Top-notch content can only build your brand if people can find and appreciate it. Even content that initially engages your audience quickly loses value if you do not continue to promote it.
The good news: you can make your content work harder for your business. By creating evergreen content and tailoring it for use across channels and audiences, your business can make a more meaningful impact.
“Evergreen content” is content that retains its value over time. It’s not tied to a specific event, time-sensitive technology or date, and so can be repurposed again and again through different channels or with new packaging. While a holiday-themed lead gen campaign may be great to use in December, it won’t be nearly as effective in April — so focus on creating lasting content that stands the test of time.
While repurposing evergreen content across channels is a great way to extend your reach, you can also remix this content on the channels on which it was originally published. For example, try creating a “highlights” blog post introducing and linking back to some of your most popular or most useful posts from the past year.
Optimizing content to work on a variety of channels can help you reach a diverse audience and engage several different targets at the same time. But how do you do it?
Think of a recently-published white paper housed on your website: it undoubtedly contains valuable content and gets at the heart of a topic your target customers have been dying to learn more about (right?!). So why is it buried on a deep, infrequently visited page of your site? The white paper should be released as a series of blog posts and shared in bite-sized pieces on social media. You can invite other thought leaders at your company to write posts elaborating on specific sections of the white paper, and linking back to it to drive downloads. At the same time, the content of the white paper can be used to create infographics or other visuals that are highly shareable.
Assets that were never intended for use in a digital environment can even be repurposed and utilized as part of your content marketing effort. Turn a deck you used for a recent speaking engagement into a video or a Slideshare. Turn key quotes from your presentations into social media images, and write tie-in blog posts that touch on the same topics. The possibilities are (almost) endless.
Quantity should never trump quality, but with all the opportunities that exist to create, extend and repurpose content, you can stop approaching each content marketing effort as a multi-month project that requires significant research and resources. If you’re having trouble striking a balance between amateur and professional content, download our white paper:
Photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons
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