According to the B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report, one of the top concerns of B2B content marketers is producing enough content to engage prospects and customers. Since most organizations don’t have unlimited resources, it can be challenging to constantly feed your blog, website, social networks, newsletters, and other marketing channels with new and valuable information.
However, you can save time on content development and reach a larger audience if you find ways to reuse or reinvent the content you have already created. Here are three ways you can get double (or even triple) duty out of your B2B content:
Use an editorial calendar
If you schedule your content marketing in advance by using an editorial calendar, you can plan content themes for different months, promotions, or trending topics. Knowing your themes ahead of time will make it easier for you to gather content.
For example, you may already have a wealth of material about a specific theme that you can easily edit and publish. Or you can use themes to identify subject matter experts within your organization. You can then interview these experts and put together quick blog posts, podcasts or videos based on their interviews. Plus, an editorial calendar lets your team members know who is responsible for what task. This helps to keep everyone on track and your content machine running smoothly.
Start big and break it down
Pieces with a large amount of content, such as webinars, take a lot of time and resources to develop. And if these pieces fail to bring you ROI, it may seem as though you’ve wasted your efforts. However, a poorly attended webinar doesn’t have to lead to a dead end and lost ROI.
Try breaking the content you’ve created for the webinar into smaller chunks that can be used on other content platforms, such as tweets, blog posts, SlideShare presentations, or short videos. As you share these bites across your marketing channels, your audience will grow, and be more engaged in the content you produce.
For example, you can host a live Twitter chat that features key points from your webinar. This open conversation can dramatically increase your mentions, retweets and followers. You can also turn your webinar content into short YouTube videos to reach a different audience. This additional exposure can even help you reach your original goal by bringing more people back to your website to listen to the replay of your webinar.
Or, start small, combine your related content, and go big
Sometimes it’s easier for marketers to develop small pieces of content — such as blog posts or short “how to” videos — than it is to create large-scale content projects. When you take a look at the body of content you’ve created, chances are several pieces will revolve around related topics and themes. Why not combine them to create content components that provide a more comprehensive view of the issues you wrote about, such as white papers, eBooks, or training materials?
Using your smaller bits of content as the building blocks of these more-detailed works can save you a lot of time and stress because you’ll already have most of the work complete. One way you can easily tie small pieces of content together is by turning a series of blog posts about the same topic into an eBook. You can also combine your product demo videos and articles into comprehensive training materials.
Just remember to think about your audience when you repurpose your content for a new medium. For example, if you want to turn a webinar into a series of blog posts, don’t just throw the webinar transcript on your blog. That’s cheating! Plus, transcripts can be difficult to read. Your blog readers may also have different expectations than do your webinar attendees. You’ll need to adjust your content’s style, length and format to match your medium and appeal to the audiences who use these mediums.
What about you?
How do you repurpose or reinvent your content to get the most mileage out of it? Feel free to share your thoughts below.
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