When a recession hits, successful marketing strategies can be crucial to business preservation. With budget cuts and labor shortages, creating consistent, compelling content can be difficult. In times like these, content repurposing can be exponentially beneficial to your business. Here are a few tips on how to maximize your content with limited resources.
Think of your content strategy as a holiday meal. Many of us go all out on the menu for big celebrations, and then spend the next day scraping the internet to find new ways to serve leftover turkey. If you took that same approach with your content plan — starting with one big piece of content — you could more efficiently scale your communications efforts. You see, that bird is your hero content. It’s the “main course” that can easily be carved into several other communication assets, instead of working tirelessly to come up with new topics to share with customers and prospective customers.
When you approach your content plan, start by creating your meatiest piece, your turkey. This could be an e-book, a research report, or a case study. Then, sit back and think about all the ways you could repurpose that core communication into smaller pieces of content that are more easily consumable. Whether it’s a blog, social post, or press release, you can create these things from the larger whole. Basically, you’re maximizing content while minimizing effort.
For instance, with one of our clients, an SAP systems integrator, we saw that there was a lot of confusion in the market over the different types of migrations from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA. Between greenfield migration, brownfield migration and selective data transition, business leaders were unsure which option would be the most successful route for their companies. To help clarify this confusion, they created an e-book explaining the challenges and advantages of each option.
Next, they added a PR component to the plan, “pitching” various industry editors about their related observations and why their readership would be interested in a blog series that outlined each option. Rather than starting from scratch to create an entirely new piece, they simply rearranged and repurposed bits of the longer piece in order to fit this new medium and serve a new audience.
If you think about it, it’s considerably easier to take the e-book and dissect it into a shorter piece. For instance, they created another blog series specifically for the client’s website and used that opportunity to create content “upgrades” that would promote the e-book and be used as gated content for lead generation. They then carved it up a bit more to use in a webinar, create social posts, and pull certain aspects of the key messaging to use in sales presentations.
Resources to create marketing content are already limited. With the possibility of a recession looming just around the corner, revenue could be cut down even further. In times like these, we need to consider what we can do with limited resources to create the most content with the least workforce, the greatest ROI, and the highest accessibility. How can we get the most use out of a single piece? Too often, people will write content, use it once, and immediately move on to the next thing. You don’t have to create more content every single day. You simply have to figure out ways to make the content you already have accessible to more people.
