Lead Generation For Dummies
Book image
Explore Book Buy On Amazon

You can quickly create a content marketing empire to be reckoned with by being smart and thrifty, and understanding how your audience consumes content. Even if you come from a large company where you have a large marketing budget and content marketing has been proven, you can always learn new ways to stretch your dollars and increase your return on investment.

Here are four solid ways to boost your bottom line in content marketing:

  1. Create a content library.

    This is your big kahuna — the fire that ignites many of your lead generation campaigns.

    Your content library piece fulfills the following goals:

    • Showcases your thought leadership around your arc

    • Shows off creative writing and design prowess

    • Is dynamic enough to be the basis for other content pieces

    • Contains best practices, tips, and actionable insights

    Your content library is the basis for many additional content pieces such as ebooks, videos, webinars, and so on, so make sure that you keep this in mind during your planning phase, and think creatively about what to include in the piece to bring additional value.

    Don't be afraid to make your content library big. Remember, you want to be recognized as a publisher, so the more value you add, the more your audience views you as a true authority. Be authentic, and people will notice.

  2. Slice and dice your content library.

    image0.jpg

    From that one effort of creating a big content library, you can create many smaller valuable pieces. Some examples of the types of content you can derive from your content library include

    • ebooks

    • Checklists

    • Webinars

    • Podcasts

    • Slide decks

    • Videos

    • Infographics

    • Blog posts

  3. Repurpose your content.

    Those two ideas above are economical and efficient, but what if you just don't have the resources available to do either, or you need something done in a short period of time? Repurposing is a fantastic alternative if you are a small team or do not yet have the budget you need to create a robust content marketing plan. Repurposing is also an attractive content-creation strategy for everyone else because even if you have a large marketing team, you can always learn new techniques.

    The concept of repurposing is taking something you created and putting a new spin on it. The content you need already exists. Just think creatively about where to find it.

    Here are a few examples:

    • Blogs: Take a blog post you wrote and create an ebook out of it. Stretch the content as far as you can by having your design team provide engaging visuals throughout. You might be surprised to learn you can easily take a 500-word blog post and turn it into a five- to six-page ebook!

    • Webinars and presentations: Many businesses are starting to include webinars as a regular part of the lead generation mix. When you produce a webinar, make sure to have a writer on hand to create a transcript of what the speaker says in his presentation. From there, take the transcript, reorganize it if needed, and create an ebook or report from it.

    • Reports/ebooks: Take a report or an ebook you create and turn it into an infographic or a visual slide deck using the same content. Reports lend themselves well to visual content because they tend to have a lot of great data points. Ebooks should tell a story, so take that story and craft a visual slide deck.

  4. Rewrite and redesign old content.

    Maybe you have some old content that you created a few years ago and aren't sure whether to toss or save it. You know it looks old and dated, but the information in there is still good.

    What can you do to bring it up to date? Here are some simple steps you can follow:

    image1.jpg

    If you do decide to retire a content piece and scrap it, check to see whether it is active in any paid programs, and always set up a redirect to route readers to a current page. After something is posted on the Internet, there are most likely live links out there, and you want to make sure everything gets redirected. You don't want a lead who clicks on an old ebook to get an error page.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Dayna Rothman is the senior content marketing manager at Marketo, a leader in the marketing automation space. Dayna leads content creation and strategy at Marketo and is the managing editor for the Marketo blog, which receives more than 400,000 unique visitors per year. Dayna has also been featured as one of the top 25 content marketers to watch according to Kapost, and one of the top 50 content marketing influencers according to Onalytica.

This article can be found in the category: