different platforms and that’ll keep your creative mind engaged and focused.

So, start simply. Choose one place – in addition to your main platform – to repurpose your content. That will instantly increase the number of people who know about you and your work. Then, once you’ve got that working well, add more.

Alternatively, if you already have a bunch of posts that you’d like to apply this approach to, your first step might be to conduct an audit. Find the posts that could be repurposed and focus your efforts there.

For more assistance with your visibility plan, jump on over here to pick up our Visibility Strategy Kit.