Finding your (re)purpose
The white paper is finished and in design. The blog is posted. The email campaign is loaded and launched. Time to rest, right? Well … not completely.
Just as a farmer’s work is never done, neither is the hopefully eternal job of your content. Why the need for longevity? Because you need to be constantly top of mind for potential customers, as well as for reporters and analysts looking for experts. When they come to your site for information, they find those blogs and white papers, sign up for email, and voila! You have a following — and a pipeline of potential customers. And those people must be cared for and tended to, or they’ll move on.
You can help keep them engaged by repurposing the content you’ve worked so hard to create. Don’t do a cut-and-paste job by any means, but don’t start from scratch either. Take pieces and parts of a white paper, for example, and put them out in a new way.
Say you’ve crafted a solid, graphic-heavy white paper on consumer trends that addresses the unique needs of your customer base. The piece has all sorts of tips and insights, and it threads the needle between informative and interesting.
What if you then pull out the section on beverage-specific insights, write some text to create a newsy blog about drink industry trends for children, and then post that? You’ll attract a whole new series of readers — people in your target demographic who are searching for help around beverage processing. Then you can easily link them back to the white paper and keep them around even longer. Result? Not too much extra work, lots more engagement and many more chances to market and sell your products and services.
Words + Pictures = more engagement, more opportunities
Don’t forget to use social media to augment what you’re doing online. If you had a great post that highlighted the white paper, be sure to post about the new, shorter content as well. Does the new material (or the old) have great art? Use that for an infographic — short and sweet, bright and colorful. And if you’re big on Twitter, grab a quote or eye-catching statistic from the source material and post it: catch the eye, catch the reader.
There are so many ways to make the best use of repurposed content, but one fundamental principle is that it’s important to have a strategy. Much as you didn’t just slap up the original piece online and walk away, make sure that your connected content does its job — attracting readers while also calling attention to the original piece you carefully crafted and launched into the world.
Want to learn more? We’d love to share some insights. Contact us at 608-695-6510, or find us on LinkedIn.